Information Quality Is What Wins In The AI Era

SPEAKER_1 (0:12)

Welcome to AdExchanger Talks, the podcast devoted to examining the issues and trends in advertising and marketing technology that matter most to you.

Sarah Seuss (0:24)

Today's episode is sponsored by Basis, the leading intelligent operating system for autonomous advertising. Its enterprise AI solution transforms campaign briefs into strategies and media plans that integrate directly into omni-channel activation. You can learn more at basis.com.

Allison Schiff (0:51)

I'm Allison Schiff, Editor-in-Chief of AdExchanger, and you're listening to AdExchanger Talks. And for that, I thank you.

My guest this week is Tim Frank, Corporate VP of Monetization, Commerce, and a little thing called the AI Economy at Microsoft. In Microsoft's view, the web has bifurcated into three webs, and all three now exist simultaneously, which means it's an interesting time to be alive, especially if you're a business. We've got the human web, which is basically the way things have worked for the past 25 years, where people search for things and drive traffic to websites. We've got the LLM web, where AI synthesizes different options, but it's still the human taking actions. And then the true agentic web, which is like the do-it-for-me web, where agents find, evaluate, and transact on a person's behalf. We'll dive into all of it, plus lots of other good and nerdy stuff, including the Universal Commerce Protocol, GEO, and measurement in the AI era. But first, there's still time to snag your ticket to Programmatic IO. New York, taking place on September 28th and 29th at the New York Marriott Marquis. It's kind of the place to be, so just saying. Podcast listeners get 10% off with the promo code POD10. So what you waiting for? Get your ticket and I'll see you there.

Hey Tim, welcome to the podcast.

Tim Frank (2:09)

Hi Allison, happy to be here.

Allison Schiff (2:11)

So usually I start out by asking people to share something about themselves that not a lot of other people already know, but I wanna start by talking about your love of space because I've seen you describe yourself as a space nerd on LinkedIn. And I also read a post that you wrote about how you stopped an internal meeting a bunch of months ago because you wanted to take over the screen to share the Artemis II launch. So before we talk about the AI economy and monetization and all of that jazz, and we're gonna nerd out on that extensively, what got you so interested in space exploration?

Tim Frank (2:53)

Well, when I was a kid, I read a lot about what happens at the edge of a black hole and what's the physics like for that. And it led me to my first job and first eight years working in space. Everything from the science of it to how we might explore and learn new information about how the universe formed.

And I've always been tracking like, what is the upcoming launch? And Artemis was not just a normal launch. It was a really big deal.

NASA kind of recreating this huge program. And it wasn't like the most critical work meeting, but it was one where a bunch of people that I was friends with and colleagues with, I was like, look, this is the moment. This is like the 10 second countdown and then the key launch. And so it was a fun way to just bring that into the office culture a little bit. And some of that like fun questions that come afterwards like, oh, what would have happened if it didn't go well? Or like, when do you know it's safe to turn off the live stream? So that was kind of the impetus.

Allison Schiff (3:52)

When do you know that it's safe to turn off the live stream?

Tim Frank (3:56)

On the bottom, usually there's like a timeline of launch and like what's happening. And so there'll be a couple of points like when it reaches the maximum, like physics load on the system.

Once it gets past that, usually called max Q, then you know that everything is downhill from there and it's very likely that physics will not destroy the spacecraft. There's a couple of key events, main engine cutoff, MECO. That's when the booster has done its job and it's probably on its way to orbit. And if it's your money on the payload, then you care that it gets all the way to the location it needs to do its job. But from a pure physics perspective, it's probably going to go well by that point.

Allison Schiff (4:42)

But max Q not to be confused with performance max.

Tim Frank (4:46)

Totally unrelated.

Maximum physics torque. And then maximum performance delivery. Yeah.