Ben Shields ’17 and his startup, Know-Me, bring AI to life

A passionate humanities student and self-described “Model UN kid” throughout his time at ASL—and his two subsequent degrees—Ben Shields ’17 is putting the human and the historical into artificial intelligence with Know-Me AI, the startup he founded with his best friend, Josh, two years ago. Between Know-Me and Precognition, an AI consultancy he founded around the same time with his mother, Baroness Joanna Shields OBE P ’17, Ben has been “jumping into the deep end” on business development and AI alike—and loving it.

Fresh off a master’s degree in public policy at Brown University, Ben Shields ’17 was back in London, working in the press office at Formula 1, trying to make household names of racecar drivers of varying levels of renown, when, as he puts it, “the AI boom of early 2023 came around.”

“I kept saying, we have all these partners—we have Amazon Web Services as a partner of this sport. Let’s do cool stuff with AI. Let’s ask Amazon to help us integrate AI into our workflow,’” Ben says of his time at Formula 1. 

“Basically they said, ‘Okay, that’s a lovely idea, but you’re an intern.’” Ben knew that there was more to be done in the AI-meets-celebrity space, and if the powers that be at Formula 1 wouldn’t let him do it, he wanted to try it himself.

Ben grew up around AI, insofar as that was possible in a world prior to that early-2023 AI boom he described. His mother, Baroness Joanna Shields OBE P ’17—to whom Ben alternately refers as his hero, a star, and when it comes to the mother–son duo’s joint AI consultancy venture, Precognition, “the best boss in the world”—has long been hailed as a pioneering figure on the UK tech scene.

Throughout Ben’s high school years, Joanna served as the UK’s first-ever minister for internet safety and security, in addition to her membership in the House of Lords and, later, her position as chair of the Global Partnership on AI (2020–22). In 2018, she was appointed as CEO of BenevolentAI, which leverages AI to help with drug discovery. 

“I was really lucky that my mom was running an AI company at the time that I was kind of starting my career,” Ben says. “So I had perspective on it.”

Just a few years earlier, Ben had earned his bachelor’s degree in history at University College London (UCL), and through a classmate, met software developer Josh Balla-Muir, who soon became his best friend, roommate and start-up cofounder. 

In 2023, the pair quit their jobs—Ben’s at Formula 1, and Josh’s at an aerospace company where he had been working on designing flight simulators—and moved into a St. John’s Wood flat along with their third roommate and company mascot (Ben’s Maltipoo, Felix), and founded Know-Me, an AI startup aimed at creating AI personae for anybody, which could hold full, accurate video conversations with their human interlocutors. Their first concept: AI-personifying celebrities.

“Our first demo was built on a shoestring. It was like a video call with AI Kim Kardashian. She could talk to you, but it took 30 seconds for her to respond to your words,” Ben laughs. 

Initially, Ben explains, he and Josh “wanted to build an interactive version of the platform Cameo”—the popular website that allows people to pay celebrities (and almost-celebrities) to film short, direct-to-camera video messages delivering any sort of news, congratulations or well wishes the customer can dream up.

But then Hollywood writers went on strike, upset in part over AI’s encroachment on creative fields, and they realized that, good intentions aside (Ben is firm in asserting that he and Josh never aimed to build and market celebrities’ AI personae without their express consent and active participation in the process), “the creative world is scared of this right now. So then we did a 180-degree pivot.”

“We found ourselves doing a project—actually with Amazon—to memorialize Holocaust survivors,” Ben explains. He and Josh are Jewish, and both have relatives who survived the Holocaust and WWII: Josh’s grandfather survived a labor camp and two concentration camps, while Ben’s great-uncle left Morocco to fight the Nazis in the early 1940s, eventually joining the British military’s fight in the Italian campaign.

“Soon, we’re going to be living in a world without Holocaust survivors,” Ben says. He and Josh wondered whether they could turn their interactive celebrity AI model into an educational tool that would preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors—the ability to interface with them “directly”—for future generations. With the help of a startup grant from Amazon, Ben and Josh hoped to help build a world in which students could “query them, and ask them, on an emotive level, looking them in the eyes: ‘What was it like? How did you survive?’”

“From there, we built a product that had a really good ability to speak accurately about these things. It had really good guardrails; it was safe; it was historically accurate,” Ben explains.

The Holocaust memorialization project wasn’t just historically accurate: it was accurate down to the actual humans it memorialized. “Josh’s grandfather was an audio engineer for the BBC after the war, and so in 1995, 50 years after he was liberated, he recorded a 40-minute audio testimony,” Ben says, laying out how Know-Me was able to use its cofounder’s own family histories for its project. “And my grandmother had written a book about our family history.” Between that and other stories passed down through generations of his family, “it was enough to build a good composite.” 

The time that Ben and Josh spent dedicated to building out, testing and creating historical accuracy guardrails around these personae were “heavy,” to put it mildly, Ben recalls, but it was an opportunity to get to know, and speak with, his great-uncle, who passed away when Ben was only five.

