Ask Emily and Jon about OLI—NBCU’s AI-powered chat experience for the Paris and Milan Olympics—and you won’t just get a surface-level overview. Instead, they’ll provide a detailed account of the project’s evolution, from technical features, to the challenges of operating at massive scale and the realities of building responsibly in the age of AI.
Our Global Head of AI Strategy and VP of Technology, both long-tenured at Huge, reflect on the partnership behind the work; an alliance defined by trust, “civil candor” and the kind of productive tension that drives innovation forward.
In this installment of Makers, Emily Wengert and Jon Hackett reflect on two intense years of building OLI—and why creating something truly new takes far more than a 9-to-5.
Years in the making.
Emily: Jon and I are in enough meetings together that we often play off each other’s intros. I'll say all my parts and then he goes, “Yep, the same for me, just on the tech side.” The cool part about our maker partnership is that we’re both deeply in the innovation and emerging technology space, and we have been for a long time.
I have been here for 17 years and in that time I’ve often been pushing the edges of what we offer and what we’re thinking about. I’ve always been interested in trying to be ready for what’s next. It’s why I love agency life. It’s the pressure our clients put on us.
About 10 years ago, I started doing experiential physical-digital work and did a lot of AI. We worked with computer vision and machine learning. We did eye tracking. We had robotics, augmented reality, virtual reality—all the realities.
That’s where I’m stealing Jon’s intro, because he always says “all the realities.” We’ve both played in the acronym space, which is also one of Jon’s jokes. Now, we work so much together, I just steal his jokes and he has nothing to say.
Jon: We’re the same but different. We are offering up two sides of the same coin. It’s a good combination. It’s the art and the science coming together. I’ve been at Huge for almost five years, but I have 20 years of working in this industry. I started as a programmer when web technology was getting popular and, as the mediums evolved, I always chased whatever was new or unknown. When a new technology came out, I was the one of the early people to dive in, break it down and understand the best way to approach it.
