How Kathryn Jones Is Rewiring the Future of Media

Recently, Kathryn Jones was asked to budget a livestream from a Broadway house. Major names were attached. The project included six cameras, same-day load-in – and no rehearsal. The budget set aside for it was $2,000.

She sent back $25,000.

Kathryn is not the type to pad a number. She had been inside enough live productions to know what was being asked: high-stakes output without the structure required to support it.

“They didn’t hire me, obviously,” she says. “But not for a second was I sorry.”

That instinct carries through her approach to AI. Kathryn isn’t dazzled by the shiniest new AI tools unless they can truly hold the work up.

Kathryn works across digital storytelling, AI workflow architecture, and live/creative production, with past work for Walt Disney, Edward Jones, Wasserman, Miley Cyrus, and Alicia Keys. For the past two years, she has brought that range into Sageworx as an active member, leading creative production for brands like Julabo and helping the collective explore what AI-enabled production can make possible. She was also the founder of Collective Agency and the creator of Insatiable Mind, an AI-native platform that keeps your books, experiences, and insights alive and evolving.

At Sageworx, that blend matters. Kathryn brings a producer’s understanding of pressure, a builder’s appetite for tools, and a storyteller’s refusal to treat meaning as an afterthought.

The throughline isn’t media, or even cutting-edge production. Kathryn is driven by the need to understand the innards of everything she sees.

If something goes wrong in a livestream, it goes wrong in public. There is no clean second pass, no quiet fix, no ‘we’ll adjust in post.’ The show either runs or it doesn’t.

“What I learned was less about being on the set,” she says, “but how do you prepare to be on the set?”

Her answer was to understand enough to know what was possible, what a client could reasonably ask for, and when a technical answer needed to be challenged.

So she learned. Her instrument of choice was the TriCaster, “a production studio in a box.” She did not plan to operate it on every show. She wanted to know it well enough to tell a client what could happen, and direct crews to make it happen.

On one production, a technical director told her he could not execute a request because he only had three M/Es available. Kathryn knew the machine.

“You’re using an 800,” she remembers saying. “It has eight M/Es. So what’s going on with those other five?”

She laughs at the specificity, but it signals a particular kind of creative authority. Kathryn isn’t the loudest person in the room, but she is often the person that understands the room best.

“One other thing I learned being a producer is there’s always a solution,” she says. “Sometimes that solution costs money, but there’s always a solution.”

For Kathryn, AI’s usefulness starts as another way to find the best way through.

She studied. She took a real course from MIT. “I spent six months teaching myself Python because I felt like I needed to understand,” she recalls. “I can’t write Python. But I understand coding concepts I didn’t know before, and I’m using that information every single day.”

“I was a producer and ran an agency for a long time, which meant I might have a lot of ideas, but I couldn't be the one to build them,” Kathryn says.

She could edit. She knew Photoshop. But if she was spending all her time making every asset herself, then the business would go down the drain.

“So I was always dependent on other people,” she says. “What I find now is I can build huge things by myself. I can come up with a vision, and I can make it happen.”

That line is not about replacing collaborators. In Kathryn’s case, the opposite is often true. The more serious the work, the more clearly she sees the need for people with real craft. AI has changed the early terrain – what she can prototype, investigate, organize, and bring forward before the full machinery of production comes online.

She compares it to the early days before YouTube. A project that once took six weeks of rehearsal, all your money, and sold-out houses could still reach only 1,200 people. Then YouTube arrived, and “all of a sudden, you could greenlight your own projects.”

AI, for her, is “a different level of greenlighting your own projects.”

One example was deliberately unglamorous: hundreds of items checked across 11 spreadsheets, a manual, error-prone process that made her feel like she was drowning.

So she built a system to fix it.

“I spent six months building an automated system for that particular project,” she says. “Now I could probably build it in two hours.”

The process itself was not conceptually impressive. It was “A plus B.” The problem was that the As were over here, the Bs were over there, and no one could reliably find them without burning hours of attention.

AI takes the drag out of the system so people have more room to think, make, and care. The spectacle comes later.

Insatiable Mind started with a feeling Kathryn knew too well: reading a book that changes you, closing it, and knowing most of it will disappear from your active mind.

Before Insatiable Mind, she began making artifacts for herself. She took books that mattered to her and turned them into slides with quotes and biophilic images behind them. She bought a screen for her office so she could keep encountering those ideas during the day.

“I’m obsessive and weird,” she says. Then she keeps going, because the point is not weird at all. “The things I read feel really, really important to me. And if there’s a book that I feel has changed me in some way, I want to retain that.”

Kathryn describes Insatiable Mind as “totally vibe coded,” and immediately qualifies that. It is vibe coded hours every day. The public-facing site “is 90% back end and then 10% front end,” she explains.

Right now, the system is built mostly around books and notes. Eventually, she wants to bring in images too: “Oh, I saw this kind of architecture in Naples, and now I’m in Greece. How thrilling to make that connection, and now I’m going to remember both those experiences a little bit more deeply.”

She’s turning storage into prolonged connection. Parts of Insatiable Mind are already evolving into experiential tours, as well an early project connected to a book and the Met.

One of her mottos is, “AI surfaces the connections. Humans experience the meaning.” Insatiable Mind is that in living color – AI used to build an experience out of a feeling.

“Yes, anybody now can make a really cool video,” Kathryn says. “But prompting is not craft.”

That’s important inside the kind of AI-enabled production she’s been working on with Sageworx. Kathryn points to work where the team created places a camera could not easily go: space, semiconductor fabrication facilities, environments that would otherwise require massive budgets, special access, or impossible logistics.

But the finished work still depends on human craft.

“People create amazing things,” she says, “but we’re in the business of selling things for our clients. There’s gotta be an ROI.”

Kathryn isn’t reducing the work to a transaction. It means understanding the output has to be far more than a prompt – something that has “a beginning, and a middle, and an end, that creates an emotion.”

She continues, “Because creating an emotion is step one to get someone to click to your site, to get someone to eventually make the decision to purchase something.”

Whether she is building a personal system for ideas to “ricochet off each other” or helping shape AI-enabled production for a client, Kathryn believes the work only matters when the system becomes something people can feel. Emotional connection is truly the point.

That is why the Sageworx model matters: the talent is only part of the advantage. The operating system is the other half — the tools tested, the workflows designed, and the collaborative culture that helps writers, producers, creative leads, directors, VFX and post-production specialists keep leveling up the work together.

Kathryn is proud of what the team has built.

“Besides beautiful, it’s also really moving,” she says. “I don’t think that would have been possible without people with broad levels of skill sets.”

Near the end of our conversation, Kathryn, reflecting on the work she has built inspired by Annie Murphy Paul, says something that sounds almost like a throwaway.

“I really want to love the making of a living.”

It explains the shape of her work: the production rigor, the self-taught builds, the systems that remove frustration, the strange and serious platform for keeping books alive.

At Sageworx, that is where Kathryn’s work lives: between what the tools can surface and what only people can make meaningful.

To follow Kathryn’s work, visit insatiablemind.ai, her LinkedIn, or connect with her through Sageworx.