When Google surprised some people in 2020 by announcing the impending (if oft-delayed) demise of tracking cookies from its Chrome browser, Melinda Han Williams was more than ready.

The chief data scientist of Dstillery already had a cookieless targeting solution in the market by January 2019.

Dstillery was once as focused on personal identifiable information (PII) as most other ad tech companies, Williams said: “In 2018 we started seeing the writing on the wall and thinking maybe this kind of data collection isn’t going to be around forever.”

Williams, a physicist by training, came to Dstillery in 2013 “because it was clear so much was happening” in ad tech and data science thanks to “the explosion in deep learning and machine learning,” she said.

The patented ID-free Custom AI targeting technology Williams developed occupies a “behavioral inventory” space that goes beyond contextual targeting without using personally identifiable information such as browsing histories. And it beats contextual targeting handily while coming close to Dstillery’s PII-based IDs in generating conversions, she said.

What advice would you give your younger self?  

It’s not too late to try something new. I remember, around age 12, thinking I was too late to start tae kwon do because others had started at age 3. Imagine how good I’d be now if I’d been doing it since 12!

If you weren’t doing your current job, what would you be doing and why?  

Something around energy. Before ad tech, I worked in renewable energy and urban energy efficiency.

How do you expect emerging tech like Web3 and AI to impact your job in the future?  

AI is my job! The 10-year-old advances in AI that laid the groundwork for tech like ChatGPT have been at the core of Dstillery’s products for years, and the products we have in development now take advantage of more recent advances in AI. The kind of self-supervised learning that makes it possible for AI to learn a ton from whatever data is available is key to Dstillery’s ability to effectively target ads without tracking the audience—what we call ID-free targeting. In the future, I expect we’ll continue incorporating emerging tech, like ChatGPT-related tech, into our products, and like everybody else, find new ways to take advantage of these tools for a range of other tasks.