Quinn Fabre’s core message was that the next important interface for AI is not simply a chatbot, a voice agent, or a video avatar, but what his company calls “human computing”: systems designed so interacting with a machine feels closer to talking with a person. After the host introduced the session as a look at the frontier of AI interfaces, Quinn explained that the goal was to give the audience a current view of multimodal AI, including what is possible today, where use cases are appearing across low-, medium-, and high-risk settings, and how the technology is moving toward more natural human-machine interaction.

He positioned the company’s work around AI humans called PALs and described deployments with organizations including Mayo Clinic, Amazon Health, and CVS across learning and development, internal communications, and healthcare. To make the concept concrete, he ran a live demo with an AI human named Ashley. The system responded conversationally, commented on his room decorations, identified a fiddle leaf fig plant from the video feed, adapted to a change in emotional tone when he introduced a sad scenario, and attempted to wave goodbye. Quinn emphasized that the important capability was not only the face: the agent could see, listen, handle natural turn-taking, respond to interruptions, and potentially screen share, join calls, take actions, or provide data.

Quinn then highlighted the company’s new real-time model, Griffin, saying that in clinical trials 48% of participants believed they were talking to a real human during a one-minute conversation. He presented that result as evidence that deeper immersion could support use cases such as education and healthcare at a level of quality that had not previously been possible. From there, he broadened the argument: the industry is not just building avatars or voice agents, but new interfaces that make powerful AI more usable.

To frame that shift, Quinn compared AI today with computers in the 1980s. Command-line computers were powerful but inaccessible to many people; the graphical user interface did not necessarily make computers more powerful, but it made their existing power understandable and usable. He argued that technology becomes effective when it moves closer to innate human behavior, citing the Mac’s point-and-click interface and Apple’s accessibility-focused marketing. He concluded this section by describing PALs as an interface that can learn from, collaborate with, understand, and connect with humans through empathy, emotional intelligence, speech, hearing, vision, and action.