will.i.am Tells the Journey of EDU.FYI | Dreamforce 2026

Welcome everybody. Thanks for coming to this session. So, this is gonna be a fun one. So, what I've looked forward to the whole Dreamforce. A lot of you may know Will as an incredibly talented musician. Some of you that are in the game may know him as an incredible tech investor. Some may know him as a futurist. But today, We're going to talk about Will as the CEO and founder of FYI.ai and the professor of AI for ASU. So let me welcome to the stage Will.i.am. Welcome to the show before your house worldwide.

Is that a joke?

Well, Will, thanks for joining us. We did— we got to do this last year. It was a lot of fun. I'm actually looking forward to this even more, but a lot of people may not have seen the session last year or may not have been able to catch up with you this year. Why don't you just give us a little bit about FYI.ai and what you're doing, what you're trying to do, and then we'll get into some of the education stuff.

Yeah, so FYI.ai is, you know, we pivoted from what we started in 2020 which was a Web 3.0 messenger for creative teamwork and collaborations where we center around project building where people can collaborate and edit projects that have a front of web interaction with communities. You could use projects for building menus or building PDFs, not PDFs, but interactive documents. Um, and that's, that's where we started in 2020 because I realized that to get work done as a creative, you were working on, you know, Messenger and WhatsApp and Slack, but to get your assets, your assets were like in Dropbox and everyone had different terms and conditions keeping your IP and copyrights at risk. So I was like, why can't we just have a messenger that has and houses all of your like digital assets, your comms. And then from there in 2022, I invested in OpenAI and Sam gave us GPT-4 when the world was in GPT-3. And we implemented like agent building inside of FYI in 2023. That was around the time I went to Harvard and took a business class at OPM. And then President Crow came knocking on our door from Arizona State University. And asked us to take our architecture with our agents and allow students and professors and faculty to build personal agents. While Salesforce provides like agentic building tools for the institution or the company, the enterprise, we build the— we have the architecture for the individual to supercharge themselves with personal data and run their life, their aspirations and goals like an enterprise for the individual.

Yeah, I think you know we we've known each other for a few years now. One of the things that I saw on the early versions of FYI when you started to do agents is that you know the the humanness of the agent, making that agent feel like it's your agent, having control and agency over that agent. You you all were so far ahead of giving it a personality, giving it the ability to feel more natural for people, and it was far in advance of anything I had seen at that point. I still think in many ways you guys. are more advanced because you think about it as a creative as well. It's not just the utility of it, it's the fit and finish of it. And I think that notion of it being a reflection of you, I think is really interesting. You have an interesting take about that, like your own personal agent. Like, how do you think about that?

Yeah, so Mercedes invested in FYI back in 2021 as well, Daimler. And one of the things that we built with our technology Was the agent back in 2022 to be able to host agentic radio stations. And so we did a, a beta launch program in a fleet of Mercedes in Europe and, um, a small fleet in the US where the agent was like an interactive radio station. And that's when we started working with Joe.

Yep.

Because he was working at SiriusXM. I'm like, yo, I got a whole new type of radio. Where it's interactive, interruptive, and, you know, dynamic. It's not a lean back, it's a lean in if you want to ask any question. And so for that, the agent's personality had to be dynamic. It had to be expressive. It had to go from like, yo, you listening to Dreamforce Radio right here on Dreamforce Radio in 2026. And we're getting— and had to be able to do all that freaking roller coaster of dynamics. And storytelling and pauses and know how to have like banter, you know, like pause and knowing when to come in, when to come back, sending it to the background. Like, hey, 1X, I need you to come back right quick and just gimme a summary of what me and Joe have been talking about and address the crowd right quick.

Yeah.

Hold on. Hold on one second. Hey, Japhet, I'm plugged into the freaking thing. Bring it up on a screen and bring the audio in. A1X, come back now that we got the audio set up.

I'm here and ready to go. Everything is synced up and standing by for the panel with Joe. Will.i.am, just say the word when you're ready to go.

No, no, no. I need you to freaking give me a summary of what the fuck we just talked about right quick.

