Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava warns AI emails kill real talk

Srivastava's comments come from a career spent between Silicon Valley and creative work — executive roles at Flickr, Yahoo, GitHub, and Adobe before Splice. At Splice she has expanded the platform by acquiring Spitfire Audio and overseen its moves into generative AI, while last year using an episode of Decoder to argue against the sort of "push-button, get-song" AI that has made companies like Suno controversial. Her skepticism, based on her questionnaire answers, has not faded.

What ties her answers together is a consistent test: whether a human is still making decisions that cannot be taken back. She applies it to documents at a remote-first company with no hallway to argue in, and to music, where she says the same thing is true. The recipe story — reconstructing her mother's food from strangers' YouTube videos — is her example of technology at its best, precisely because a person put something of themselves into it.

The stakes for Splice hinge on whether a stated personal preference becomes a practice inside a company that is also building AI products. If written documents are where a remote team's arguments live, the quality of those arguments may depend on how much of the writing still sounds like a person.