Three years ago, my dad was diagnosed with cancer.
He had worked all his life — some years flying more than 250 days. When we lived together, I’d wake up for school just as he was getting ready for bed after working on his PowerPoint lecture. As a kid, I didn’t really know what he did. I just knew he was a management consultant.
As I got older and started going to his lectures, I finally understood why people loved him so much. His talks were full of energy. People stood on tables yelling, laughing, getting hyped — it was nothing like the classrooms I grew up with in China. He explained business concepts in ways people could remember. And more importantly, he helped companies grow. A lot of them ended up becoming number one in their field — some 10x’ed under his guidance.
In recent years, he launched an accelerator group made up of over 500 company executives. They traveled the world — visiting businesses, walking through deserts, and hosting events and courses that challenged and inspired each other. The community grew into a tightly bonded tribe, united by his vision and mission.
But the hardest part of what he built is this: no one can replace him. People didn’t come for the content. They came because he was teaching it.
In 2021, during COVID, I went back to China and helped him film videos for Douyin (Chinese TikTok). I saw the spark in his eyes. He was alive doing what he loved. His goal then was to help 10 companies go public within 10 years. He also wanted to help me start something of my own.
But I stayed in the U.S., and our paths drifted. Ever since he separated from my mom in 2015 and I moved away, we hadn’t had many chances to connect. This May, I made an emergency trip back to China as his condition got worse. For the first time in years, we really talked.
He told me about everything — growing up in a village with no education, working his way up into elite business circles. He studied, read, learned, and just kept going. Even when he had hepatitis B, he kept drinking at business dinners — because in China, social drinking is part of the job. COVID was the first time he stopped, and it forced him to finally get an ultrasound. That’s when they found the cancer. It was already late stage.
Scaling back was torture for him. Work gave him life. But now, he can’t teach anymore.
While I was in China, the idea of building an AI version of him had already started forming. I asked my cousin — who’s now helping run the company — to send me everything she had: audio, videos, old recordings. She sent it all. But when I returned to the U.S., I didn’t start right away. I got lazy. I thought I had more time.
Then a few weeks later, my dad called me and my mom and asked us to record the conversation. He talked about his will, how to handle the company, and his wishes if things got worse.
While we were reconnecting, I began to understand just how much this legacy means to him. He built everything from scratch, and there’s no real way to keep it alive, because no one can teach it the way he does. After that call, I realized I couldn’t keep putting it off. My cousin is working on books based on his systems. But I wanted to contribute something too. And since I love vibe coding, I knew I could build something meaningful.
I kept thinking about Tony Robbins’ AI — and how powerful it could be to build something like that for my dad.
I transcribed his old lectures using Baidu AI Cloud, loaded the transcripts into a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline using LangChain and OpenAI, and deployed the chatbot with a custom Next.js frontend. Then I added voice, training a custom model with ElevenLabs so users could actually hear responses in a voice that sounded a little like his. (🔧 Curious how I built it technically? I wrote a technical walkthrough here)
My parents tested the chatbot, and my cousin is now using it while continuing to document his teachings. The plan is to roll it out to the 500-member CEO group, and eventually to others purchasing his courses. It may also help promote the book series based on his management system via a WeChat botx.
We often think of AI as something cold and corporate. But I built mine out of love — for my father, his teachings, and the people who still need them.
I’m proud of what he’s built. He started from nothing. His mission has always been clear: help businesses grow, help people lead better. It’s sad that he can’t continue doing what he loves. But I hope this AI lets people engage with his ideas, even in a small way.
It’s not emotional. It doesn’t replace him. It doesn’t capture the spark in his lectures or the way he lights up a room. But it holds his words. His systems. His wisdom.
And for me, it gave me a reason to revisit his work, to understand it deeply, to understand him better. It is a small, imperfect archive of love.