No industry is safe from artificial intelligence. Not even podcasting.
This isn’t hyperbole. There are already at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes on platforms like Spotify and Apple. That’s thanks to Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees cranking out 3,000 episodes a week covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and its cultural impact, to a biography series on Anna Wintour.
Its podcasting network Quiet Please has generated 12 million lifetime episode downloads and amassed 400,000 subscribers — so, yes, people are really listening to AI podcasts.
Inception Point’s ability to flood the market with audio episodes faster than any human team could match starkly illustrates both the promise of AI and the nightmare scenario that it can truly come after every job. Even as companies have shed more than a million jobs this year, with many citing AI as a reason, there was a belief that certain creative roles would be safe. The biggest allure of a podcast, after all, is the personality of its host. But Inception Point CEO Jeanine Wright believes the tool is proof that automation can make podcasting scalable, profitable and accessible without human writers, editors or hosts.
“The price is now so inexpensive that you can take a lot of risks,” Wright told TheWrap. “You can make a lot of content and a lot of different genres that were never commercially viable before and serve huge audiences that have really never had content made for them.”
At a cost of $1 an episode, Wright takes a quantity-over-quality approach.
“Riches are in the niches, for sure,” Wrights said. “My friends in the podcasting industry, they’ll ask, ‘Do you have any show that’s in the top 10? How are your shows charting?’ We don’t even think about it like that.”
Inception Point’s timing is fortuitous. The podcasting industry has become a hub for journalists, artists, athletes and medical professionals alike. More than 584 million people listened to podcasts in 2025, with numbers expected to reach 619 million by 2026, according to Riverside. Even Netflix is getting into the podcasting business, striking a partnership with Spotify and The Ringer for video podcasts as part of its 2026 strategy.
Inception Point, which bills itself as the “audio version of Reddit or Wikipedia,” pairs hyper-specialized content with different AI personalities to attract targeted listeners. The company chooses its shows and topics, specifically avoiding subject matter that may be tricky for the AI models, so human review is not required for each episode. Where they place calculated effort, though, is in its over 120 host personalities.
Inception Point said that its generated personalities are more than an elevated Siri. The company leans into specific niches, viral trends and search engine optimization to reach targeted audiences. It has created podcasts from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and its cultural impact to a biography series on Anna Wintour.
Though some online users call the content AI slop, the company argues that its biographical, “edutainment” content has value in the crowded podcasting landscape.
“Instead of having to be really focused on trying to build the next Kelce Brothers, the next Crime Junkie, the next Joe Rogan, these huge shows, you could serve niche audiences and micro communities,” she said. “It’s just a totally different business model.”
Inception Point AI almost operates like a newsroom — albeit one without human journalists. AI models scan the internet and prompt the team with lists of compelling ideas, and the employees see what sticks.
With its small eight-person team, it takes a day to go from an idea to a complete episode. Once a topic is chosen, a team member will pair it with an Inception Point AI personality and the machine can start generating the episode, which takes about an hour.
With each episode only needing 20 listeners to turn a profit, it’s no wonder Inception Point prioritizes quantity. The company noted on its website that it monetizes with iHeartRadio as a partner, but representatives for the audio platform were unfamiliar with it. The company generates its revenue from programmatic ads that run during its episodes.
Meet the AI Hosts
Among the 120 personalities available are “The Confidence Coach” Kai, whose British voice and daily uploads attempt to establish a routine for its listeners. The just three-minute episodes attempt to build self-esteem from “the friendly AI” host. Her comments are sourced from self-help tips and tricks from across the internet.
Or listeners can get the latest gossip from “Celeb Confidential” host Vivian Steele. Her tone is not quite as peppy as you may expect. The intonation sounds robotic as she discusses Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco’s wedding weekend, and is devoid of the kinds of opinionated hot takes pop culture podcasts have been known for.
Nearly every host speaks in a similar, monotonous rhythm throughout the episodes, barely pausing between sections and sometimes even sentences. Wright said her team programs the personalities with backstories and weaknesses, flaws and even a sense of humor “to make them more interesting and human like.”
Five of these personalities have an Instagram presence, all with less than a thousand followers, but the company has not formally tapped into video generation quite yet. For the few that it has experimented with, the videos are glaringly AI-generated with glitchy bouts between movements of the avatars.
Outside of the personalities, the AI tool scrapes the internet for content that can be used for educational, biographical content.