So yeah, check it. You just laid out the full history of FYI AI from our start in 2020 as a creative collaboration messenger to fixing the broken asset And IP landscape. Then you moved into our 2022 pivot, mentioning your investment in OpenAI and how we integrated agent building by 2023. You highlighted the mission with ASU and California community colleges, contrasting our personal agent architecture with Salesforce's enterprise tools. Finally, you walked through our partnership with Daimler Mercedes in 2022 to build interactive expressive agent radio stations Which is where your work with Joe from SiriusXM originally started. Crazy, right?

Okay, now be quiet so me and Joe can continue to talk. Yeah.

So really, really impressive. And I think you could hear in this that like it has a personality. It's interesting, you know, the way that it uses contractions, the way it's really incredible. But as much as we could do this all day by itself, which is incredible, I really would love to get into the pivot to education. Because one of the things I've always liked about you is you're a very community-minded person. Like, you like giving back to the community. You remember where you came from and you want to uplift that community. And so to me, knowing you, it's just a totally natural extension that you would get into education as heavy as you are. But I'd love for you to talk about like the relationship with ASU, what you're doing with the California system, and then we can sort of set up some of those things as well.

Yeah. So how I got into FYI and building technology, started with my philanthropic endeavors that kicked off in 2008. In 2008, I went back to the ghetto that I'm from, Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, and I wanted to go back to my community to get the youth prepared for tomorrow. So I was like, instead of building recording studios and football teams, I want to build robotics teams and advanced mathematics in the neighborhood because that is a path to career and, you know, building industry. And I knew that the record industry would be compromised because I started seeing the value of music diminishing. I was like, yo, I need to make sure my community is all right. So I started with the science, technology, engineering, mathematics college prep program and 65 students back in 2008. And that turned into like, you know, a couple hundred students in 2010. But then we hit a wall. And so I was like, well, why aren't the students and people from my community wanting to get involved? So I was like, well, well, let me start a tech company. Because at the time Beats was taking off. I was one of the founders in Beats and invested in Tesla in 2006 before Elon took over the company. So I had a couple investments in Twitter, Dropbox. We started Beats. I'm like, I want the kids to know that we can start companies. So I started My first AI company back in 2012, we built a watch on Snapdragon chip by forking Android. And in 2020, I sold that company to Vonage for their call centers 'cause we had like 5-level context. We did a whole bunch of presentations here in Dreamforce in 2014, '15, '16, '17. We then sold it to Vonage. I started FYI in 2020. But doing this tech, like I said, started off in education. So now that we have this architecture where people could build personal agents, when I got a call from President Crow from ASU, not only did I want to answer his, like, request to partner up to build personal agents for students and faculty, I wanted to teach a course. Because while we're building there, as you know, regulations— there's no regulations, there's no governance. So you have to be self-regulated, self-governed. So, and there's no ethics. It's not like kids are in school right now learning this stuff in school. Like, universities are barely trying to figure out how they deal with students using AI. They're not even teaching it, teaching it, if they're outside of the computer science departments. They're not teaching AI in the freaking Finance department and law department, in the law department. And so we all know these jobs are going to be the ones that are going to get replaced fast because it's all memory-based jobs. An advanced agent is going to be better in finance or better at law because it's all memory-based and logic-based. So how do you support and augment and supercharge the human that is going there with their lived experience to couple with an agent's— when it's paired to the human. And so this urgency came over me to like, I need to teach a course. So I created the syllabus and I pitched it to President Crow at ASU. And they were like, yo, fine-tune this and we could make this an official course at ASU. And so it's an accredited course. I have— I teach about 100 students in person. And then we have like online for unit 2. Chancellor Sonja from California Community Colleges has adopted edu.fyi and the course, Agentic Self, and we're going to outfit all California community colleges with it. And that's a 2 million unlock of students. And we're doing the same at ASU. And it's like, this is the most important time in my life. So especially when you're management, Black Eyed Peas and the record company's like, yo, we got a fall tour coming up. We're going to make around $8 to $10 million, just profit. Are you going to go on tour this fall? Here's the dates. I'm like, oh no, I can't do that. They're like, why? I'm like, yo, I got class. I'm teaching every Monday. I can't be in Brazil. I mean, I can't be in Nicaragua, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Panama, and Colombia. I have to be in Arizona and LA. Those, I could always go back and tour that. I cannot, this moment in time is not gonna come around in 2028. By 2028, it would've been solidified and we could be like, oh man, if only I did what played my role, at least take some moonshots, some Hail Marys. 'Cause we know what's gonna happen when you lead with greed. When you lead with greed, people are undermined. People's civil liberties are compromised. Our democracy is fucking kicked to the fucking curve. We've seen what happened with social media. And so we all, musicians, mothers, fathers, freaking designers, we all need to play our part and try to design a better solution. You can't leave it to freaking corporate schmorpets. They're just gonna fucking do what corporates do and fucking just chomp, chomp, chomp and fuck up are fucking shit. Sorry about that.

