Cristian Cibils Bernardes is not interested in making AI faster, cheaper or more scalable for its own sake. His priority is to use AI to help preserve the emotional richness of human memory. “It is hard for me to imagine a world worth living in that isn’t warm,” he says. That belief anchors Autograph, the company he founded that uses AI-powered weekly phone calls to capture the stories, thoughts and reflections that shape a person’s life.
Cibils Bernardes has always been drawn to the deep, human layers of storytelling. Whether writing science fiction, recording conversations for a podcast, or imagining future societies shaped by computational technologies during his time at Stanford, his curiosity gravitates toward the emotional and philosophical undercurrents that define who we are. “If I could talk to everyone on Earth every day, I would,” he once said, only half joking. This passion for people and ideas converged in a single personal moment that would change his trajectory. that would change his trajectory.
Days before Cibils Bernardes planned to record his grandmother’s remarkable life story, she suffered a stroke that left her unable to speak. The questions he never got to ask became the blueprint for a system that would ensure no voice is lost to time simply because someone waited too long to ask.
A Global Upbringing That Informs Empathy at Scale
Cibils Bernardes was raised in Paraguay in a household where warmth and ingenuity went hand in hand. His parents, both computer scientists, co-founded one of the country’s only tech companies to expand internationally. “They kept trying until they succeeded,” he says. “That gave us a very unique worldview where we started thinking a bit more global.” At Stanford, Cibils Bernardes studied Symbolic Systems, an interdisciplinary major combining artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy and psychology. “I’ve always really been interested in the why of technology, not just the how,” he explains. “Blending technical competency with academic rigor was really exciting to me.” This training shaped his conviction that AI could deepen human connection, if built with care.
An Early‑Stage Company Built Around a Phone Call
Cibils Bernardes watched large language models accelerate content creation, yet he saw an unmet need: recording lived experience with the same care historians devote to archives. After a stroke left his grandmother without the ability to speak before he could document her story, he asked a simple question: What if everyone could capture their life each week, without technical hurdles?
The answer became Autograph, an early‑stage company that interviews users by phone. No downloads, log‑ins or push notifications compete for attention. Instead, an AI interviewer named Walter calls once a week, asks open‑ended questions and stores each conversation in a private portal. “It feels like talking to a person on the other side,” Cibils Bernardes says.
Engineering Warmth Into Algorithms
Cibils Bernardes argues that technology must honour the social fabric it touches. “Human warmth is what powers human connection,” he explains. “It is hard for me to imagine a world worth living in that isn’t warm.” He maintains that large language models are surprisingly capable of empathy when guided well, because their training data is saturated with human feeling.
Autograph encodes that principle in three ways. First, Walter frames every prompt as genuine curiosity, mirroring the cadence of an attentive friend. Second, entity extraction links people, places and events into a personal knowledge graph, turning transcripts into an easily explored archive instead of a flat log. And, lastly, granular privacy settings allow a user to share a single story at certain points in the future, such as when a child turns eighteen.
How To Build Human‑Centered AI
Asked how other founders can keep warmth at the core of emerging products, Cibils Bernardes offers three actionable insights:
- Measure social impact, not just engagement. “Your north‑star metric should be the effect your product has on relationships,” he says.
- Avoid replacing real conversation. Autograph augments family dialogue but never tries to stand in for it. “We do not want Walter to become a digital friend who crowds out human ones.”
- Keep the user’s story front and centre. Whether coaching, educating or entertaining, an AI that positions the individual as protagonist encourages reflection rather than passivity. “If your life is not a page‑turner to you, something needs adjusting,” Cibils Bernardes says.
The Long View on Memory and Meaning
Cibils Bernardes expects autonomous agents to handle much of tomorrow’s paperwork, from visa applications to grocery orders. When that happens, context will decide which agent serves a user best. “We plan to hold the details of your life so any future assistant can act with insight,” he says. The same archive can filter the coming flood of synthetic content, anchoring recommendations to lived reality instead of viral novelty.
What began as a remedy for one lost interview has evolved into a thesis about time. Weekly calls create a longitudinal dataset that lets users consult earlier selves for advice, or gift future generations the texture of ordinary days. Cibils Bernardes sees the service as insurance for identity. “Every word we choose is a vote for the future we want,” he says. “We are literally recording history.”
Readers can follow Cibils Bernardes on LinkedIn and X to learn more about Autograph and his work to keep humans at the center of AI’s development.