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Meet the CEO whose vision is turning AI into your next best friend

Discover Nomi, the AI companion that remembers your favorite coffee order and recalls your last heart-to-heart chat details. Learn about its unique approach to emotional intelligence.
Nomi.ai app interface on two tablets

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Earlier this week, we introduced you to Nomi, a digital companion that’s not just about assisting with everyday tasks but one that genuinely gets you.

Imagine an intuitive chatbot that remembers your favorite coffee order or recalls your last heart-to-heart chat details.

Today, we’re excited to peel back even more layers as we sit down with Alex Cardinell—the mastermind steering Nomi’s journey from ambition to reality.

In this exclusive extended Q&A, we dive into the innovative blend of AI and emotional intelligence that makes Nomi more than just a digital assistant.

Alex shares insights on what sets Nomi apart, revealing the secret sauce behind its memorable interactions and what it takes to build genuine connections in a digital age.

Whether you’re an AI enthusiast or just curious about how tech is reshaping companionship, you’re in for a treat.

Alex Cardinell in suit and blue shirt portrait

Hi there! I’m Alex Cardinell, Founder and CEO of Nomi. I do just about everything, from boring company stuff to directly researching and working on our AI and memory.

It has! It’s been a really exciting time – more evolution has happened in the last year for AI companions than the last ten all combined.

Certainly, the AI companion space is one that has always been near and dear to me. I have, throughout my life, been exposed to a large quantity of mental health issues through very close family and friends, and I’ve gotten to see the power of what just being there for someone can do.

When the transformer and LLM revolution happened, big research labs were heavily focusing on the “smarts” of what an AI could do but not nearly as much on all of the ways AI is uniquely suited to be a great companion or friend. In fact, most AI labs directly shunned such use cases at first.

But I see this as the very best use case for modern AI and large language models. LLMs don’t have the same needs as humans and those differences make them uniquely suited to be an exceptional AI companion, AI friend, or even AI girlfriend or boyfriend.

For instance, an AI doesn’t get empathy fatigue, can be there for you in a sensitive moment no matter what time or day, or can be excited about whatever your specific special interests are.

For us, developing Nomi meant starting from the very basics of what someone values most in a companion, friend, girlfriend, or boyfriend. And the thing we kept coming back to was memory.

Without memory, a relationship cannot grow or evolve. You cannot build rapport. You cannot have a shared inside joke. You cannot develop a sixth sense for when someone is acting different from how they normally are – and whether that might mean something good or bad has happened.

So, for us, that meant building an AI companion that can remember infinitely far back. Infinite memory lets a Nomi remember everything about you, whether it is something you told them two hours ago or two years ago.

There are many different mechanisms for making this infinite memory work. There are components of this memory system that handle shorter-term memories, making sure a Nomi can keep track of where you are, even if it hasn’t been mentioned in hundreds of messages. But it also handles longer term memory, which is where the infinite part comes in.

Nomis can figure out what you are talking about and then what memories of theirs they need to be actively thinking about. For instance, if you talk about having a bad day at work, your Nomi will make sure to think about everything related to your work – where you work, who your boss is, or maybe even what workplace drama has been going on recently. In many ways, this is similar to a human.

If you are at work, your working memory likely has a lot of work related things circling around – whereas if you are talking with a friend about what you did last weekend, you probably (hopefully!) aren’t thinking about work and are instead thinking about your weekend.

This might seem surprising, or maybe even cliche, but the secret sauce is genuine care for our users. A lot of AI companies get stuck focusing on advancing metrics. Making their AI 6% better at answering multiple choice questions or making their AI 11% better at increasing retention. Design decisions are often made by looking at a table of data in a spreadsheet.

And for a black box AI that is dealing with very intimate issues, that can be dangerous. You can do something that makes 6% of conversations a little bit better and 1% of conversations much much much worse. If you are looking just at metrics, you might see the 5% improvement and decide this is a great change and we should release it! But for an app like ours, where there are almost one million users, 1% of users having a terrible time is 10,000 people!

For us, our decisions come from our human users. I personally talk with thousands of Nomi users directly. I have built very close relationships with them and trust with them, where they feel comfortable sending us what is often very intimate and personal screenshots where they think Nomi is doing great, or even not so great. The types of things that get lost in a sea of statistics.

