“Your new Car and New Job” might at one time have been the subject line of a targeted marketing email. We have left those days behind. Way behind. Today, if you spend any time online – and specially on social media – you’ve no doubt noticed what’s going on with personalized advertisements. Ads seem to be getting increasingly specific. Targeted. And timely.

At one time we were able to explain this by assuming Google knew what we were searching for, and was selling our search information to advertisers. Then it started looking like advertisers weren’t sending us email, they were reading our email! And lately personalized ad targeting has gotten so specialized that we’ve begun to wonder if our phones and other voice activated devices are listening to us.

Whether or not they are, the truth of what is going on with online marketing is even more unsettling. Online marketing people are reading our minds. For real. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence. Or A.I.

When applied to marketing, A.I knows when you want to buy a product – before you do. This is not some sort of futuristic science fiction. It is science. But it’s not fiction. And it’s not the future. It’s here now.

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the leaders in the field of A.I. marketing is from Lafayette. His name is Frankie Russo.

Frankie Russo has your new car

Frankie Russo

Frankie’s venture capital, company Russo Capital, invests in startups. And Frankie is founder and CEO of the A.I marketing company, 360 IA.

Whether an automated bot decides it’s time for you buy something new, or you decide it for yourself, you’re still going to need money to buy it with. For most of us, the only way to get that money is by having a job.

Latest estimates are that around fifty percent of us work in a small business. If you’re a part of that 50%, you know that the way you get hired and get trained on the job in a small business is different from the way you get hired and trained at a bigger company.

And if you own a small business, you know that hiring good people and retaining them can be a major headache, and a drain on resources. Which is where a company called HR NOLA comes in. HR NOLA steps in for just a few weeks, days, or even hours, to give small businesses an HR department with the same advantages of big business.

Amy Bakay is your HR department

Amy Bakay

The founder and CEO of HR NOLA is Amy Bakay.

Amy Bakay, Frankie Russo, Peter Ricchiuti

Amy Bakay, Frankie Russo, Peter Ricchiuti

Out to Lunch is recorded over lunch at Commander’s Palace. Photos by Hope Byrd. 

Find out more about New Orleans on the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, life on a chip.