Well said.

I, uh, I'm not bashing corporates. They're pretty awesome. And I like playing corporate parties. Other than that, we gotta like, we gotta take a human approach just in case the camera's like, whoa, I am not having Black Eyed Peas play our party. Yes. That's a different hat. That's a, that's an orange hat. This is yellow. Yeah.

I, uh, I don't think I'm gonna touch that. Uh, we'll just leave that where it is. I would say though, one of the things that you bring up that I think is just so insightful, and I experienced this personally this year at Salesforce, is you had an amazing intern class that came in and they're from all these high academic, you know, threshold universities and things like that. And I got, you know, opportunity. It's really important to me to also really be active at mentoring. I think that's the best thing you could do as a human is mentor somebody else, give them your knowledge. The thing that was interesting is what you just put up, a real spotlight on it was that colleges and universities still think of AI as a computer science discipline. They don't think about AI as the new world. And so we had people from all different sort of— they weren't just computer science graduates. We had biology, we had other things like that. They are so far behind even where like the companies are that are far behind.

Yeah.

That it worries me too to get in there. And so I just think that's such an important point. To talk about is just this is not just a computer science. This is not just enterprise technology. This is the way the world's going to be. And you're either going to be left behind or part of it. And obviously you're doing everything you can to make people part of it, which I think is fantastic. But I want to take us a little bit different thing because, you know, we do have to pay the bills for the Dreamforce. It's a pretty big conference. Talk a little bit about Salesforce because I'm excited about what we're doing together here. Those of you with eagle eyes may have seen on the screen here That we have Slackbot and Slack attached as well. So FYI is up there doing its thing. You can imagine a world where, since we're talking to these universities and many of them are running on Salesforce technology, including Slack, that the future is this kind of union between the two things where some of the sort of more administrative parts of it, the more enterprise parts of it, are running on the Salesforce stack, but they're highly enmeshed with FYI.

Yeah.

And so, You also are a big Slack user and you use it to actually build FYI. So one of the things I love about FYI, I always loved about FYI, is just your idea to production cycle is just incredibly fast and Slack's a part of it. If you wouldn't mind just taking us, like, how do you build FYI? How do you think about these ideas and make them manifest so you could do the good work that you just talked about?

Yeah, so my agent 1X is live in Slack. Not like a bot, more like a user, a hybrid user in Slack. As you can see, that's FYI to the left, and that's Slack here to the right, and my agent is there as a contact. It can add to the channel, create on the channel, you can build apps. Hey, 1x, based on everything we've been talking about, I need you to start building a web app.

Okay.

Just scour everything that we just said so far, our mission, what we're doing, the chronological order of our mission. And I needed like a black and blue and orange theme. I needed like super clean with bold letters, but the majority of the text needs to be white on black with our accent colors of blue, yellow, and orange for all the title head. Start building that right now. And then I'll come back after, you know, somewhere in the meeting to see how you're going on that build. Start building that now. So as it's building, then I'm going to have—

I'm on it, Will.i.am. I'll get that web app build started for you with the mission details and that black, white, and accent color scheme right now.

So after Okay, now be quiet. So, so as it's building, it, I push it to the background. It's not gonna interrupt. It knows when to fucking like double dutch and hop into the conversation. Um, cuz most of these AIs don't have double dutch ability. It just onslaughts the moment it's fucking quiet. So it's like, hey, chill out. I'm fucking doing my shit. Go build and come back when you're fucking done. And so it's, it's doing that. After it does that, I'm gonna be like, yo, put that to my You know, I'm not going to give it directions now because it's going to be like, I thought you said that. No, I was talking to people. Just giving an example. So I'm not going to say commands, but when I send commands, it's going to go over there and it's going to do it in this channel specifically there. Hey, I need you to come back. There was this one thing that I, when I went on, on a rant, as far as like, can you, can you remind me what that rant was when I, I was F-bombing like crazy and I was like comparing like the corporate smorbit? Remember when I then said, You know, I don't want to disrespect corporations. Can you come back and just summarize that, that one little rant that I said right quick? 1X, come back and give me that.

