Disrupting Advertising: How Forage Makes Brands More Human With AI that Digs TikTok, Instagram, YouTube For Real-Time Consumer Insights

Arham: In a world saturated with digital noise, how do brands build a genuine connection with their audience? Are we sacrificing cultural relevance for clicks and conversions? And could the key to unlocking authentic brand building lie within the very technology that many fear will dilute it?

Welcome to the AI and Beyond for Business podcast, where we explore the cutting edge of technology, creativity, and culture. I’m your host, Arham. Today, we have a very special guest tackling one of the most pressing challenges in modern marketing.

We’re joined by Charles Swan, a 20-year advertising veteran and the founder of Forage. Charles has worked with iconic brands like Apple, Google, and Coca-Cola. He’s identified a critical flaw in brand communication today: They’re losing their soul in the relentless pursuit of short-term metrics. His new venture, Forage, is on a mission to change that. They’ve built a groundbreaking AI vision platform that decodes the cultural truths hidden in millions of social media images, offering a new way for brands to find meaning and forge a genuine human connection.

To give us insight into the powerful technology making this all possible, we’re also thrilled to welcome Yann Kronberg, the CTO of Zazmic. As a key partner in this venture, Zazmic has been instrumental in building the groundbreaking AI vision platform powered by Google Cloud that decodes these cultural truths. Yann will be sharing the expertise behind this. In this episode, we’ll dive deep into Charles’s philosophy on using AI not to replace human creativity, but to supercharge it.

We’ll explore how Forage is helping brands uncover deep human insights, the story behind the technology, and how they’re working with partners like Google Cloud and Zazmic to bring this vision to life. If you’re a brand leader, a marketer, a technologist, or simply someone fascinated by the intersection of brands, culture, and artificial intelligence, you’re in the right place. Charles, Yann, welcome to the show.

To kick off my first question, Charles, I want to go straight to you. Your work is built on a lifelong fascination with brands as social codes that shape our identity. What about your 20 years of experience working with brands led you to take this idea seriously?

Charles: Thanks for having me here today. For me, brands have a fascinating way of helping us make sense of a complex world. They can be used to explain things we care about to others based on the brands we associate with. They can also just make buying easier because we know what to expect. I’ve been fascinated with the idea that humans accept brands in our lives for these different purposes.

A big part of what drove me to start Forage is watching as culture itself increased the importance of authenticity. Brands and people are expected to be better connected into culture, yet many marketing efforts struggled to keep up, relying more on performance marketing and other tools. There’s a growing gap between what consumers want from brands and what brands can deliver. It’s not for lack of desire; every CMO and leader out there realizes the power of authenticity and strong brands.

The challenge is culture is moving so fast, it’s complicated and fragmented. It’s difficult for brands to keep up. It’s no longer just what’s happening this quarter, but what’s happening this week among a niche group of people in a part of the world you don’t have visibility into. My goal was simply how do we help brands see culture with greater visibility, with greater velocity, and be able to take those insights and turn them into brand experiences.

Arham: I like how you mentioned brands are something that not just people, but also cultures accept. I want to throw the question back at you and ask you about the first brand that captivated you as a child and made you realize it’s more than just a physical object on the shelf, it’s a story. Could you talk about one product that did that for you?

Charles: I’ll age myself a little bit here and say I grew up during the age of the Chicago Bulls, Michael Jordan and all of that. I also grew up in a place where we didn’t have much money for fancy Nike clothes and gear. I remember very vividly getting a Chicago Bulls Nike hat. That was a really big moment, a special experience. It was something to be able to show my connection to the culture of what was happening then, to show up in school and have people see that I had this cool brand with me. It was an interesting moment where it felt like I was able to be part of something bigger by associating myself with those brands. I even remember trying my hand at sewing a Nike swoosh into a little headband so I could have my second piece of Nike gear. Those were my early memories.

Arham: That’s fascinating. Yann, would you have a similar story to share about any brand that wooed you as a child or when you were young?

Yann: Well, for me, it would be more the luxury brands that shaped my life, Louis Vuitton or the Levi’s, and so forth. The power of the brand is still there. That’s something that has shaped pretty much everyone. Similar experience with probably different types of brands.

