AI, ethics and business: Marcello Violini of TetiAI meets Professional Master students

23 March 2026

A new appointment in the series of meetings dedicated to Professional Master students of Bologna Business School brought into the classroom an open conversation on artificial intelligence, ethics and business models, together with Marcello Violini, founder, with Lorenzo Nargiso, of Teyuto and TetiAI.

Marcello Violini opened with a reflection: when used without awareness, artificial intelligence risks weakening rather than empowering those who rely on it. An opening that immediately touched on one of the key themes of the discussion: how can we coexist with these tools without delegating to them what makes human thinking uniquely human?

Violini and Nargiso come from Teyuto, a video platform active in more than fifty countries and recognized by the European Commission. With TetiAI, a startup founded in 2025 with operations between Europe and the United States, they shifted focus, bringing to the AI landscape a positioning that deliberately moves against the current of major global players.

At the center of the meeting was Teti, a digital assistant with persistent memory, designed to retain preferences, projects and conversations over time, building a continuous relationship with the user rather than resetting context at each session. Alongside its technical dimension, TetiAI has defined a clear commitment: a public Ethical Charter, an independent Ethics Committee with veto power, no military or surveillance use, and zero data tracking. The proprietary Teti N1 model is built on a fusion of open-source models—a choice that, in the co-founder’s words, is not a commercial strategy but a necessary condition to ensure the system’s transparency and verifiability.

The discussion with the class covered several topics: the business model of a company that renounces data monetization, the boundary between radical privacy and the need to train models, the energy sustainability of AI infrastructures, and the implications of a concept of “ethics” that changes across cultural contexts. Violini addressed these issues openly, including existing contradictions: TetiAI guarantees that user data is not used to train its own model, but cannot guarantee the prior history of third-party foundation models it builds upon.

Before closing, a final note on entrepreneurship: money, Violini said, is the last problem for those building a startup. The real challenge is to build something necessary — and to have the patience to stay with it long enough.