Mato is a media platform that uses AI to help companies turn their expertise into professionally produced podcasts and media.
“We’re building the first generation of AI talents that interview real humans, creating authentic content at a scale that was never before possible,” it states.
Mato has been awarded an ElevenLabs grant, received AWS Activate credits and is a member of NVIDIA Inception.
Alexander Benz is co-founder and CEO.
Radio World: What is Mato?
Alexander Benz: Mato is a Los Angeles-based media technology company founded in 2024 by my husband, Edward Benz, and me. The company is privately held, and we recently raised a pre-seed investment from Mucker Capital and joined MuckerLab.
Mato gives companies AI agents that interview real human guests live. The AI host prepares for the subject, conducts an unscripted interview, listens to what the guest actually says, and asks followup questions in real time. The conversation can then move through editing, transcripts, clips, cover art and distribution, with the customer retaining final approval.
RW: Tell us more about it and how it might be used by radio broadcasters or related audio fields.
Benz: The core product is the live AI interviewer.
Most AI audio tools start with text and generate something from it. Mato starts with a person. A real guest joins an interview, speaks naturally, and the AI host conducts the conversation in real time.
A public demonstration of the AI interviewer is available, which includes a Kevin DeMeritt interview, transcript and follow-up timestamps.
For radio, I think the interesting part is what that does to the economics and logistics of producing expert-led audio. A broadcaster can capture interviews, recurring expert segments, branded programming or niche shows without needing a human host and full production team around every recording session.
Since we first spoke, we’ve brought this into traditional radio with Lear Capital. Their Mato-produced show “Outside the Dollar” uses AI-hosted interviews with real guests and is now being distributed for radio as well as digital listening.
RW: What prompted the development of a tool that uses an AI host to conduct interviews?
Benz: We were much more interested in whether AI could conduct a good conversation than whether it could generate another piece of content.
There is an enormous amount of useful knowledge sitting inside companies with founders, customers, executives and subject-matter experts. Traditional podcast production makes capturing that knowledge relatively expensive and operationally heavy.
The question became: What happens if the AI does the preparation, interviewing and much of the production work, while the expertise still comes from an actual person?
That became Mato.
RW: How do your guardrails assure that the final interview is correct and appropriate?
Benz: We do not claim that an AI interviewer can guarantee that every statement a guest makes is factually correct.
Our approach is to preserve provenance and human editorial control instead.
The recorded human conversation remains the source. Customers can set the subject, questions and editorial boundaries before an interview, and they retain final approval before anything is released. The transcript and recording also make it possible to review the finished material against what the guest actually said.
The AI is responsible for conducting and processing the conversation. It does not become the authority on the subject being discussed.
RW: What is the experience of being interviewed by an AI host like?
Benz: It feels much closer to being interviewed by a person than completing a questionnaire or talking to a traditional chatbot.
The guest joins, the AI host asks a question, and the guest answers naturally. While they are speaking, the agent is listening to the substance of the answer and deciding what makes sense to ask next.
So if someone introduces an unexpected detail, the host can follow that thread rather than simply moving to question number three on a predetermined list.
The guest does not need to write prompts or learn how to use an AI tool. Their job is simply to talk about what they know.
RW: How can an interested reader learn more or hear an example?
Benz: Lear Capital’s “Outside the Dollar” is a useful current example because it shows the model in an actual subject-matter interview rather than a scripted demonstration.
We also have several public interviews and product examples available through Mato, along with a press kit containing screenshots and company information.
RW: What else should we know?
Benz: The distinction that matters most to us is that we are not trying to synthesize the human out of media.
There are already plenty of AI products that can generate an article, a voice or a podcast from a prompt. Mato is built around the opposite premise: The interesting material should still come from a real person.
We want AI to remove much of the coordination and production work required to capture that person’s knowledge, rather than replacing the person whose knowledge made the content worth producing in the first place.
Podcasting is our first use case, but we see the broader product as a conversation layer for capturing human knowledge.
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