“My great-uncle’s story was like something out of Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, whereas Josh’s grandfather… Sitting there, building that AI… it was stories of starvation; bargaining for your own life from feckless, awful people. The two months we were working on that were emotionally taxing. But it also filled us with hope—we couldn’t let these stories fade away.”

Once the Holocaust memorialization personae were complete, Ben and Josh felt more equipped to develop other, potentially more commercial, applications of their AI. A dream of Ben’s is to create personal, AI tutors of the most celebrated minds in history, to guide students through school—though only as a supplement to (human) teachers, of course.

“When I was a kid—when I was here at ASL, actually—I was never very good at math. I was never very good at science. I said to myself, ‘Someday, the dream is for every kid to have Isaac Newton and Aristotle as their personal tutor.’ If you could look at your homework with them, and they’re there to talk it out, that would have made me way more engaged.”

Likewise, Ben and Josh have developed demos of “AI Roman emperors” and the like for use by museums. Currently, their largest project is with a TV news company in the United Arab Emirates. “We’re building them an AI that can sit in their office headquarters and talk about the news with visitors—it will know all of the events of the past 24 hours; all of the articles; and be able to talk about it.”

Josh, with his tech and science background, manages the technical side of Know-Me, while Ben has approached their venture from “the crazy ideas and history side.” 

Ben joined ASL from the English school system in Grade 6, and always gravitated toward the humanities in his time at the School. “I was very much a Model UN kid,” Ben says with a smile. “I did all those conferences, and I always loved that ASL gave me the opportunity to travel.” 

He went on to pursue history and policy for his undergraduate and master’s degrees at UCL and Brown, respectively, but has also found himself enjoying the business side of things in his work as a startup cofounder. 

“Josh manages the developers,” Ben explains. (While he and Josh remain Know-Me’s only full employees, much of their programming work is outsourced to third-party developers.) “Josh oversees the broad strokes of the development, and then it’s my job to make sure, ‘Okay, has the money cleared? Have we got new deals in the pipeline?,’ and things like that.”

“Starting my own business was definitely jumping in the deep end,” Ben says, when asked how his humanities and social science degrees prepared him—or, as the case may be, did not—to found a company. “But you jump in and you learn how to swim.”

For Ben (ironically, perhaps?), the highlight of Know-Me business development has been the human, face-to-face element. “There were a few months where I was going to museum events—Tate events; British Museum events—and putting on a suit, and trying to connect,” with the ultimate goal of convincing one (ultimately too underfunded) British institution or another to invest in an interactive AI for arts and cultural education. “I really do like that part: going out there and talking to people face-to-face. You can’t fake that virtually; you just have to be in the room. I find that fun.”

“Right now, my life is kind of split in half,” Ben says. “On the one hand it’s Know-Me, and we’re really trying to deliver this project in the UAE. On the other, my mom and I have started an AI consultancy company (the aforementioned Precognition), and so my time is split between the two.”

Ben feels lucky—and often says so—to work so closely with his mom, Joanna, half the time, and his roommate/best friend/cofounder the rest. At Precognition, explains Ben, he and Joanna advise clients on proper AI implementation in their businesses, and drawing on Joanna’s expertise and government background, they also help clients navigate regulations and government in this brave new world.

“My mom often says to me, ‘You don’t need to follow in my footsteps,’ and I respond, ‘I want to—I’m not trying to!’ That’s just where I gravitate,” says Ben. “I’m interested in politics and technology and where they intersect, and trying to do something good.”

At the annual ASL alumni pub social last winter, Ben met fellow ASL (and Brown!) alum John Carroll ’80, and the two hit it off. John, who is involved with education nonprofit TEAM Global thanks to longtime ASL history teacher John Wilson (ASL 1971-2009)—John Wilson sits on the organization’s board—encouraged Ben to speak to the pressing questions of AI and democracy at a TEAM Global conference on democracy in our technological era, which he did this past January at Ursuline High School in Wimbledon. 

“TEAM Global is this organization that’s very committed to Atlanticism—the special relationship between the US and the UK, and democracy and NATO. I grew up in between two continents, and it's all very dear to me, keeping that alive,” Ben reflects. “It was fun: I got to talk to all these 16-year-old kids about AI and democracy.” 

At the conference, he says, Ben spoke about how “there are periods in history when institutions catch up with technological development. And those are the best times to be alive.” After World War II, he explains, “Most of the developed world had great healthcare systems, great social welfare systems, growing economies… We figured out how to catch up with radio, industrialization and mass military mobilizations. But now we’re in a period where our politicians are starting to understand social media. They don’t really understand AI. And we basically find ourselves with poor policy outcomes as a result.”

Not to mention the oft-discussed existential question of AI’s rampant energy (and, therefore, water) use. “I think it’s a valid concern,” Ben admits. “And I think AI will develop its own solutions—but not before it creates problems. It’s like industrialization: it created huge problems, but then it created its own solutions.”