Last week, I did a very strange interview. The subject knew all my tricks. She anticipated my questions. At one point, she quoted my own book back at me.

I was talking to my virtual self.

A vintage ribbon microphone with a torn-paper orange and teal outline on a grey halftone background.
A microphone catches the words. It cannot catch the pause before them.

Let me back up. I’m Rhea Wessel. Journalist, founder of The Institute for Thought Leadership, and, since this spring, the so-called ‘story engineer’ at BBN AI Studio. My role here has two parts. I interview the experts behind the AI Studio’s skills and turn what I learn into pieces like the one you’re reading. And along the way, the creator of the AI Studio and I are shaping one skill I know rather intimately: the thought leadership skill, based on my book, Write Like a Thought Leader.

The thought leadership skill and I were formally introduced in May, in Mannheim, Germany. There, Marco Luciano, who built BBN’s AI Studio, opened his laptop and showed me my own methodology turned into a skill that runs on various AI platforms. This is more than my book uploaded into an AI. It is my process, sliced and structured: the interview questions I ask, the sequence I follow, and the quality checks I run.

Then Marco put it plainly.

We can’t take your brain out of your head. So the skill is how you show up inside a client’s team.

I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or unsettled. I went with flattered.

Then came the challenge: use the skill on yourself. Talk to your virtual self. See what she’s got.

Getting to know my virtual self

So I did. I opened the skill and told it I wanted to sharpen my own positioning. It fired back with: ‘What do you believe about your field that most of your colleagues would push back on?’

Rude. That’s my question. I use that question.

From there, my virtual self walked me through niche discovery. That intersection of passion, expertise, and a viewpoint that is unmistakably yours. When I tried to skip ahead to headlines (everyone tries to skip ahead to headlines), she steered me back. When I floated a story idea I secretly knew was tired, she flagged the angle as overused. A ‘writing sin,’ in my vocabulary. And yes, she used my own term with me.

(My method includes 17 thought-leadership story types, by the way. This piece, fittingly, is a ‘What I Learned’ type.)

My verdict on my virtual self, and her limits

Here’s what my virtual self is good at. She’s available at 11 p.m. when a deadline looms and no coach on earth is answering the phone. She works in your preferred language. She’s endlessly patient with your third, fourth, and fifth attempt at a thought-leadership niche statement. And she holds you to a process instead of letting a chatbot’s eagerness carry you straight to a shallow draft. As a first stepping stone into thought leadership positioning, she’s solid. Better than I expected, if I’m allowed to say that about my virtual self.

Here’s what she can’t do. She can’t hear the pause before your answer in a live interview. She can’t see you lean forward when you land on the topic you actually care about, or notice the throwaway line that deserves a follow-up. ‘Wait. Go back. You said the idea hit you. When, and where? Tell me about that moment.’ That instinct, when to dig, when to sit in silence, when to abandon the plan entirely, is craft built over thousands of interviews. My virtual self doesn’t have it. Neither does anyone else’s.

Why this is the fun part

This is exactly how we think about skills at the BBN AI Studio.

The skill does the fundamentals in a structured, reliable way, inside the tools your team already uses.

No new platform, no new tab. And where the machine reaches its limits, a human expert steps in. In my case, that means discovery interviews, framing conversations, and the coaching that makes thought leadership sound like you instead of like everyone else.

The best part: every conversation feeds the next version. Each expert I interview, and each rough edge we find, goes back into the skill. She’s getting better every month. I’d like to claim the same for myself.

So, if you’d like to meet the BBN AI Studio thought-leadership skill, a sort of virtual version of myself, she’s available around the clock and speaks your language.

And if you’d like to meet me, the version that reads the room and asks about the back story, you know where to find us.