Arham: Right. Charles, I want to come back to you. You now spend your daily life professionally decoding the meaning behind millions of images on the internet. When you’re just scrolling yourself, what’s a recent trend or visual that has caught your attention and made you think, “huh, now that’s interesting.”

Charles: I’ll jump on the bandwagon of lots of people who know it, but the Coldplay concert meme was huge. For me, though, I think in stories. A lot of people in marketing think in stories. What was fascinating was not that the story got picked up, but what is underneath it? Why do humans all across the entire world get interested in that story?

I think if you understand the deeper meaning of the story, it helps brands do something authentic in response. A lot of brands jumped on the bandwagon and just mimicked exactly what it was. But really, the deeper story behind this is this human anxiety we all possess that we are hiding something and we’re afraid that other people are going to find out, even if it’s something small, like, “I don’t feel like I’m as good at programming as I should be,” or “I’m not wearing the right brand,” or something like that. We all have that little fear, and being able to see that in someone else having a big, massive problem allows us to think, “well, at least my thing I’m hiding is not that big,” or “I wouldn’t make that mistake.”

As I watched brands mimic that, I thought, man, if people understood the deeper story of this idea of getting caught doing something you shouldn’t do, they could have much better stories out of it. So, going back to my Nike example, Nike doesn’t have to try to replicate exactly that, but would that story show up as an Adidas brand manager getting caught by his friends running in Nike? That’s the way those stories could come up for other brands. So, when I think about fun stories, I think about big cultural moments like that and how you translate those into more authentic and meaningful experiences.

Arham: It’s interesting you point that out because that same Coldplay trend was picked up by people all around the world from very different cultures, and we saw these individual creators perhaps being able to tell that story in a very culturally relevant way to their own audience. But large brand organizations weren’t able to replicate that. Could you talk a bit through why you think that was the reason?

Charles: I think it’s really hard for humans to understand different cultures when you’re not embedded in it, right? We all feel that moment when you get just a little bit older and suddenly the young person trends are hard to keep up with, and you just don’t understand what’s happening. When you don’t live within that culture, it’s really hard to understand. You can go deeper into the anthropology of this. There’s a reason why each little cohort wants to be different from the other cohorts around it. So it’s naturally hard to keep up.

As a brand sitting in New York or London, trying to understand what people in another country or another place are understanding or how they’re interpreting that trend is nearly impossible, especially when you’re thinking about how this would show up among young women in Japan. It’s just not something you can do.

So brands struggle with saying, “what does this authentically mean? How does it get picked up among these different audiences?” There’s no way for me to know what that person lives like at the speed that I would need to be able to take advantage of it. What Forage is trying to help with is how do we understand those little moments and those subcultures to be able to understand how that story shows up for them.

Arham: Right. Yann, I want to bring it back to you. From a technologist’s point of view, what was the initial spark for you when Charles came to you or when you heard of this vision of Forage? What at that time did you feel was the core technical challenge that made you think that “we can build this?”

Yann: You know, I’ve done like 20 years of ad tech. I think I mentioned that to Charles when I met him the first time. What was interesting with the project was that we knew there’s not a lot of things we cannot build. I think more interestingly, Charles is a real entrepreneur, and I have some instinct about that because I meet a lot of people that want to build stuff and build companies. Not only Charles had the vision and the domain expertise, but he also has the grit to invest in his own company and to go through the steps and bootstrap a company. Very few people can do that. You know, in Silicon Valley you have more people like that, but very few anyway. So it was a mix. I was like, yes, I can build this for sure. I know what he wants to do, but more importantly, I can trust him to make it successful. I think that’s the difference to me.

Arham: Yeah, I have to agree. In my pre-conversation with Charles, I was going through the idea and I was like, “this is a big challenge you’ve taken on.” Coming out and saying that “I want to disrupt marketing,” that’s a scary thing to take on. So it’s definitely a brave move from Charles. We’ll definitely be interested to see how fast we can see all this change. But the mission and the challenge you’ve taken on, it’s fascinating to see someone finally do that. And who better than someone who’s been in the industry for over 20 years?

