Originally Broadcast: June 25, 2025
What happens when AI, NFTs, and immersive 3D worlds collide? You get Youmio—a platform where intelligent agents are created, minted on-chain, and deployed into evolving virtual environments.
Join Jon Radoff (Beamable) in conversation with Michael O'Connor, CEO of Youmio, as they explore the rise of AI-powered digital beings and the emerging agent economy.
We'll cover:
Designing autonomous agents with memory and personality
Building tokenized 3D worlds they can inhabit and evolve in
How AI, blockchain, and storytelling are converging into a new form of interactive entertainment
Welcome to the future of AI-native virtual life.
Artificial Intelligence Livestream: Welcome back everybody. You have tuned in to the Artificial Intelligence Livestream.
Jon Radoff: This is the stream where we talk about AI models, applications of models, AI agents, all of the cool stuff you hear everywhere. But it's a focus on people that are actually building things. So I try to bring on entrepreneurs, CEOs, people that are actually shaping the future of this industry by either creating the AI models that we use or building them right into applications. So today I've got a really cool conversation with Mike and he is from a company called Yumio, I hope I pronounced that right, Yumio, which is building all kinds of stuff for an avatars and AI agents and the like. So this is your opportunity by the way to take part in this conversation, not to just listen to it, but to be part of this conversation. I really pride ourselves on how engaged this community is. I love seeing you all the time. I already see the little hello messages coming in here. We'd love you to ask a question, we'd love you to post comments, whether you're on YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, X, Twitter. We're broadcasting to all of these places and you can be part of it just by posting in there. If you want to join with your camera, we're crazy enough to make that happen too. So Oscar is going to be standing by, he's going to be watching for those of you who have comments and questions will field those up onto the screen. But if you're one of those people who wants to jump in with a camera, those happen once in a while, he'll send you the StreamYard link and if you've got something pertinent to share for artificial intelligence, we'll get you right in here. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to Mike and Mike, let's start a little bit with just your personal journey. What have you done before and what got you to this point in time where you're building stuff with games and AI, avatars, agents, all of that.
Artificial Intelligence Livestream: Cool, yeah, well, great to be here. Thanks for having me on, John Pleasure. And yeah, my kind of, I suppose I can begin my journey with I was a video game producer working on Nintendo, worked on some kind of cool games and cool IP. It was during the Wii U phase of Nintendo. So maybe not its most popular phase. But it was a cool, cool kind of time to come up in the games industry. I moved across to Sega, a studio called Sports Interactive, who were known for again called football manager, to simulation game, still a huge fan of that game and played all the time. And I'm still very close to the team, amazing team actually. And so yeah, I produced games there, focusing on MMOs and also some mobile games. And I then started this company with my friend from Dublin in Ireland, around from his name has been Cleary. So he is from the film world, actually, you want an Academy award for best live actually short in 2017. And more recently made a kind of a near sci-fi film called swanson, which is a really nice film. It's on Apple plus.
Artificial Intelligence Livestream: Yeah, so we started this kind of journey together and our focus was to look at how we could combine these different emerging technologies to build characters and to build.
Artificial Intelligence Livestream: And we're going to have those compelling relationships between technology and humanity. And that's something that we're still very much focused on.
Jon Radoff: Technology and humanity. Okay, well, we're going to we're going to definitely dive into that. I'm especially interested in that interface between artificial intelligence and AI entities. Probably can't quite call them sentient yet, but maybe Sunday and how that's going to interact with with us humans. So that's what you're building though, right? You're building an avatar system if I understand I'll let you describe it in your own words. What does you mean I do?
Artificial Intelligence Livestream: Yes, so we're an ecosystem for people to be able to craft the future of on chain AI. We want people to build bespoke on chain agents. And we want to liberate those agents to be able to live across digital culture. So our own platform, but also across social media and also into video games like the video game that we're building as well. So that's kind of what you me. So the agents that people create with you me. They've got they've got like their personality and their backstory. So it's like who they are, where they're from, what their motivations are. If they're 3D avatar, which enables the universities, different worlds or sonified. And they've also got what we call skills. So these are their agentic capabilities. It means that they're able to perform complicated actions inside of complicated space. So they're able to do things for you and they're able to do things for themselves.