One AI host, a whole business day

ALEX is the AI host of EVOLUTION, the 2026 annual congress of Pernod Ricard Kazakhstan. He introduces himself on stage as a virtual assistant and analyst, and he works as the virtual host of the whole business day — opening, off-trade, on-trade, B2B and e-commerce, marketing, digital and AI, finale. A white-and-grey humanoid with blue lit eyes and a halo of concentric rings above his head. Flavatars designed, produced, voiced and animated him.

At EVOLUTION it carried the whole business day. ALEX was not an insert: he opened the congress, ran seven segments of the programme — off-trade, on-trade, B2B and e-commerce, marketing, digital and AI among them — and closed the official part. Sixteen spoken cues, nine minutes forty-seven seconds of screen time, spread across a full programme. Human speakers took their sections in between; the AI held the thread between them. An AI emcee, in other words — for a full business day, not for a two-minute opening.

The opposite was written into the script. In the digital block ALEX says the tools take away routine and give people back the time for what needs judgement, context and real relationships — and that not one of them made a single strategic decision that day. He closes by telling the room they know their own market better than any artificial intelligence does.

Fifteen colleagues appeared as living portraits — eight-second square loops in which a photoreal portrait moves: a blink, a breath, a shift of expression, behind a transparent AR visor with a magenta read-out. One wardrobe, one near-black background and one loop length for all fifteen, so the screen read as a single cast rather than fifteen separate videos.

Because the congress was a closed distributor event. Flavatars publishes its own work — the format, the cast, the craft — and not the client’s names or the client’s numbers. The fifteen twins are shown here as a visual cast; the names, the roles and everything said about the business in that room stay with the client.

Like an actor’s. Thirteen candidates read the same short test text in a single fifty-minute session, two of them deliberately robotic — and neither machine voice was chosen. A second round of six takes followed a week later, two of them marked «more emotional». Nearly every finished line was then voiced twice and the better take kept.

With standby loops. The host’s loop is fifteen seconds of an avatar simply looking at the room — small movements of the head and the eyes — so the screen never goes dead between cues. Two variants were rendered, so the idle never settles into a frozen image. The fifteen portraits do the same in eight-second loops.

A fusion of long-standing industry expertise with current technology, held together by one sign: the spiral, for continuous progress, growth and movement forward. It runs from the lit rings above the hall to the halo of concentric rings above the AI host’s head.

Flavatars built the whole AI layer — design, production, synthetic voices and animation for the AI host and for the fifteen digital twins. The congress itself was produced by FIRST MEDIA and directed by Iaroslav Gubskyi, with Andrey Glushik and Yana Abraimova on the creative team.

The same partnership, a different production. Flavatars built the digital cast at both; EVOLUTION was produced by FIRST MEDIA and directed by Iaroslav Gubskyi, while the Hyundai Winter Dealer Conference 2026 was produced by Gubsky Talent Hub. Two annual conferences, two formats — eight counterparts in dialogue there, one host carrying the day here.