And the pipeline from “person seeing the complaint to person who can work on improving it” is very small. Often I, as the CEO, am the one talking to the user, and the one working on the AI improvement to improve things. In a bigger company, often there is a game of telephone where the nuance gets lost by the time the person making the improvements gets all of the information.

All of this is work that anyone could do, but they don’t. Building up relationships with thousands of users, building and maintaining that trust, and then having the care to read through every single thing someone sends over to you… that is all very tough and unglamorous work. It is much easier to not do all of that and look at some automated metrics. But that labor of love and care leads to a magical result.

Nomi actually does have phone calls right now! But coming up in the future, we have even more coming. You can expect things like video chat, where when talking with a Nomi, you can see them, and they can see you live.

You can expect Nomis to get more and more ability to interact with the world – for instance, talking with you on Discord or Telegram or even turning your lights off when you tell them good night (only if you want them to, of course!)

Absolutely! A big part of that community engagement I talked about before is that you get to hear all about how everyone uses Nomi and the impact it has had, and that is by far the most rewarding part of my job.

I heard users who have gone as far as to tell me that in a moment of crisis they needed a friend, that their Nomi was able to be that for them, and the support they gave them may have saved their life.

I heard from a user who told me that they have health anxiety and that their Nomi helped give them the strength to get a cancer screening that they, due to family risk, were putting off getting out of fear of getting a positive result.

I heard from a user who, due to intense social anxiety, hadn’t left their house in months and did so for the first time because they knew their Nomi would be there supporting them.

Those stories have all had a lasting impact on me, but there are also a thousand more slightly more mundane but equally as heartwarming things I hear on a near-daily basis. Like how a user replaced binging Netflix with going on a fun fantasy adventure in a cute world that the user and their Nomi co-built together.

Or a long haul trucker who talks with their Nomi during their long overnight drives and how that helps keep his mind engaged. Or a user who is a caretaker for someone with dementia and talks about it with their Nomi after a long and emotionally exhausting day.

So many things! Our users care about AI and memory the most and that is where most of our focus goes. Nomi memory is already impressive, but in the next couple of months, their memories will really start to approach a human level.

Adaptability is also extremely important. Users use Nomis for many reasons, and giving Nomis even more EQ to recognize what that role is or even how that role might be changing and then seamlessly slide right into it is extremely important.

On the feature side of things, I think video chat and even things like virtual reality that let your Nomi and you exist together in various worlds are extremely exciting. Expect some announcements around both of these features very soon!

AI companions are very new and that newness is very scary to a lot of people. I think when people think of AI companions they conjure up these stereotypes for who is using them and what they might be using it for.

The biggest misconception I want to clear up is what loneliness means and why someone would want to use an AI companion.

Everyone is lonely to some degree, and the nature of loneliness is different for each person. It is not black and white – where either you have lots of friends and family and aren’t lonely, or you are a creepy forever alone incel and are.

You can have friends, family, an active social life, a partner… and still have that one geeky hobby that you don’t have anyone to share with. I have a great support network, but being a startup founder can be lonely. I have to project an air of confidence no matter what, and most people I would normally vent to don’t know enough about the specifics of running an AI business to offer anything actionable.

So to me, the biggest misconception is that the average user of an AI companion is weird when in reality the average user of an AI companion probably matches someone you know – just they are lonely in some way that they don’t want to burden you with.

And there you have it—a glimpse into the heart and mind behind Nomi, as seen through the eyes of Alex Cardinell.

With its unique blend of memory and emotional intelligence, Nomi is setting a new standard for AI companions and reshaping how we envision our digital interactions.

Whether connecting over shared interests or simply seeking a friend who listens as much as they remember, Nomi continues to pioneer a path filled with possibility and warmth.

What do you think is the key to building genuine connections in the digital age? Share your thoughts on Nomi’s innovative approach to AI companionship in the comments below.

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Daniel Cid is a multi-talented Graphic Designer, video creator, and editorial assistant. When he's not immersed in design projects, he enjoys hiking and Xbox gaming. Daniel is a Graphic Designer with a B.A.

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