“This agent is programmed to identify people that people might want to have regular information about, and then it dynamically creates based on our prompts and our format content about this person,” Wright explained. “It is regularly updated when there’s new interesting information about that person available.”
For example, when Kirk was shot, the AI bot identified the conservative activist as a person of interest that the podcast network already had a biography series on, so it dynamically produced a new topical episode of the podcast on his death. After the increased demand around that episode, the team produced several more podcasts about Kirk’s assassination and the fallout.
With thousands of podcasts a day, it would be physically impossible to listen to all of the episodes created on the network. For that reason, the company treads lightly with controversial topics that could get their personalities in trouble, but there is some human intervention. In the instance of the Kirk episodes, humans stepped into to listen to the content before they published.
“When we lean into things that we describe as hard politics or hard news, we do a human review before they go out the door,” Wright said. “We want to make sure that everything is factually accurate, but also we want to make sure that the topic is being treated with the right sensitivity.”
But the company is so small that human review of even a quarter or less of its daily output would be impossible. The company uses multiple large language models, or LLMs, to cross reference and ensure that the content does not contain hallucinations, or made up answers that spontaneously emerge — which can happen with AI models. But the tactics are designed more to mitigate the risk of inaccuracies vs. proactively safeguarding against them, as a human editor would.
Another issue is matching the correct tone with the best personality. The AI models, for instance, still struggle to strike a balance between reverence and forming a hot take.
“That’s the area where I still feel like AI has room to grow,” she said. “It’s getting better every day. You can program in a lot of emotionality, but that’s where we still really need to do a review.”
AI a rising trend in audio
Inception Point isn’t the only one employing AI in podcasts.
The company does not yet have significant competition at the scale they are producing, but Wright welcomes it with open arms. Its closest competition is PocketFM. The India-based audio platform uses AI tools like ElevenLabs to generate voices for fictional audio series and tested AI tools for writing and adaptation assistance internally. The startup said it launched close to 1,000 pilots per month as of August, operating on the same volume strategy that Inception Point does.
One Cornell professor told TheWrap that academic sites turn almost anything into a podcast. To the chagrin of some researchers, research papers have been turned into podcast form without their consent, using AI-generated voice tools. Sites like Academia.edu will automatically create AI podcast versions of scholarly articles and then give authors the chance to opt out of the service. The professor took issue with this notion and how the term “podcast” gets imposed on whatever bit of public knowledge is available.
Joe Caporoso, president of sports and media company Whistle, said he sees some value in AI tools for his podcast creatives but is unclear about its merit for full-length episodes.
“I would imagine there’s going to be some meat left on the bone in terms of some of the improvisation that happens in a normal episode, and some of the different ways that you know conversations naturally flow,” Caporoso told TheWrap. “But for certain formulaic episodes, and for certain formulaic parts of episodes, like ad reads, I’m sure AI will be a big part of it.”
While Wright believes AI voices can captivate listeners just as well as human hosts, others in the industry remain skeptical. Some see automation as a tool for efficiency — not as a creative replacement.
“I don’t think there’s a computer personality that can replace the humor that Funny Marco brings to a show, or the realness that Kylie Kelce brings to ‘Not Gonna Lie,’” Ryan Jann, EVP, head of strategy and revenue for Wave Sports + Entertainment, told TheWrap. “I think those are going to be incredibly difficult to replace.”
The three major platforms — Apple Podcasts, Spotify and YouTube — don’t require creators to disclose when a podcast was created by AI, but all Inception Point AI hosts do disclose they are AI at the top of the episodes.
What’s next
As for the company’s next steps, Wright said video is on the horizon. The company’s AI-generated illustrated podcast covers, however, are slightly off with depictions of Sabrina Carpenters and Tucker Carlsons.
Inception Point has already experimented with short-form videos and creating social media profiles for the personalities in the hopes that it may turn them into influencers. Wright hopes to create thousands more personalities in the near future to see which personalities stick.
The five existing personalities on Instagram look significantly different from the graphic used for the podcast’s profile picture. Also, the voices depicted in their profiles are slightly off from the ones used for the audio-first platforms.
On track to produce nearly 150,000 episodes by the end of the year, Inception Point AI has already made a large splash in the podcasting market, but will the company burn bright and fast or make a lasting impact in the space?
“I think very quickly we get to a place where AI is a default way that content is made, not just across audio, but across television and film and commercials and imagery, and everything. And then we will disclose when things are not made with AI instead of that they were made with AI,” Wright said. “But for now, we are perfectly happy leading the way.”
