The Power of Eye Tracking for the Enterprise - with Adam Gross, Co-Founder & CEO of HarmonEyes

**Ray Rike** (0:08)
Welcome to today's episode of the AI to ROI Podcast. Today, I am joined by Adam Gross, co-founder and CEO of Harmonize. Today, Adam and I will be discussing four different topics. First, what is eye tracking, and why is it valuable to the enterprise? Second, how AI is applied to the science of eye tracking.
Third, a couple of different enterprise use cases.
Fourth, the tangible benefits and ROI of corporate eye tracking with the use of AI. Adam, can you please take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the AI to ROI podcast.

**Adam Gross** (0:53)
Yeah. First of all, nice to see you, Ray, and thanks for having me on the podcast. I look forward to our conversation. To give you a little bit of background, I started the company in 2012, with my co-founder, Dr. Melissa Hunfovay, who is a renowned eye tracking scientist. Really, the story begins when you think about eye tracking, is the technology behind recording and capturing eye movement behavior. A little different than maybe an image of your retina or scanning your iris, this is all about how your eyes move, the patterns that they move in, the signatures, even things like pupillometry, etc. There are certain signatures of your eye movement behavior that correlate to different aspects of your health, your vision, your performance, your cognition. Really, when we started the company, there had been decades of research that drew these correlations, yet the technology hadn't really caught up.
Many of the use cases were utilitarian at the time. Our goal was to take eye tracking, the idea of capturing and understanding eye movement behavior, to draw those correlations in software and science, and turn those into really useful and practical and actionable insights and applications.
We started that 12 years ago when we've developed dozens of eye tracking software products over the years, and we've procured the largest validated eye tracking database in the world, at this point, over 15 million unique records, and so now we're entering into the world of AI and using that data to train models.

**Ray Rike** (2:56)
Well, this is exciting to me because as we mentioned, I was first introduced to you and we discussed the episode. My daughter about 15 years ago had the opportunity to benefit from using eye tracking, so maybe we start, Adam, with more traditional individual consumer use cases and why it's valuable and then we'll get into more some enterprise use cases.

**Adam Gross** (3:20)
Yeah.
One of the really wonderful aspects of eye movement behavior and therefore eye tracking is that the characteristics that make it such a powerful sensor is the fact that it's objective, right? So when your daughter was doing some of these eye movement testing 15 years ago, it's hard to fake that, right? It's hard to fake a micro eye movement.
And so the data that you get is objective, it is passive and it's quantifiable. And so some of the early use cases around eye tracking have been for more control purposes. So people who have conditions that don't allow them to communicate, you can communicate through your eyes, right? If we understand the position of your eyes, through valuable software and that use case still exists today. And that kind of migrated to other use cases around market research. And where we took this with our company, our parent company, RightEye, was delivering valuable medical and performance testing around eye movements. So understanding vision skills if you're an athlete, but also understanding a visual impairment if you have a traumatic brain injury or a concussion or kind of detecting previously unidentified vision issues that are difficult to identify with the naked eye. And so those are some of the kind of use cases that have existed. We've been a leader in the medical device space over the last decade. And so while we've really penetrated the vision care and the neurology community on the clinical side, we've also had a really big impact on the performance side through our relationships with elite military through the Special Operations Command of the United States Military, and also dozens of professional sports teams and partnerships with Major League Baseball and the NBA, etc. over the years. And so through that exercise or through that business, we've been able to procure this valuable data set. And now we're able to deliver, when we combine it with AI, and I know we'll get into that. But we're able to leverage that and train models that aren't necessarily assessment based, but that are real time. And that's really where the AI helps us understand a person in real time and even predict how they're going to change in the future.