Even as we grapple with the Information Age’s more disruptive trends — social media, e-commerce, and the gig-economy, to name a few — we are nonetheless in its infancy. Ken Aizawa examines these trends and charts a future in which artificial intelligence and data become the lingua franca of digital commerce.

Ken Aizawa is the Head of AI at TheTake, a startup powering rich, contextual product discovery across your favorite movies and shows on all your favorite viewing devices. Ken’s team of engineers and researchers develop machine learning algorithms and tools for large-scale video metadata annotation, identifying the people, products, and places on hundreds of hours of video content each month. Previously, Ken worked on AI at Microsoft Research and on biochemistry at Memorial Sloan Kettering and Mount Sinai, where he first learned of the promise of ML and data.