Steve Mudd

I run Talentless AI, an AI-native production studio in Austin, Texas. We make AI video for brands, ongoing content programs, and AI VFX and production support for film and television. I've directed AI films including THRESHOLD and The Painter, and built Backlot74, a slate of six original microdrama series. The work has pulled more than ten million views across platforms, which is the only proof I trust that any of it resonates outside the room it was made in. Before AI was a headline, I wrote, produced and directed the feature film Seclusion, and wrote the screenplay for Spotless. I worked the IBM Watson era at Ogilvy, back when cognitive computing was the phrase everyone was pretending to understand, and I led global messaging and content for NetApp. That order matters. I was a filmmaker and a storyteller first, and story discipline is what keeps AI work from turning into slop. On stage I give the AI talk without the hype hangover. Most AI keynotes are written by people who have never shipped anything with these tools. Mine comes from a studio that uses them every day, so the promise, the limits, and the parts that are still genuinely broken all show up in the same talk. My signature keynote, Creativity in the Age of AI, is built on a mindset I call Create Now. The examples are made the week of the talk, because they go stale fast. Somewhere in most sessions the audience stops being able to tell whether they're watching me or my synthetic double. It gets a laugh, and then the room goes very quiet, because everyone works out what it means for their own industry at about the same moment. I won the 2026 AI Leadership Award from the Austin AI Alliance, serve as AI Expert for Propolis, the global community for B2B marketers, and am a resident expert and frequent keynote speaker for Ragan Communications. I host AIAF, a podcast about AI meeting human imagination, and write Talentless Genius on Substack. Audiences leave with something to do, not something to fear.