Charles, I want to come back to you and ask you, since you’ve spent a significant part of your career working with pretty big brands—Apple, Google, Coca-Cola are just a few—what was the recurring friction or frustration you were experiencing, not just working with these brands, but generally with brands, that made you realize there was a problem which only entrepreneurship or your own venture could help solve?

Charles: I think it goes back to what I was mentioning before, which is that it’s really hard to understand what’s happening in culture. In marketing and advertising, we always think about the big idea, the core human truth, whatever you want to call it. But great campaigns and great products are just grounded in some unique human insight, right? The Nike “Just Do It” is this deep human motivation that grounds the brand and everything they do. But we see it in all other types of brands as well. Finding that important human truth is incredibly hard.

One of the things we always talked about in marketing and strategy is that there’s a whole bunch of things you could do as a brand. The challenge is not defining what you could do; the challenge is defining that one thing that you should do. To do that, you have to be able to quickly understand consumers, scale or size what the problem is, understand what competitors are doing in this space—all these different types of insights you need to get. The challenge for every brand is making sure you can get those insights in the form you need them and at the speed you need them to make the decisions. The challenge over the last 10 years is that speed has just increased exponentially. Six or ten years ago, you could have four weeks to find an insight, and that would be fast. Today, two weeks to find an insight feels like it’s taking forever.

So, a lot of what happens is you just don’t have time for the insight. Brands end up trying to make decisions based on outdated insights or making decisions off of gut instinct. That makes it really, really hard to have repeatable success when you’re relying on gut instincts for it.

Arham: Right. You even mentioned an interesting point in the founder’s story, which was that there was a time in the last few years where clicks and conversion gained more importance over cultural relevance or just forming a community around your brand. Is this something you specifically experienced in a particular project you worked on? And how did you try to combat it or get your point across at that time?

Charles: For me, I’ve done a lot of work in growth strategy, trying to think about what we should be doing. A key thing we always think about is understanding why this thing is happening. Performance marketing and the focus on clicks and conversions happened for a very natural reason: it gives some level of predictability to the spend, and every business out there wants predictability and ROI in what they spend. The tipping point is just watching as the predictability of performance marketing got better and better. We can argue about what the long-term impact is, but you can’t argue that there’s ROAS, and I can measure ROAS and tell you what it’s going to be.

Brand building doesn’t have the same level of predictability in the near term for most situations. Watching as brands were saying, “well, I can invest in brand building, but then I don’t have metrics to measure it in as great of clarity as I do for my digital marketing campaigns.” As budgets get tighter and pressure increases, we’re emphasizing more and more the clicks and conversions because that’s something I can prove to my C-suite is the ROI. How do we bring that same level of predictability, that same level of repeatability into brand building? That is the foundational challenge that Forage is addressing.

Arham: Just to also clarify to the audience how Forage works, because it’s not about using AI to mimic the culture, but it’s to make sense of what’s going on through AI. Could you walk us through a real-world example of how Forage’s AI vision algorithm would analyze a photo from social media? Maybe we can pick up from the same Coldplay trend and reveal the hidden truth behind it. And also, what would be the difference in having a human strategist look into this? What would they essentially overlook, which the AI algorithm wouldn’t?

Charles: Forage at its core is like a human desk researcher or anthropologist. We go through social media—Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube—and we look for videos and images related to whatever topics clients would be interested in. That could be influencers, collections of demographics (Gen Z, Gen Alpha), or just keyword trends like “what are people talking about in the best running shoes.” Each of those posts gets evaluated, again, as a human would look at it. What is happening with the consumer? What is this creator trying to express? Are they saying “I am innovative,” “I am fit,” “I am successful”? What brand or brands show up in this video and how is that brand being expressed by the consumer or the creator, if you will. Is the creator saying, “think of me as affluent and successful because I have a Louis Vuitton bag,” or “think of me as authentic and rugged because I’m wearing Levi’s,” right? Those brands play that role.

