Steve Sanford

The story

The through-line has been high-stakes communications, in the US and internationally. Situations where the audience is not neutral, the other side is well funded, and being approximately right in public is the same as being wrong. Somewhere in there I produced more than 3,000 commercials for consumer brands.

In the 1990s I told the people building Broadcast.com that streaming would overtake traditional broadcast. It was not a popular position at the time. I was among the first to put streaming media and live television together, producing nightly simulcasts of Treasures in Your Home for PAX Television across two seasons, shot at CBN Studios in Virginia Beach and at Lifetime Studios. The instinct has not changed since. Find the emerging application of a technology, then turn it into something somebody will actually buy. It was never about being first. It is about seeing what others do not see yet and bringing it to reality.

The work after that was global strategic communications for regulatory fights and M&A, with turnaround CEO roles at venture-backed firms alongside it. And production at the high end: Unreal Engine green-screen studios, human digital twins at scale. A show I produced, Love and Respect with Killer Mike for PBS, took a Southeast Emmy in Interview and Discussion, Long Form. We shot it on multi-camera studios through the pandemic, when most productions like it had simply stopped. It got finished because I rebuilt how it was made instead of waiting for the old way to come back.

That same pandemic took every client I had. Not because of a bad call. Because of something nobody could control. Profitable companies, gone in a few weeks. Both of those things are true about the same stretch of time, and I would not tell you one without the other. The pivot is the part worth telling. Finishing that show and rebuilding after that loss came out of the same instinct: change how the work gets made instead of waiting for the conditions to come back.

What I'm building now

So I did what I have always done. I found the next problem and built. This time on AI, and for the first time I built something that runs without a room full of people.

I am co-founder of Simulus AI and of Contero, a content platform that grounds its work in cited research and then runs adversarial agents against its own output to catch what the creative agents got wrong or invented. It serves paying businesses every day. It is not a demo. Roughly ninety percent of anything automatable in my own companies runs on AI, which is the only reason I have full attention left for the actual problem in front of me.

My position on the technology is unsentimental. AI is not the problem, and it is not the answer either. It is a tool, and it fails the moment nobody is on it. That is the whole idea behind Human Prompted. Human Approved.™ Use as many agents to challenge the work as you use to make it. Speed without judgment is just faster slop.

A fair amount of what I get asked for now is not building at all. It is judgment. A company with twenty AI initiatives running and no way to tell which three are real does not need another vendor. It needs somebody who has built enough of them to say which ones will not survive contact with production, and to say it while the money is still unspent.

I am doing the rebuild in public, mistakes included. If that is useful to you, the writing is where it gets documented.