Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava questions AI-written workplace documents

Keeping people at the center of AI

Kakul Srivastava is the CEO of Splice, a sample platform used by music producers for one-shots and melodic loops. Samples from the service have appeared in songs including Lisa's Money and Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso. Before Splice, Srivastava held executive roles at Flickr, Yahoo, GitHub and Adobe.

At Splice, she has expanded the platform through the acquisition of Spitfire Audio and overseen its work with generative AI. She has also been publicly skeptical of what she calls push-button, get-song systems. Splice has instead tried to develop AI products that keep people at the center of the creative process.

Documents that support real conversation

Srivastava considers a well-written document and a real conversation about it to be her most indispensable work tool. Splice is remote-first, so the company does not have the hallway conversations available in some workplaces. She believes many successful projects begin when someone thinks through an idea and others discuss and challenge it.

That process is why she is careful about AI-written documents. When readers can no longer tell whether a person is behind the words, she says, the discussion changes and becomes worse. She believes the same principle applies to music: technology should support human creativity rather than replace the person making decisions.

Technology seen through personal experience

In the wider questionnaire, Srivastava said Instagram is her favorite online space because its feed exposes her to unexpected forms of music. She also shared fond memories of Antakshari, an Indian singing game played during long car rides, weddings and other gatherings.

Her current obsession is reconstructing her mother's recipes through YouTube videos. She described one family recipe video as giving her mother's cooking back and said the experience shaped her answer to what technology is for. Among her personal preferences, she named live jazz as worth splurging on and a cup warmer as her most disappointing gadget because it warms the cup but not the coffee.