The challenge, obviously, for any person who’s done desk research is that you can spend eight hours and go through a couple hundred posts in detail and kind of get a sense of what’s happening. But being able to do that at scale at a global pace becomes really, really difficult.

As an example, we had a client working on a campaign for a side quest. A side quest, if you don’t know gaming, in video games you have your main goal, like saving the world, but every once in a while that gets overwhelming, and you want something simple as a side quest. The client said, “well, what does that look like in real life for Gen Z, Gen Alpha? How do they express the desire of a side quest?”

We went through and looked at thousands of images and videos people were sharing about their own personal side quest. At scale, we learned very quickly that a side quest is not an adventure. People are not sharing stories of their side quest with strong degrees of adventure. They’re not off doing some crazy hike. Almost by definition, a side quest is something that is comfortable, something that is familiar, but it’s an elevated experience.

One of the examples I give is, let’s say you’re traveling to a foreign country. You’re doing your adventure things and trying new food and different experiences, but then you end up at the fanciest McDonald’s in downtown Paris or something like that. You may never eat at McDonald’s in your real life, but there’s that fancy McDonald’s in Paris that just draws you in. That’s your side quest. It’s familiar, but it’s elevated, right? To have the clients be able to very quickly orientate around this idea of the side quest—wait, it’s not an adventure. We shouldn’t be expressing it in that way. Instead, we should be expressing it as this everyday elevated experience that people can have—allowed them to really quickly resonate with that.

And as we think about expanding that globally, what would that same thing look like for consumers in Mexico? What would that look like for people in the Philippines? All of that becomes a possibility when you can look at AI and use it to go at scale. It doesn’t care about language, so I can look at it within different markets really easily. That’s a big difference between what you can do with AI versus what a human could do.

Arham: That’s really interesting. It’s almost like where we would traditionally take words at their literal definition. It seems like now we’re going a bit broader and saying, “hey, you know what? This word might mean a certain thing, but what meaning are people giving to it?” So with “side quest,” it’s not the word itself that matters as much. This can go similarly for words that have no meaning at all when you look up definitions, right? I think we’ve seen that a lot with Gen Z using the internet, where those words might not have any meaning, but it’s the meaning they’re giving to them. And Forage is able to go through the online posts and actually find out what those words are trying to say. Am I understanding that correctly?

Charles: The one clarification I have is we’re not looking at forums, we’re looking at the social media videos and images in there. That for us is the richer source of where most people are going—younger people are going today—to talk about or to learn about different trends and different behaviors.

Arham: Yann, I want to come back to you for a second. Could you actually demystify the tech behind this a bit as well? Charles has given a pretty interesting overlay of what Forage’s algorithm is capable of. Can you tell me what’s happening under the hood?

Yann: Sure. You have a lot of technology and shortcuts that help the AI understand the meaning behind a picture or a video, as opposed to just seeing what’s in it. So from a technology point of view, you’re building models and you’re building databases and RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) to understand what is in an image, but more importantly, what exactly are they doing, what potentially they are going to do, and so forth. So it’s a bit more complex than raw AI, because AI is really good at the ‘what’. But if you want the semantic of what they’re going to do after that, it’s a bit more complex. So we’ve been working hard to do the second thing, which is interpreting the object or what is happening in a video or an image to make it meaningful to the audience.

Charles: I might jump in, Yann, as a less technical person. The way I think about it is, if you were to ask, “does a human learn what a picture means or what a scene means or what different words mean,” we look at how they grew up, right? We have fairy tales as children, we have teen books that teach us about relationships, we go to school, we watch movies—all these different types of things. So we learn social norms, we learn what it means to have grit and determination through that. AI has done the same thing. It has read every children’s book, watched every movie, it’s seen all these different images. So when I ask, “what does it look like for someone to express creativity through the eyes of a child?” It has millions and millions of examples of it.

The challenge, of course, is to be able to go backwards with that, which is to take the outcome, the image, the video, the context, the broader thing, and decode the meaning in a way that can be structured and scaled. But the fascinating thing about AI is that if you can give it the right inputs in the right way, it has more than enough context to understand what the person is trying to express, even if they’re not willing to say it themselves, because that often happens in an image. I’ll tell you one thing in my caption, but then when you look at the image itself, it’s quite a different thing that I’m trying to express.

