AI Agents Podcast Inside Classify: Contextual Intelligence, AI Agents, and the Hidden Layer Powering the Web | EP 138
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May 1, 2026 
Brendan Norman, co-founder and CEO of Classify, builds semantic infrastructure that makes web content machine-readable for advertisers and AI systems. He explores contextual intelligence as a foundational layer, how Classify standardizes retrieval for consistent agent behavior, and why small teams can move fast using AI tools.
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Contextual Intelligence Is The Missing Infrastructure
- Contextual intelligence is a foundational infrastructure layer for AI agents that standardizes how machines understand web content.
- Classify containerizes semantic understanding so agents can retrieve consistent, repeatable content signals instead of probabilistic one-off reads.
Backcountry Skiing Search Failure Sparked Classify
- Brendan built an early platform to connect backcountry guides and struggled to find adtech that could identify the top 5,000 pages about backcountry ski touring.
- That gap led him to assemble engineers and data scientists to scrape, classify, and organize web content at scale into searchable databases.
Humans See Nuance Machines Miss
- Machines historically index pages with shallow taxonomies, missing the nuance humans extract from storytelling and semantics.
- Classify applies deeper semantic classification and stores results in vectorized databases to make nuanced content searchable quickly.