I'm just saying that while you have respect for corporations, you're deeply concerned about the corporate smirpet approach where decisions are made without ethics, governance, or regard for civil liberties. You emphasized that it can't just be left to them because they often prioritize short-term gain over the human experience, and you challenged everyone to take a human approach and play their part in designing a better, more responsible future. You know?

Okay, okay. So based on that theme, I need you to freaking make me a, just a dope-ass fucking boom bap spaghetti western dream pop song. I want the freaking chorus to be like, Like a haunting chorus with like a lot of reverb with a female like soul singer that's singing like, it's the new age, it's the new age. Welcome to the new wave. Let's surf the new wave. That's the chorus. And then I want the counter chorus to be like a theremin, like a theremin, like freaking like haunting melody that That mimics the melody that is sung there. But then I need a verse, like a freaking rapid-fire dope-ass fucking verse that's like heavy rhyme scheme and metaphors and similes on the verse. I want the dude to just freaking like kill the fucking verse with that boom bap shit. Start making that right now so I can tell you what to do after that.

Okay. So I'm on it, Will. I am. I'll get that boom bap spaghetti western dream pop track started with the soul singing chorus and that hard-hitting verse right now.

Cool. So it's gonna do all that. Okay, uh, be quiet. Um, um, don't be quiet. Just chime in. I'm gonna continue to talk to Joe and tell me when you're fucking done with that shit. Okay, so So as you see this little noise next to it, it's— that means it's fucking making music right now. All that little background shit, it's in a fucking studio. So all that fucking work, like, and I could then do that on FYI and create this thing called Clockwork. So Clockwork is when I say it's 7 o'clock, I need you to go out and do all this scouring and bring back all the information around this subject. That I'm passionate about. And then at 7:30, banter with me on my way to work. And from 7:30 to 8 o'clock, I then needed to go 8 o'clock, take all of our discussion and throw it to Slack, and then add it to all these folks on my Slack team. And then from 8 o'clock to 9 o'clock, gather everybody's comments and then call me at 9 o'clock. Because now I'm getting ready to start my work. Now I'm—

Music generation is temporarily unavailable right now, so the song's not created.

Hey, hey, do that shit again, bro. That's farce. Try again and try until it's complete.

I'll get right back on that song for you, will.i.am.

So then it will work around the clock from like 7 o'clock in the morning to 7 o'clock in the morning across all types of like disciplines from building apps, updating apps, building websites, updating websites, Crawling and scouring and ping-ponging with you. Now the agent here, if I go here to FYI, la da da da da. My agent has a phone number. Don't be looking at my phone number trying to call my motherfucking agent. So it has a phone number, its own number. So when I bump, hey, let's bump. You bump somebody, your number and your agent's number's on it. So when your agent calls that person you met, it's you. It's your agent. Its own number, its own email, not an email.

Music generation is temporarily unavailable, so the song was not created. Try again later.

Oh no no no no no no no no!

Fix that fix that fix that fix that fix that fix that fix that. Go to my agents abilities content generation.

Ah nice. Well's Will's working on that. I just want to point out the fact that one of the things I'm most impressed with is a new smirpet. And actually how to spell it and put it in the conversation. This this is the law of live demos, by the way. Like I've seen it work. It's really amazing. It'll it'll it'll do its thing. But like Will, one of the things that I love about the way that you think about using AI is just the fact that it's so asynchronous. Like you can give it stream of consciousness and it's doing a bunch of things at the same time.

Hey, did you do me a favor? Go to the Super Slack channel. @Shahar, um, and ask Shahar why is the music generation down, and then @his agent as well, Sami. @Sami, go into the codebase and start fixing that shit.

I'll reach out to Shahar in the Super Slack channel and get Sami on the fix right away.