Arham: Charles, let’s make this a bit more tangible for the audience to understand. Let’s imagine I’m a marketing or a brand manager coming to you from a legacy food brand that wants to connect with the younger audience. How would I use Forage as a creative ally, not to get just a prescriptive answer, but to actually find unexpected cultural truths that could fuel a breakthrough campaign for my company?

Charles: Definitely. One example that popped up for me is when we were looking at the modern “Share a Coke” campaign, a more Gen Z oriented and digital-first version of that. With every user-generated content (UGC) campaign, it can be really, really hard to understand what’s happening just through the volume of content. One of the things that came up as we were looking at that was a TikTok video where the first thing it said in the caption was, “Coca-Cola, do you hate me?” And you’re like, “well, what does that mean? Is it something we’ve done wrong or are they upset with some policy we have?” But when you look at what Forage sees, Forage sees that it’s a person with a unique name, as they consider it. They’re talking about the experience of having a unique name and searching through the entire rack for a Coke bottle that has their name on it. And Forage understands this tension, this emotional challenge that they have with, “Boy, I wish I could find my name,”because there’s something special about seeing my name on it. It turns this moment from a negative—if you’re just looking at what was written in the caption, thinking there’s negative sentiment here with Coca-Cola—to actually a really interesting campaign moment, right?

What would it look like for Coca-Cola to be able to create experiences where people with unique names find their names? What does that feel like? How do I express that? How do I give someone that opportunity that they may not feel like they get in their normal life? To quickly find something that’s happening, that’s resonating, because it’s getting a lot of engagement and likes on TikTok, and turn that into a campaign, that’s game-changing, right? To be able to say, “hey, we saw this on Monday. We understand it. We can see what people are trying to express in it. Let’s go put something like that together and kind of seed the conversation.” That’s the type of thing I talk about, being able to see something in culture and quickly turn that into a more authentic experience.

Arham: It’s so fascinating that it would be able to pick up the nuance of someone saying they hate Coke as not something that’s negative, but as something which wants them to be seen perhaps more by that brand. Fascinating. Coming back to Forage as well and the process of building out this solution, typically a lot of solutions start off very different to where they actually end up. I want to know if that was the case with building out Forage, because it might have changed drastically just based on how much AI has changed drastically over the last year.

Charles: I joke with people that every three months it feels like things change. For anything that’s natural for a startup, if you’re exactly what you were expecting to build a year ago, then you maybe didn’t learn enough over the last year. I would say it’s grown and progressed in a very natural way. When we first started, we focused a lot on just the insight side of this—just how do we make sense of this? How do we present it into the world? As we learned more and learned what technology was changing, especially with things like Google’s Agent Development Kit for AI agents, it became very clear that there were a lot of new opportunities to activate those insights for the clients. So, as opposed to the clients having to do a lot of the work, finding ways to use AI to take those insights and turn them into plans that people could activate.

As we look ahead, actually generate content for that if clients want to use AI to generate imagery or videos. So, I think that’s the big progression. It’s just some of these tools, yes, evolving and expanding, but also being very conscious of where is the biggest opportunity, where is the biggest impact you can have as a brand or as a business, and not being afraid to pivot when you realize there’s actually a bigger opportunity here than what we originally thought on this side. We need to move to that side.

Arham: So Charles, you obviously chose GCP (Google Cloud Platform) to build out this solution. What was it about Google Cloud that gravitated you or moved you towards picking them as the core behind this technology?

Charles: That’s a great question. The interesting thing is when I first started this, it was less about picking GCP because I understood the full breadth of it. I’m a moderately technical founder, but we’re all learning about this. I think the first thing was that GCP and Gemini are the only platforms that can natively do video and image within the same process. I think the Gemini model itself is really impressive with that. The speed and the cost associated with Gemini is also much less than the other platforms. So it allowed us to be able to scale in a way that was more cost-effective than others. The thing that I’ve been most excited about, just watching how GCP is approaching it—and I feel like I’m fanboying, but I’m just genuinely a really big fan—is that it feels like GCP’s philosophy is more of: how do we make it really easy to build and integrate all of these components together.

