Mobile game maker PlayStudios uses AI to report Q1 earnings, cloning the CEO’s voice

Corporate earnings calls don’t usually turn a lot of heads. But PlayStudios’ reporting of its first quarter results Tuesday is an exception—and the numbers will have little to do with it.

As analysts and investors listened to the first half of the call, assimilating data—like the quarterly revenues hitting $80.1 million compared to an expected $73.4 million—they likely had no idea that the words and speakers they were hearing were entirely generated by artificial intelligence. The script that discussed profitability and revenue? Written by a chatbot. The presenter? It wasn’t founder and CEO Andrew Pascal, but rather an AI clone of his voice.

The surprise was revealed at the end of the earnings presentation, right before Pascal and his executive team (in their real-world human forms) joined to answer questions from analysts. It was definitely a surprise. Of the 750 or so people who work at PlayStudios, only 10 knew of the plan to do the AI-generated earnings call. Even the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was unaware of the idea, Pascal tells Fast Company.  

“I’m fascinated with AI, as I think we all should be,” he said in an interview five hours before the earnings call began. “It really can and should impact every role throughout the company. That’s something I’ve been evangelizing, so what better way to really demonstrate to my teams internally than to take it on myself and see how and where I can be applying it in a way to make me more productive. . . . This seemed to me like an intriguing way to really reinforce the idea that there isn’t a role in the company, including mine, that won’t be impacted by it.”

Like many companies that are rushing to incorporate AI in their products, PlayStudios has been using AI in its games, a popular collection of rewards-based slots, blackjack, and bingo mobile titles (as well as the official mobile version of Tetris), in a variety of ways, including creating assets and game content.

Whether an AI earnings call will become a regular event is still up in the air. Pascal says using the technology to create (and voice) the opening statements on Tuesday’s call took roughly one-third of the time it normally does. “Everything about this was far more efficient,” he said. ChatGPT was used to create the script and ElevenLabs for the voice cloning.

If you’ve never listened to a PlayStudios conference call, Pascal says there’s very little chance you picked up that it was AI doing the heavy lifting. There are certainly issues of cadence and emphasis in the cloned voice that are different from his actual speaking voice, but he says the technology is about 80% accurate.

The idea for an AI conference call came to him not long ago. Pascal says he was thinking on how best to signal both within the company and to investors that PlayStudios planned to embrace AI and show that it can enhance both creativity and productivity.

Once he had committed to the idea, the company began feeding information into the chatbot. But because of strict SEC guidelines, there had to be some precautions taken. No actual earnings numbers or nonpublic information was entered along with the data. And when getting the AI to generate the language of the narrative they wanted to tell, the company was careful to create multiple versions that reflected a strong performance, a disappointing one, and one that was on target.

In doing so, says Pascal, PlayStudios ensured that should outside parties somehow get ahold of the information it had entered, there was no way to determine how it had actually performed in the first quarter.

“It was dummy data,” he said. “The dialogue and specific narrative that speaks to revenue performance and profitability, we had to plug in the actual numbers after it had generated the script.”

While Pascal is leaning heavily into AI, he acknowledges that there are some workers (and some investors) who are still a bit afraid of the technology. With Tuesday’s call, he says, he hopes to calm some of that.

“Hopefully, people will find it fascinating and it will provoke them to take a deeper interest,” he said. “I hope it signals that these tools are going to impact just about everything. We shouldn’t be fearful. We should embrace it.”