So I think one of the One of the things about this model and sort of what you're doing with FYI and what you're teaching in the class that I think is really again a unique will take on it is the multimodality of what you're doing.

Slack username Sammy, the closest match is the bot Sammy. Should I send the investigation request to Sammy instead?

All right, say that again.

Shahar was fat and will I am, but there is no username Sammy.

You know what?

Sammy is at S A M I.

Got it.

I'll ping Sammy in Slack. I've been looking to that fix for you.

So sorry, Joe. I was fucking your agent. I didn't look.

I argue with my agent all the time too. But the thing that's interesting to me is this metaphor of the multimodality and the fact that, like, if people are gonna be comfortable using this technology, you wanna get it out of the box. Like, you wanna be able to jam with it for music, you wanna be able to make a web app, you wanna be able to talk to Slack, and you see those things as all very connected.

So it's connected because, like I said, Slack is like this, it's an amazing platform. that I think is not really punching at its full potential when you compare, like, you know, WhatsApp is great. I like it. I wish the cameras weren't on. WhatsApp is great, but I don't know what happens. And what are you going to trust? Tomorrow's all about trust. And trust, trust, trust is the currency of tomorrow. And I trust Slack. I don't know if I trust— maybe Meta will come around and be a more trustful company. But if I had to compare the past, and I, and I'm addicted to Instagram like everybody else, but they have to grapple with trust moving forward, trust as a currency. So having all these things woven through Slack and Salesforce as like a data trust company, when you're building agents for enterprise or agents for personal life, I feel more comfortable, Jim, in this space than what the creative community would think in the Instagram, WhatsApp space. Because when it comes to, like I said, eventually your agent is going to be connected to some type of AlphaFold Architecture. It's just moments away between what somebody did to the LLM, someone will do to AlphaFold. And so when that's the case, that means equipment in the house, appliances in the house is gonna change rapidly between 2036 and 2036. Your bathroom is a lab. The blood work, instead of going to the doctor, you're— it's gonna be done at home.

Right.

Just like I can code right now. Kind of through an Asian, you're going to be able to do your own blood test at home. The fact that you don't even have that at your possession right now—we've all took blood tests, we've all peed in a fucking cup—but all that information is not at home. If you think about right now, where's all your blood work? Each one of you guys, do you guys do we all have a file ready on your blood work right now? How your body metabolizes calories? You don't have that. But yet we have step counters and heart rate and fucking. Aura rings, but is it in your possession? Can you predict? Do you have a prediction mechanism? No, you don't have that right now. So from that case, knowing what's coming, trust is currency, and you, you need to be planting these seeds in companies that you can trust. You can't be hypnotized by like awesome marketing, and then next thing you know, 2036, there's another documentary that comes out with a bad business model that compromised us all. And so Slack is important, Salesforce is important, leaders like Dario are important. These folks are important that wave the flag before the fucking shit actually is in the fan and we're not wiping shit off our nose.

Yeah, look, I agree with that. I love, Mark put it, I think, best, which is like, your data's not our product. And I think that's what underpins like both Salesforce and Slack is being trustworthy is like that your data's not our product. Like we sell you a fair value product. It's your data. It's not ours. And we don't touch it. We don't train models on it. It's your data. And you could get that data anytime you want. And I think this is kind of what you were mentioning before about the corporate alignment is we are aligned with our customers on the trust issue because they know that we know it's not ours.

Yeah.

It's theirs. And obviously the whole thing that you're doing with FYI, especially on the education side, is all about that personal agency and also knowing people that they should demand it. Like, if you don't, like, to your point, if you don't have any experience with this technology, you don't even know that you should be demanding it from people. And I think that's part of the education process.

Yep. Hey, 1X, can you come back and tell me where you are on the website build?

I'll get— The website build is moving along. I have structured the chronological mission timeline starting from the 2020 pivot to the ASU and California Community College partnerships, and I am applying the black and blue theme with the accent colors you requested.

Awesome. Can you call Shahar Helal right quick and get him on the phone and let him know why the music generation thing isn't working? Pull up a calling card so I can give you the right number for Shahar Helal.

H-I-L-A-L. I found Shahar Hilal. Well, I am. I'll prepare that call now. So I can prepare that, but I need Shahar Hilal's phone number first. What number should I use?