So when we launched our AI agents, which we call Scout, we used Google’s Agent Development Kit. It just felt familiar. There are new things to learn about it, but we understood how Gemini worked. We understand how the tools work together. We were able to integrate it into the platform relatively easily, build out the RAG database for it. I put together the RAG database for it, and I’m not that technical, and I was able to put it together. So to have this platform where it feels like Google’s really saying, “we’re going to make it really easy for you to integrate these tools together and build something out there,” and “we’re going to let you do it at a speed and a cost that works for the business,” was what for me has made it far and away the best choice. Even if we wanted to switch, we couldn’t build it with someone else.

Arham: Yeah, and I actually read something about Forage where you talked about making the tool itself accessible to people who use it. So it’s not just the technology at the back that’s really simple. You’ve kind of made this process consistent throughout, where even anyone who’s coming in to use Forage can easily get on and start using it within their organization.

Charles: I mean, that’s a big challenge, I think, for everyone in AI. We have this interesting space where we’re told that AI is going to revolutionize everything, and we all have to adapt or die, basically. Yet a lot of the tools are still pretty difficult to use. I joke that if you have to be a prompt engineer to make use of a product, then the product is probably broken. So how do we find ways to make the tool just intuitive? With AI, it’s possible. We can make it more intuitive. That’s been a huge goal of mine, just what we call speed to insights.

Arham: Now Google Cloud was an important part of the process, but having the right engineering team was just as important. You got to work with Zazmic, its massive engineering team. What was that experience like? What stood out for you?

Charles: I think for me, the biggest challenge in building AI products these days is that the technology is so new that it’s really hard for product people to understand what the technology is capable of doing and what it’s not. It has a very fuzzy frontier. There are things that AI does incredibly well; there are things that it does really poorly. Everyone jokes about how many bees and blueberry type thing are silly, but it’s a good example of it’s just hard to know what’s good and bad. What struck me about working with Zazmic that was really fun is that I know the problem really well. I understand what brands are struggling with. I know enough about the technology to have a sense of what is possible and not possible in that.

But Zazmic was able to take what feels like it is viable when I’m prompting things manually one at a time and turn that into a scalable solution. I see so many times on LinkedIn people are like, “here’s my prompt technique for how to get this thing to do that.” That’s cool and it’s interesting. But if I say, “now I want to do that a hundred thousand times in a hundred thousand different situations and instances, and I need it to work every single time,” that’s a technical challenge. It is just incredibly difficult to do. And Zazmic was the team of people who I could explain 90% of what I wanted to have happen, and they just went and made it happen. We continue to see that as we’re trying new things with agent development kits and other things like that. It’s like, “I think this thing should be possible. How do we make it happen?” That’s been super fun, just to kind of come up with crazy ideas and have the team, either the direct team that’s working on what I’m doing, be able to solve it or having someone else within the Zazmic group have experience with it.

Arham: Thank you, Charles. I want to take the last few questions to speak more directly to the audience as well. For brand leaders listening to this podcast who still feel that pressure to chase metrics from their management and are worried that their brand is essentially losing its soul, what’s the first and perhaps most practical step they can take tomorrow to begin re-centering their strategy and finding these genuine human truths?

Charles: I would say we can’t walk away from performance marketing as much as we want to say we can stop that. I think it’s putting it within its context of how do we balance performance marketing with the brand building side of it? My biggest piece of advice is start using AI to prove the value of your brand building before you go out and invest in it, right? One of the hardest things to do is to get any business to invest in a brand building campaign if you can’t demonstrate that it is authentically connected to what’s happening in culture. So being able to say, “hey, here’s the proof I have for why this brand building is going to work.” Obviously, I’m biased and want people to say, “start using Forage to be able to do that.” But ultimately what we need to do from a brand building perspective is to put some more rigor against it. It’s common to say it’s a mix of arts and science to build brands, but if we want to push back against performance marketing, we need to be able to put more rigor against the brand building process, both in the ideation side of it, as well as the execution side.

