Howie Liu pitches one-on-one shopping chats with a star's AI twin

Airtable founder Howie Liu was trading startup ideas with entrepreneurs Sam Parr and Shaan Puri when they asked him about using computer-generated stand-ins to sell products. Liu said he thinks the area is really interesting, and then laid out a pitch for making online selling feel personal.

In his version, “each person shopping gets to have a one-on-one interaction with her about” the star’s products.

That one-on-one celebrity shopping does not exist yet. Liu was proposing it as a business idea, building on live shopping that already works and on avatar videos his own team can already generate, and he said he may use them for thank-you notes.

Liu argues that live shopping is already huge. In Asia, he estimated, probably tens of billions of dollars in goods are sold this way, with influencers on TikTok talking through products on video while viewers click and buy. In the United States, he pointed to Whatnot, a live shopping company, where he said the appeal is personality as much as the product, almost like watching live game streams.

His idea is to replace the one-to-many broadcast with a one-to-one digital twin. A shopper could talk directly with an avatar version of a celebrity like Kim Kardashian about her Skims products. HeyGen offers ready-made faces licensed from real actors, and people can also create their own. Liu, who said he is an investor in HeyGen, called it “the easiest, fastest, self-serve avatar product out there.”

He pointed to his team’s setup at Airtable, the workplace software company he runs, as proof it can be done. The team uses Airtable’s own web agents to research customers and write customized email pitches, and it has built an internal setup that can automatically generate a HeyGen avatar video from a row in a table. His example was a thank-you note to every person who attends a dinner or company event.

Liu said he would tell people upfront that the thank-you is from an avatar version of himself. Today, he added, the setup still takes a little scripting to connect Airtable to HeyGen’s programming interface, but it can be done.