AI’s identity moment: Brahma AI bets on trust as the next digital infrastructure

As artificial intelligence begins to generate not just text but lifelike faces, voices and personalities, the question confronting businesses is no longer about creative possibility—it is about trust.

At Founders Forum India, the closing fireside chat titled Reel to Real – AI, Digital Humans, and the Future of Visual Storytelling saw Prabhu Narasimhan, CEO of Brahma AI, lay out a thesis that could define the next decade of the internet: identity will become core infrastructure.

“Through most of human civilisation, when you received communication—text, voice or video—you assumed two things: you knew who was speaking, and that the person was identifiable,” Narasimhan said. “For the first time in history, that assumption is breaking.”

The shift to visual civilisation

For centuries, communication was largely text-based. The medium evolved—from papyrus to print to email—but the human behind the message remained central.

In the past decade, however, communication has become predominantly audio-visual. Short-form video, livestreaming and immersive formats now dominate digital engagement. AI tools have accelerated this shift, enabling high-quality video generation, voice cloning and photorealistic avatars at minimal cost.

The implications are far-reaching.

Narasimhan cited examples of synthetic speeches attributed to public figures circulating online, resonating emotionally with audiences who often cannot distinguish between real and AI-generated content. “Humans are connecting to synthetic intelligence without knowing it,” he said.

In such a landscape, he argues, the focus shifts from what is being said to who is saying it.

Digital humans as enterprise tools

Brahma AI is building enterprise-grade “digital humans”—AI-generated avatars that replicate an individual’s likeness and voice, with explicit consent and governance controls.

In entertainment and advertising, celebrities can license digital versions of themselves for campaigns—reducing production time and enabling multilingual outreach. In healthcare, physicians can use digital avatars to communicate with patients at scale. In financial services, leaders can deploy personalised, localised investor communication.

“If a founder is preparing for an IPO and needs to address investors across geographies and languages, a digital human can extend that presence,” Narasimhan said.

But the company’s core proposition is not content creation—it is compliance and control.

Every digital human created through its platform, he said, is traceable, auditable and used only with the consent of the individual it represents. “The digital human belongs to the human,” he emphasised.

Trust as competitive advantage

The rise of generative AI has also triggered legal and ethical concerns—from unauthorised deepfakes to data misuse. Marketing and legal teams, Narasimhan noted, are often “frozen” not because the technology is immature, but because regulatory clarity is still evolving.

He believes companies that build safeguards into their architecture from day one will gain a durable advantage.

“Speed is strategy,” he said, “but there is no conflict between speed and safety. If you are building a high-performance system, you must also build the braking system.”

Rather than framing his approach as moral positioning, Narasimhan calls it commercial realism. “Trust and security are not charity. They are business strategy.”

The age of parallel humans

Looking ahead, Narasimhan predicts the emergence of “parallel humans”—digital counterparts capable of operating autonomously across time zones and languages.

These avatars, he argues, will not replace individuals but augment them—handling routine communication, scaling engagement and unlocking new revenue streams.

The larger question, however, is governance. Who owns and controls these digital identities? In Narasimhan’s view, stewardship must rest with the individual whose likeness is being used.

As regulation inevitably catches up with technology, identity verification and provenance tracking could become as fundamental to the internet as payment gateways are to e-commerce.

Beyond the hype cycle

The conversation comes at a time when AI valuations are soaring globally, but scrutiny around ethical deployment is intensifying. Investors are increasingly examining not just product-market fit but also data practices and regulatory resilience.

In that context, Narasimhan’s pitch is pragmatic: build for compliance first, scale second.

“I’m not solving humanity’s problems,” he said candidly. “I’m building a business. And if identity and consent are foundational, that business will endure.”

As AI collapses the distance between reel and real, enterprises may discover that authenticity—not just automation—is the true currency of the next digital economy.