Arham: And is there something you would say you should not do with AI as well?

Charles: I think of AI as a lot of other tools that get used out there, right? Is the execution of what you’re doing authentic to your brand and your story? You have brands that are trying to generate AI advertisements that don’t connect into their brand purpose and their brand vision. Coca-Cola’s last season, they had their Christmas campaign that came out where it was AI generated that people didn’t like. But then there’s a lot of other content and videos that have come out that have been AI generated that have gotten a lot of excitement and people are really interested in it. So it’s not, “I have this new tool, I have to go use it.” It’s just with every other tool, “how would I authentically use this to express the value my brand brings?” For a lot of brands, that means never using it because they are that. New York Times would be one where I would not expect them to use GenAI because a lot of their brand vision is around authenticity. But then there are other brands that are super quirky and fun that I would say, “yeah, I totally understand if they used AI to do those things.” So for me, it’s about being authentic to what your brand means and think about that when you’re considering, should I be using some of these AI tools?

Arham: Yann, I have one last question for you. For the tech leaders and people out there who have such great ideas, what’s one way they can reach out to work with Zazmic?

Yann: Just send me an email, yann@zazmic.com. I’m pretty responsive. And yeah, we can help them. We’re very reachable, so just reach out.

Arham: Awesome. Charles, one last thing. I was looking at your LinkedIn profile and under your position as the founder of Forage, I found you wrote, “Trying to disrupt an industry while keeping my sanity intact. One of these will succeed”. What struck you to write that and how has the experience been so far?

Charles: I think as a founder, first-time founder especially, you have loads of imposter syndrome.

Yann: It never stops, Charles, just so you know.

Charles: Exactly. I think it’s healthy to have a little bit of fear that maybe you don’t know what you’re doing. But I think it just kind of reflected the feeling of being a founder. A lot of excitement, a lot of confidence that we’re doing something special, but at the same time staying up late at night, being anxious about whether it’s actually going to work is a common feeling. So yeah, I think that just kind of captured it well, that feeling of like, maybe we’re gonna do something amazing or maybe I’ll go crazy trying.

Arham: Awesome. And just looking five years into the future, what do you believe will be that defining characteristic of brands that actually stand out and what role do you hope Forage ends up playing in that?

Charles: I think it’s going to be the same as what we see today. We see a brand like Poppy who came up and became a billion-dollar brand because it authentically reflected cultural moments. So my hope is that in five years from now, brands will continue to stand as powerful cultural symbols for something, that they’ll reflect some authentic human need. I hope that Forage plays a big role in helping expand that, so it’s not unusual to see a Poppy or unusual to see some of these other brands succeed, but it becomes a common thing, easier for brands to be able to follow. And we don’t just sit around going, my gosh, how did Liquid Death pull it off?” but saying, “hey, we all have the capacity to understand culture and turn it into brand value.”

Arham: And this is the perfect place to wrap up. What a fascinating conversation. We’ve covered so much ground today, from brands losing their cultural relevance in a sea of metrics to the incredible potential of using AI to decode visual language and find human truth within it. The journey of Forage is a powerful example of how a deep human insight combined with brilliant technology can create something truly revolutionary.

A huge thank you to my guests today. First, Charles, the founder of Forage. Charles, thank you for sharing your passion and vision for bringing the soul back to branding. It’s been incredibly insightful. And to Yann Kronberg, the CTO of Zazmic. Yann, thank you for breaking down the complex technology behind this and giving us a look under the hood at the partnership that makes this all possible. For our listeners who want to learn more, you can experience the future of brand intelligence at letsforge.com and discover the technical expertise behind it at zazmic.com. We’ll have links to both in our show notes, along with the LinkedIn profiles and emails for Charles and Yann, if you’d like to connect to them directly.

As always, thank you for tuning in to the AI and Beyond for Business podcast. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, please consider leaving us a review on Apple podcasts or Spotify. It really helps us reach new listeners. Don’t forget to subscribe so you don’t miss our next episode. I’m your host, Arham. Thanks for listening.