Skip NavigationSophia Kianni, co-founder of Phia, speaks onstage during day two of TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 at Moscone Center on October 28, 2025 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch)Kimberly White | Getty Images
Though she’s perhaps best known for being a tech entrepreneur, Sophia Kianni also describes herself as a “creative and a storyteller at heart.”
Kianni, 24, is the co-founder of Phia, an AI-powered shopping startup, which she launched in April 2025 with her college roommate Phoebe Gates. The duo also co-hosts “The Burnouts,” a business and lifestyle podcast.
Kianni says she isn’t worried about AI encroaching on creative work. In fact, she’s confident that creativity is the No. 1 quality that AI can’t replicate or replace: “Creativity and ingenuity [are] always going to come from a person,” she tells CNBC Make It.
Still, Kianni says she is optimistic that AI can be used to “empower” creative teams. “You can have one, two, three-person teams actually doing so much more work than what was previously possible,” she says, “because they’re able to use AI to expedite their productivity.”
In her view, the biggest benefit AI has for creatives is that it can take over the “tedious and time-consuming” parts of their workflow. For example, Kianni says that her content creation teams at Phia and “The Burnouts” use AI to “automate out” tasks like data collection and content performance analysis, which allows them to spend more time workshopping ideas instead.
“I want my teams to stay in their zone of genius,” she says. “They’re so incredible at coming up with good, interesting, creative ideas for content … I want them to focus on that.”
While AI is able to “remix what exists,” humans are capable of “imagining possibilities that never existed before,” according to LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky and Chief Economic Opportunity Officer Aneesh Raman. Both describe creativity as an irreplaceable skill in the age of AI.
AI may disrupt the labor market, but it can also give creative professionals more room to focus on their unique skills, Yat Siu, co-founder of gaming software and digital assets company Animoca Brands, told CNBC in June. He said his hope is that “we can all be free to be creative, because machines can ultimately deliver what we need to do on that side of things, while we can be truly human.”
Phia co-founder Gates shared a similar perspective at the SXSW conference in Austin in March. “People with high agency are just going to be able to do more and more and more, and going to be able to use AI to basically supercharge [their work] and not have to do a lot of these manual or laborious tasks that used to have to be performed,” she said.
Cultivating an audience through content creation has been a key part of Phia’s growth strategy, according to Kianni, and using AI has helped the team do it.
Three-quarters of digital creators who use AI view it as “essential” to their work, according to Adobe’s 2026 Creators’ Toolkit Report, based on a survey of over 16,000 creators worldwide. The majority (87%) say it has boosted the growth of their business or audience, and 63% say creative AI has made them feel more confident in their work.
Kianni and Gates have chronicled the process of building their company on “The Burnouts,” which has over 900,000 followers, according to the podcast’s LinkedIn page. It’s “much more authentic and fulfilling to be able to actually take our audience behind the scenes and have them learn in real time with us,” Kianni says, and she encourages other entrepreneurs to share more about their process online.
Doing so — with creativity and ingenuity — is how you develop an audience “that genuinely is invested in your success,” she says.
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