Amperity Reimagines Data and Developer Workflows with AI - Ep. 271

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. From Magenta AI to VibeCoding, our guest has been at the forefront of showing how AI powered systems can empower engineers while delivering measurable business value. Derek Slager is cofounder and chief technology officer of Amperity, a company that's redefining how enterprises use data to better understand and serve their customers. Derek's here to talk about his journey founding Amperity, the tools his team is building, like Chuck Data, an AI agent for data engineers, and his perspective on how AI is reshaping not just the enterprise landscape, but the developer experience itself. So let's get to it. Welcome, Derek, and thanks so much for joining the NVIDIA AI podcast. Thanks, Noah. Great to be here. Great to have you. So let's start at the beginning. Tell us a little bit about Amperity. Yeah. So Amperity is an AI powered customer data cloud, and we help brands unify, understand, and activate customer data at scale, which is a lot of things. And, you know, we're really particularly focused on data quality. Right? Because we're big believers that, better data equals better results. Right? Right. You're funneling that through agentic use cases or otherwise. And so, we have a lot of, great capabilities to to help people all over a consumer business take advantage of that data, but it's all about getting the data right. So what inspired you to cofound the company, and how does your background, your own journey as an engineer kind of shape the direction of Imperity? Yeah. For sure. So, we started in 2016. Right? Like, which which, you know, I sometimes refer to as, like, the false start AI era. Right. Sure. You know, there was a lot of, you know, a lot of excitement about kind of, you know, deep neural networks and and and a lot of other kind of innovation happening in the AI space. But, certainly, it was, you know, nothing in comparison to the current AI wave. But but nonetheless, right, like, that was kind of you know, it was on a lot of people's minds. And and, you know, what we observed in kinda researching, Amperity was almost every consumer brand had a project to unify all their customer data. Mhmm. And yet we couldn't find a single one, and we tried pretty hard. We couldn't find a single one that said, yeah. Yeah. We solved it. Right? Despite all that effort. And and we just found that ridiculous. And so, you know, what inspired us to start Amparity was really the opportunity to help all these people who were trying and failing to solve a problem that was really important to their business, actually succeed in doing that. And and, of course, like, the the the key point there was, you know, all these people were smart. They were trying really hard to solve it. Right? So so clearly, the existing tools were insufficient. Because …