About Chris Hood.

My Story.

Hi, I’m Chris Hood, an AI keynote speaker, strategist, podcast host, and author. I love storytelling through intelligent systems and have made it an essential part of my career for over 25 years. I’ve always been fascinated by using AI, data, and emerging technologies to craft compelling narratives and paint solutions for others to experience. It is the primary reason I became a veteran of both the digital entertainment and enterprise AI industries, having pioneered AI-driven customer experiences across television, streaming platforms, cloud computing, and interactive entertainment for more than three decades.

What once started as selling popcorn in a local movie theater as a film student, I found my love for cinema and an endless drive that propelled my career to incredible heights. This included receiving multiple industry awards for theatre marketing campaigns, including the National Association of Theater Owners’ coveted customer service award and Hollywood Reporter’s grand prize showmanship award three years in a row for Jurassic Park (1993), Wyatt Earp (1994), and Apollo 13 (1995). This was also the point in my life where I began public speaking. At 19 years old, I stood in front of audiences of 500 people to talk about movies. 

Taking “behind-the-scenes” to a new level, I followed my entrepreneurial spirit early on to invent, develop, and market a patent-pending digital multimedia advertising and interactive technology platform for movie theatres. The Digireel technology was the first digital cinema advertising and video game program introduced to replace slide-based pre-show entertainment, creating a unique, AI-powered advertainment service. Digireel premiered in the summer of 1999 at Cinemapolis movie theatre in Anaheim Hills, California, and was acquired by National Cinema Network a year later. The Digireel technology became the foundation for onscreen advertising seen in theatres nationwide today. 

In 2003 I joined the music industry with a small startup called Ruckus Network (Ruckus.com). We produced a legal music service for college campuses during Napster’s reign and the RIAA suing college students for music piracy. In 5 years, the company grew and was acquired by a joint venture between Universal Music Group and Sony Music called Total Music. During this venture, I helped design TunePost, the first cloud-based music player featuring AI-driven recommendation algorithms, predating the modern cloud infrastructure we use today. 

No stranger to transforming various industries, my eye for innovation and strategic digital campaigns sparked several executive management stints, including FOX Broadcasting Company. While at Fox, I developed storytelling technologies and innovated new mechanisms for viewers to engage with television content for shows like Glee, Gotham, Sleepy Hollow, 24, X-Factor, and American Idol. My work also included developing TV Everywhere products and building new interactive media to support digital marketing initiatives across multiple media platforms, including Xbox, Playstation, Apple TV, Roku, and Chromecast.

I am an active member and previous chair of the International Game Developers Association, supporting over 20,000 members in Southern California in the video game industry, including founding chapters in San Diego, Orange County, and Los Angeles. My passion for games led me to Co-found Blind Squirrel Games in Orange County, California, in 2009. Around this time, I spent more time in the AI space and began teaching courses at Colorado Technical University on AI/ML automation and ethics.

By 2014, my expertise garnered the trust and respect of dozens of brands. I developed the framework for Customer Transformation and continued to deliver customer-centric strategies for Universal, Doritos, Reebok, Columbia Pictures, Apigee, Emmys, and more.

In 2016, I joined Google to lead customer transformation strategy for Google Cloud. For nearly six years I worked with Fortune 500 companies to build customer-centric cultures and the engagement programs behind them: executive experiences, city-by-city customer events, and That Digital Show, the first weekly business podcast for Google Cloud, which reached a million listeners. The through-line in all of it was the same question I’d been asking since the theatre lobby: what does the customer actually experience, and how do we make it better?

That question became the Customer Transformation® framework in 2014 and, a decade later, the book of the same name. It has since grown into four books on customer experience. AI-Powered Customer Success (2025) looks at retention and success in an automated world. Infaillible: The AI Ideology (2025) examines what happens to consumer behavior when people start trusting machines more than each other. And Unmapping Customer Journeys (2026), a finalist in the 2026 American Book Fest Awards, argues that the traditional journey map is dead — customers no longer move in straight lines, and the organizations that serve them need an adaptive model instead.

The AI work I do today lives inside that customer lens. Since 2023, through CH Digital, I’ve advised organizations including United Airlines and Johnson & Johnson on customer experience strategy and the practical integration of AI into customer-facing operations, and I spent nearly three years at PolyAPI building the customer and developer journey from scratch as one of its first three employees. Along the way I kept hitting the same gap: AI agents were being dropped into customer interactions with no agreed way to hand off work — to another agent, to a system, or to a person. So I wrote the standard. The Agent Transfer Protocol (AGTP), an open, royalty-free IETF submission, defines how agents transfer work so that automation never strands a customer, and the Agentic API specification gives those agents a shared, intent-based language for declaring and negotiating goals. Both are foundations of Nomotic, the AI governance platform I help build, and both exist for one reason: so the technology serves the person on the other end of it.

Global Gurus has named me one of the Top 30 Global Customer Experience Leaders for three consecutive years, 2024 through 2026. I host The Chris Hood Show, speak globally on customer experience and the realities of AI, and teach customer-centric culture, business strategy, and AI ethics as an adjunct professor at Southern New Hampshire University, following earlier teaching at Colorado Technical University.

Thirty-plus years after that first customer service award, the standard hasn’t changed: customer first, technology last.