Firsthand's Jon Heller Shares How AI Agents Enhance Consumer Journeys in Retail - Ep. 242

Hello, and welcome to the NVIDIA AI podcast. I'm your host, Noah Kravitz. The AI community is abuzz with agents. As NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said in his CES keynote this past January, Agensic AI represents the next wave in the evolution of generative AI and a multitrillion dollar opportunity at that. AI agents enable applications to move beyond simple chatbot interactions to tackle complex, multi step problems through sophisticated reasoning and planning. They're expected to become a centerpiece of enterprise AI systems going forward. Our guest is John Heller, co CEO and founder of Firsthand, whose brand agent platform is transforming how advertisers and publishers engage consumers online. Firsthand is also a member of Inception, NVIDIA's program for start ups. John, welcome, and thanks so much for taking the time to join the AI podcast. Hey, Noah. Thank you. It's great to be here. Very excited. So let's start with the basics. If you don't mind, tell us a little bit about Firsthand. Sure. As you said, firsthand is building the brand agent platform, and that's because when we see AI, we believe it is itself a new medium, not just a technology. Perhaps I can explain that a little bit about how we came to be. So I've been working in advertising tech since the Internet started in the nineties. And, I've worked at DoubleClick for quite a long time. More recently, I was the co CEO and cofounder of FreeWheel, which is now Comcast ad serving platform. Right. And I've been doing ad tech for a long time. And actually, when I left Comcast, I went back to school, finger quoted in AI, so online courses, because I wanted to work in something that was much more broadly applicable Mhmm. And much earlier in its life. And I'd actually started by working on, reinforcement learning robots to act as minions and artificial teammates in video games. And that's how I started learning the the guts of it. I'm biting my tongue so we don't take us off course because that sounds fascinating as well. Oh, yeah. Then that that could be a separate conversation. But I've been working in the in the gaming world and some of the generative AI abilities for gaming assets when language models really came out. Mhmm. And something struck us, something very powerful, which is and this is a a metaphor for the math inside, but AI now understands the ideas and intents needs you may have from what you're reading, what you're watching, what you might ask it outright, and it can go find the right response or take the right responding action. And everything is presented to you in a very natural human way. And if you back up a step and think of that happening all the way through a consumer's use of the digital world from when they're searching and becoming aware of things they might need, when they do some investigation and read up on products or …