What do you do when the business you've built is already successful, but you can see that the technology transforming your industry is going to demand something completely different? In this episode of Built For This, Carly Pepin sits down with Shahrzad Rafati, founder and CEO of RHEI, to explore what it really looks like to disrupt your own company, embrace the agentic AI era, and rethink the relationship between technology and human creativity. Shahrzad's connection to storytelling began long before she became a technology entrepreneur. Growing up in Iran, where access to content was limited, she experienced what it meant not to have an endless world of stories and perspectives available at your fingertips. After moving to North America, she became fascinated by the intersection of storytelling and technology, and by the possibility of giving more people the ability to create, share, and find an audience. That journey eventually led to RHEI, a global technology company that today reaches more than 600 million unique viewers every month across more than 150 countries. But despite operating at enormous scale and generating hundreds of millions of dollars, Shahrzad and her team made an unusual decision. They chose to disrupt themselves. Seeing the possibilities emerging through generative and agentic AI, RHEI began shifting away from its traditional toolkit and services model and investing in a fundamentally different future. At the center of that transformation is Made, an agentic creative operating system designed to function more like a creative team than another piece of software. The idea is simple but ambitious. Creators shouldn't have to become editors, designers, distribution experts, rights managers, community managers, and platform specialists just to bring their ideas into the world. Instead, technology can take on more of that work, freeing creators to spend their time doing the thing only they can do: create. Shahrzad is refreshingly candid about what reinventing an established company actually involves. RHEI changed leadership, rebuilt its R&D organization, sunset business units that were still generating revenue, transformed its approach to sales and marketing, and significantly increased communication across the organization. Company offsites that once happened quarterly moved to every other month because Shahrzad understood that transformation can't simply be announced in a presentation. People need time to understand the new direction, challenge it, ask questions, and see where they belong within it. Carly and Shahrzad also explore one of the biggest questions surrounding AI: what happens to human creativity as machines become increasingly capable? For Shahrzad, the answer isn't to turn every creator into a prompt engineer. It's almost the opposite. She believes empathy, curiosity, taste, lived experience, and creativity become even more important as AI grows more intelligent. Her vision is to use technology to protect and amplify what she calls the "human signal," including the imperfections, experiences, perspectives, and stories that make someone's work unmistakably their own. It's a fascinating conversation about AI, creativity, leadership, organizational transformation, and having the courage to disrupt something that's already working in order to build what comes next. Key Themes Sometimes Your Current Success Is the Biggest Barrier to What's Next RHEI wasn't a struggling company searching for a turnaround. It was already operating at enormous scale and generating hundreds of millions of dollars. That made the decision to reinvent the business significantly harder. Rather than protecting what was already working, Shahrzad and her team chose to invest heavily in R&D, restructure teams, sunset revenue-generating business units, and rebuild the organization around where they believed the industry was heading. It's a powerful lesson in the difference between responding to disruption and being willing to disrupt yourself before someone else does. Curiosity Is Becoming a Competitive Advantage As AI makes knowledge dramatically easier to access, Shahrzad believes curiosity becomes increasingly valuable. Someone working in sales can now rapidly deepen their understanding of marketing. A junior employee can study an industry, competitors, research, and methodologies at a level that previously demanded far more time and resources. The question is whether they actually want to. As Shahrzad puts it, you can't bribe someone to be curious. The people who naturally want to learn, explore, question, and understand are increasingly valuable in an environment where the tools for learning are available to almost everyone. AI Can Give Humans More Space to Be Human Shahrzad's vision for Made isn't about replacing creativity. It's about removing more of the work surrounding creativity. Creators shouldn't need to spend their days resizing videos, creating thumbnails, managing rights, navigating distribution platforms, analyzing thousands of comments, or learning an endless collection of tools. Instead, AI can increasingly take responsibility for that operational burden. But Shahrzad also believes those systems need to understand the individual. Rather than producing generic AI content, Made is being designed around personalization, proactivity, and the creator's own voice, audience, taste, and creative DNA. The goal isn't to remove the human from creativity. It's to give the human more room to actually be creative. Memorable Quotes "You can't bribe people to be curious." "What makes us humans is the imperfections." "I think every core pillar that you look at comes from that human connection, and we want to make it better." About Shahrzad Rafati Shahrzad Rafati is the Founder and CEO of RHEI, a technology company building AI designed to amplify human creativity, scale audiences, and enhance impact. Under Shahrzad's leadership, RHEI has grown into a global powerhouse reaching more than 600 million unique viewers every month across more than 150 countries. The company is now pioneering Made, an emotionally intelligent platform designed around the future of human creativity. Beyond RHEI, Shahrzad has contributed to both the G20 and G7 and supports a number of influential boards and organizations spanning technology, media, investment, design, architecture, and the not-for-profit sector. Her roles include serving as Vice-Chairperson for Invest in Canada and as a board member for Hootsuite Media Inc. and Bjarke Ingels Group. Connect with Shahrzad RHEI: rhei.com LinkedIn: Shahrzad Rafati on LinkedIn X: Shahrzad Rafati on X Instagram: Shahrzad Rafati on Instagram
