Steven Bartlett built Diary of a CEO into the world’s second-largest podcast according to Spotify, behind Joe Rogan. But FlightStory, the company behind it all, has long outgrown a single show. With revenue of around $47 million a year and a valuation of $425 million for its holding company Steven.com, it is now rebuilding its internal processes with AI. And where AI does not work, it deliberately switches it off.
More than a podcast
FlightStory describes itself as a “creator media company” and works on three levels. The studio makes podcasts (Diary of a CEO, We Need to Talk, Begin Again), publishes books and manages speakers from Davina McCall to Dr Tara Swart. The fund invests in companies such as Whoop, Huel and SpaceX. The incubator builds its own products.
The company’s website gives figures for the whole group: 1.2 billion downloads and views, 42 supported companies and $400 million of value created. It has studios in four cities (London, Manchester, New York and Los Angeles) and around a hundred people on the team, according to Business Insider.
The company is led by CEO Georgie Holt, who in an interview for Lindsey Gamble described her vision that the next billion-dollar media company will grow out of human IP. FlightStory is one of the few examples of a creator company that is actively building this vision. Most creators scale their content. FlightStory scales the entire infrastructure around content, from production through distribution to monetisation.
A competition that saved a million dollars
Bartlett launched a two-month internal competition in which all the teams in the company took part. The brief was to deploy AI agents in their own work and measure how much time and money they saved. Bartlett described it to BusinessCloud in one sentence: “This wasn't an AI competition, it was about inspiring a mindset shift.”
Within 60 days, 48 AI tools were created. The total saving reached $1.18 million (£860,000), and the teams freed up 65,284 hours of productivity. The winning team was pre-production, which according to Business Insider “replaced or improved nearly every part of their processes”. The prize for the winners was $20,000.
The consequences of the competition went beyond the saving itself. Since then, Bartlett has required staff to prove, before any proposal for a new hire, that an AI agent cannot do the work. The use of AI has become part of employee performance reviews, as he confirmed to BusinessCloud.
Where AI works at FlightStory
AI translations of the podcast into 14 languages are among the most visible deployments. The Spanish version of Diary of a CEO brought 20.5 million incremental views and $200,000 in indirect YouTube ad revenue. For a company that scales globally, localisation is a key multiplier. One episode becomes 14 language versions without the team filming a single extra minute. Bartlett highlighted this topic at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where he spoke about AI translation as a tool that could unlock trillions of dollars in global trade.
Proprietary AI tools for preparing advertising proposals cut the time needed for a pitch from three days to a few hours. Over two years, this contributed to a 60% rise in average revenue per employee. FlightSpeakers uses conversational AI to recommend speakers and check availability, while the relationship side is left to people.
FlightSocials, launched at the end of 2025, makes it possible to create up to 15 posts a day per creator thanks to AI evaluation and clip recommendations. The tool automatically picks the best moments from long formats and suggests cuts optimised for each platform. The company is also producing an animated children’s series, “Steven’s World”, for children aged 5 to 8, fully animated with AI. According to Business Insider, the series is being distributed with major streaming platforms. Bartlett wrote the script, while FlightStory Studio used AI to clone his voice, create the storyboard and animate it.
What all these deployments have in common is that AI does not replace people. It automates routine work so that people can focus on decisions, relationships and creative work. This is consistent with a broader trend in the creator economy, where, according to The Influencer Marketing Factory, 91.9% of creators already use at least one AI tool.
Where FlightStory’s AI does not work
FlightStory has deliberately limited its use of AI on LinkedIn. The company noticed a flood of AI-generated posts on the platform and concluded that human-written content has better emotional resonance and performance. Bartlett therefore writes all of his social media content personally. He deliberately leaves small mistakes in it for authenticity.
It is a remarkable step for a company that otherwise deploys AI for everything from preparing pitches to animating a children’s series. The decision was based on engagement data. Human posts generated better numbers. In an environment where the platform’s algorithm rewards authenticity more than optimised perfection, that made sense.
A similar fate befell the experiment with the AI podcast “100 CEOs”. The format uses Bartlett’s cloned voice and AI-generated animation to tell the stories of entrepreneurs such as Steve Jobs or Richard Branson. It has reached at most 35,000 views on YouTube, while a typical episode of Diary of a CEO reaches hundreds of thousands. The AI host did not convince audiences. The podcast works, and has listeners on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, but it is nowhere near the performance of content with a human host.
Different rules apply to the flagship productions. CRO Christiana Brenton summed it up for Business Insider in one sentence: “The risk profile and the stakes are higher when you're producing long-form content that reaches millions of people.” The risk is too high when content reaches millions. That is why the final editing of major productions always passes through human hands.
Bartlett spoke about the limits of AI in the creator economy back in January, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, as we wrote in the article Bartlett in Davos is more than a cool moment. A few months later, FlightStory shows what those words look like in everyday practice. A million-dollar saving on one side, deliberately switched-off AI on the other. And in between, around a hundred people who decide every day where that line lies right now.
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