See a great shirt, sofa or spice rack in that online video clip you watched at lunch?

There’s an app for that. Or more accurately, there’s a company that does ‘smart’ product ads that match video content to live retail opportunities. And it’s coming to an artificial-intelligence platform that will launch later this year.

Agorai, an integrated marketplace for AI tools and the data assets that fuel them, said today that DeepVideo will join its AI marketplace.  

“We believe that AI is going to transform many things, but one of the most untapped potential sources of business improvement is the use of machine vision to understand contextual awareness of what people are seeing, and react accordingly,” Agorai CEO Josh Sutton told Markets Media. “DeepVideo is at the forefront of that.”

A key point is that the advertising is seamlessly embedded in content that people want to watch, rather than in discrete chunks that people don’t want to watch.    

“DeepVideo is changing the advertising experience from something that is frustrating, to something that is helpful,” Sutton said. “They are enabling people to leverage AI to purchase clothing and products they want and when they want them, based on what they’re seeing in real time.”

Sutton said smart product ads are similar conceptually to Amazon’s X-Ray, which instantly provides extra information about actors and songs in, and trivia about, movies and television shows. The market is massive — more than 500 million hours of videos are watched on YouTube each day, according to 2017 industry research.     

“By offering contextual video advertising, we enable consumers to easily view and purchase products that are actually relevant and interesting to them,” DeepVideo CEO John Ivarone said in a release. “The Agorai AI Marketplace opens up a new distribution channel for our technology…We are pleased to be one of the first companies making our applications available on the platform.”

DeepVideo’s services are not tailored to financial services specifically, but there are takeaways for the industry, according to Sutton.

“Video, both published and individually created, is becoming the dominant form of communication,” Sutton said. “AI enables the analytics of that. So while this particular use case happens to be more geared toward retail spending, the same implications of what you can do with machine vision for understanding behaviors, understanding what people are wearing, and understanding how different brands and products are doing, are very applicable.”