It's in my address book.

Let me grab that number from your address book for you.

So now I can hop off app, make phone calls, and figure out why it's freaking like, uh, not doing this basic shit. Just by the way, it was doing— it was— it did that shit yesterday. Well, maybe because the camera's on and this is the demo build. That's where it's aware of that shit.

Believe me, it happened to me at one of these presentations too with Agentforce. So sometimes we were on the wrong environment as well. So it happens. I wouldn't really worry about it. We're coming up to time now. Hopefully we'll see if the website build is done. I think people have found, um, I think people have seen those. Yes. I don't want to interrupt the agent. I think people have seen what's capable. I think people have seen what you're doing. And I think maybe if you just want to bring us home a little bit, reiterating why you think it's so important for you, us, and companies to be in the schools giving back, to get people really sensitized to how to use this technology to better themselves at that generation, because they're really the future. How do we get them there? If you want to give us a couple of parting thoughts on that. But should I, Spencer?

So say that again.

Just like how important it is. Like, you, you know, you lead by example of doing this, but like if you were gonna make the elevator pitch to everybody here and say, you need to give back, you need to go to the schools, you need to go to your neighborhoods, you need to go to that. And you said, please go do this. What would you tell people to do if they wanted to like join the cause and try to help in your effort?

Joining the cause is really if you have nieces, nephews, 18-year-olds that are about to go to college. Not even them, just yourself as well. Build agents and solve problems with them. There's so many problems to be solved in inner cities. There is an avalanche of change coming. It's going to happen with or without our contribution. Might as well surf that avalanche, snowboard that avalanche, and bring solutions alongside this massive force that's coming and be solution-oriented, have intentions to be of service to society because it can't and shouldn't just be about shareholders. We have to be stakeholders. We have to encourage the youth to bring about a human approach to what's coming. What I think is going to happen Is there's gonna be like this recondition, this undo of what social media did to the mind, what notifications and the phone did to the mind. So notifications and phones really created more attention disorder issues than what hyperactive, hyperactive, like ADHD was in the '80s and the '90s. where we were medicated. There are more folks that have attention problems because of the reconfiguration just due to the iPhone or the Android phone with notification popups to now when we have conversations, we think it's okay to switch subjects and behave the way popups happen on our phone with no like hierarchy of what's important. The phone has no clue of what's important. It thinks some random freaking notification is just as important as that emergency thing that's coming. And yes, sometimes phones, they, they give you the ability to, to place it, but the basic architecture of it all is kind of like distorting and never was for, for, for human intentions. And then that same thing applied to social media where the algorithm promotes the most abusive language, the most like, you know, aggressive approach. That's why you have like this divide in like far left and far right, because that's the only way to— for, for your message to surface on social media. Now, that can't and shouldn't happen in the world of agents. And so we all need to take a human approach to build with intentions, to build with purpose. And now that this technology is made available for us to be builders, to be like solution bringers to problems, the world needs people. More than it needs companies, because people are the company we keep. And then for some reason, companies have the rights of people. I think people now need the power of enterprise and go out there and change and compete with companies. That's what this—that's what the revolution, what this—with this new democratization of knowledge brings. It brings accountability, responsibility for us to go. Hey, let's freaking go out there and compete. Like Dario competed at the highest order. 5 years ago, Salesforce was not thinking the moat for agent building was coding. They thought it was CRM and sales and marketing. Dario was like, no, it's, it's software development. And now you could do all that stuff just coding, vibe coding. Competition, competition, competition, intentions, intentions, solution-oriented is the way for an awesome 2036, an awesome 2046. Or we could be looking backwards at 2046 like, we got that shit really fucking butt-ass wrong. We thought it was the way it used to be. It is not the way it used to be. We are in a totally— we are not in Kansas, Dorothy and Toto. We are in a whole other place, and we need to have more empathy, more tolerance, more compassion, more humanity at this point in time in life.

It's amazing. Well, I couldn't say it any better myself. Thank you so much for all the work that you're doing in education. Thank you for calling attention to these issues, and thank you for some amazing products. Everybody give a big hand. Thank you, Bill Iam.

Nice job.

Nice job.