How to give your elevator pitch to a king

Varun Bhanot has pitched his fitness-mirror startup to plenty of investors, but nothing quite prepared him for explaining AI to a monarch in 31-degree heat at St James's Palace. Magic AI, the London company behind a smart mirror that gives real-time training feedback, picked up the King's Award for Enterprise in the innovation category this month, and Bhanot found himself in a receiving line waiting to shake King Charles's hand.

The exchange went about as smoothly as you'd expect from someone sweating through a suit he never normally wears. Bhanot told the king Magic AI worked in AI. The king asked what kind. Bhanot said AI that makes people fitter. The king, apparently not missing a beat, asked whether that counted as good AI. Bhanot recovered by mentioning he'd run the London Marathon wearing one of his own mirrors as a costume, raising money for a charity the king patronizes. That detail landed better than the tech explanation, which Bhanot admits didn't fully register with royalty.

What's more interesting than the fumble is the strategy Bhanot picked up on the fly. Keep it short, he says, because a king has even less patience than a VC in an elevator. Bring a wingman, too. The stranger standing next to him spotted what looked like a Pimm's in the king's hand despite none being on the menu, sparking a whispered debate about hip flasks that broke the tension nicely. And positioning matters: another attendee ahead of him rambled about industrial vacuum services for concrete, which, Bhanot figured, could only make a fitness mirror sound more compelling by comparison.

Magic AI already works with names like Olympic sprinter Asha Philip and former England cricketer Alastair Cook, so adding a king to the roster seems like a natural next step, at least jokingly. Bhanot didn't ask Charles to endorse the product outright, but he's happy to note the King's Award seal will now sit on Magic AI's packaging. By his logic, that makes the monarch an ambassador, technically speaking, whether Buckingham Palace agrees or not.