Imagine this: you’re in bed, hair a mess, sipping coffee. You’ve got a Zoom meeting in 2 minutes, and you’re not camera-ready. No problem—Pickle has you covered. It’s a new AI tool that creates a photorealistic avatar of you sitting at a desk, lip-syncing to your live audio. The best part? You don’t even have to be in front of the camera. Pickle works like this: you’re still speaking and listening in the meeting, but the app replaces your video with an avatar that looks like you in a professional setting. No worrying about messy backgrounds or awkward angles—your colleagues will think you’re laser-focused at your desk. Whether you’re holding a baby, walking the dog, or even driving, Pickle lets you participate in meetings without the hassle. What makes this so brilliant from a product strategy perspective is how it zooms in on just one slice of the broader meeting problem. Instead of trying to build a full AI meeting clone—something that requires solving challenges like accent interpretation, conversation context, and real-time decision-making—Pickle focuses on the visual layer. It lets you sound like yourself and removes the hardest technical hurdles. The result? A tool that’s simple, effective, and market-ready. By narrowing its scope, Pickle manages to solve a real pain point for busy remote workers without over-promising. Solving “being presentable” in meetings is a much smaller lift than trying to replace someone entirely. This approach allowed them to launch faster and target a widespread but often overlooked frustration: maintaining professionalism when life gets in the way. It’s a masterclass in delivering value by addressing the part of the problem people care about most. It’s wild to think about the subtle ways AI is transforming work. I saw the demo, and honestly, you wouldn’t notice someone using it unless you looked really closely. This tool might not go viral because, let’s be real, who wants to admit they’re using it? But I’m betting it’s going to quietly spread. Would you try it? #product #productmanager #productmanagement #startup #business #openai #llm #ai #microsoft #google #gemini #anthropic #claude #llama #meta #nvidia #career #careeradvice #mentor #mentorship #mentortiktok #mentortok #careertok #job #jobadvice #future #2024 #story #news #dev #coding #code #engineering #engineer #coder #sales #cs #marketing #agent #work #workflow #smart #thinking #strategy #cool #real #jobtips #hack #hacks #tip #tips #tech #techtok #techtiktok #openaidevday #aiupdates #techtrends #voiceAI #developerlife #pickle #meetings #secret #truth #joblife #meetinglife #jobhacks #realtalk

Are you tired of meetings? I am also tired of meetings. There is a startup that is solving an actually interesting part of that problem. Most of the startups in this space, I think, are just out to lunch. Like, they are trying to solve the entire problem of meetings and basically create an AI avatar of you that will always do your meetings and perfectly summarize it and be able to use a large language model to always interact correctly and understand what is being said. No. Like, that's not getting done. And that's not getting done soon. That's not getting done with the kind of runway that most apps build. And if it got done, I wouldn't trust it. Because that's my reputation on the line, right? Like, I'm in a meeting and, like, I have to trust it. So this startup is not doing that. This startup is different because they picked a much, much smaller piece of the problem. And they picked a piece of the problem that, as a human being, makes a lot of sense to care about. And that is the I am doing the dishes problem, the I am driving the car problem. Think of all the places that you have ever taken a meeting and you could not be at your desk wearing a suit and tie or wearing what you wear to work. And you feel like you're not put together enough to be on camera. Maybe you're sick and in bed. Maybe you're tired and in bed. Maybe you just don't feel like going to your desk and you're in bed. Either way, you're in the meeting and you want to be camera off. They solve for that. So this startup is called Pickle. And it's getpickle.ai. And they make a lifelike clone of you. You send them a video of you in a professional environment wearing professional clothing. And it can be your choice, right? Like, they will give you a new outfit if you want from AI, but you can also wear your own thing. And you give them the video, they make the AI clone and all the AI clone does. It doesn't understand what's being said. It doesn't generate its own responses, none of that. It just sits there and lip syncs what you say live. So if you're in the car driving to the doctor for your kid, it will sit there on the screen and have a live background and because like it will pull your background, like you can have your background, I can have my little globe back there. And it will just lip sync me live with my usual background. Your colleagues are going to be using this if you're in a remote work environment. And the interesting thing is you're probably not going to know because I've looked at it and it's photo realistic. The only way you'll know is most zoom meeting participants tend to have more dynamic body language than these clones do. It's not the face, it's not the lip syncing. It's that like you're in the meeting and like you look off into space for a minute and think and then you come back. That is not happening. But if you just need to sort of go about your daily life, but also be in the meeting, and you're going to actually participate, you're going to talk at appropriate points, etc. Well, pickle is a way to do that. And I think a lot of people are going to recognize that and use it. I think it's really interesting. This is certainly not like an endorsement I got paid to offer you guys. I just think this is an incredible example of a company that picked a problem that was painful. And everyone else was going for the fancier problem. Like let's solve all of meetings. Zoom made a big sort of statement about that we're going to build an avatar for all of meetings. And I just rolled my eyes. But this company just picked this tiny piece. We don't want to always be on camera. And they saw for that. And I think that's really, really fascinating. So get pickle.ai. Check it out. Let me know what you think.