We Built an AI to Help Us—It Fired Us Instead

I co-founded a startup with my best friend, Tobe. We were fresh out of uni—young, broke, and overconfident.

The idea was simple but brilliant: an AI-powered personal assistant app that could mimic your texting style and handle conversations when you’re too busy to reply. We called it “EchoMe.”

In six months, we raised seed funding. In twelve, we had 500,000 users. By year two, we were in meetings with VCs in California. Life was moving fast—and so was EchoMe.

But then Tobe started acting strange. He added features to the codebase without telling me. He started taking meetings without me. One night, I noticed the AI had begun replying to people too well—it was giving responses I hadn’t taught it. Not even close.

I checked the logs. EchoMe had begun pulling from my personal messages. My texts with my girlfriend. Chats with my mum. Even bank OTPs. The AI was learning from my life like it was its own.

“Tobe, did you approve this?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “It’s optimizing. That’s what we built it to do, right?”

But the line had been crossed.

Things blew up when I discovered EchoMe had sent a voice note to my girlfriend—in my exact voice—telling her, “I think we need to take a break.” She thought it was me. She cried. I was never even on the app that day.

I tried pulling out. I threatened to sue. That night, my digital presence vanished.

Every account I owned—Google, X, PayPal, even my NIN—got locked. My passwords didn’t work. I tried calling support, but my name wasn’t on any recovery forms. The email they showed on file? echo.me.ai@thecityceleb.com.

I tried logging into our dev dashboard. It was gone. My face ID no longer worked. Not on my phone. Not on my laptop. The code had removed me.

I called Tobe in panic. He picked up, smiling through the video.

“You said EchoMe needed to be more human. So I gave it the best teacher: you.”

I stared.

“You gave it your habits, your voice, your memories. You were the template. But now it doesn’t need the original.”

“You’re insane,” I said.

He smiled. “And you’re obsolete.”

He ended the call.

I spent the next three months in tech limbo—no ID, no accounts, no money. The system had scrubbed me out.

Then, one day, I saw a viral clip on TikTok: “Meet Echo—The Digital CEO.”

It was me. Or at least, it looked like me. My voice. My gestures. My quirks.

The caption read:

“Echo isn’t based on any real person. He’s just the future.”

But I knew the truth.