CHOPS is the home of AI-conversational avatars on premium brand websites, co-produced with Mimic Productions of Berlin — the studio David Bennett founded after leading facial animation on the first Avatar film.
An AI-conversational avatar is a brand-aligned presence that meets website visitors with engaging conversation. It's not a chat widget with a face or a scripted greeter. Rather, an interactive avatar is built specifically for a brand, running on a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Gemini, with guardrails that keep responses inside the brand's domain. It's able to recognize the needs of the visitor and respond intelligently.
The avatar model currently in use is Gaia, on our Humbrella app. She's a working avatar — not a demo reel, not a sizzle video, not a slideshow. Visitors arrive at the site, ask her questions about the wellness practice the platform is built around, and get answers in the brand's voice. She's been running publicly for months.
Helping agency teams experience this type of communication for the first time is the mission. The questions about whether the category is real, and whether CHOPS is the right partner, get answered by spending time with Gaia in conversation.
A senior agency team opens a pitch deck on a Tuesday morning. Three weeks ago, the client added a question to the brief: what's our position on conversational AI avatars on the brand website? Before that, no one asked. Now everyone is asking.
The team has been in the room when category-readiness questions like this one show up. They know the pattern. There's a window of several months between the moment a client first asks and the moment they pick a vendor without the agency in the room. The agencies that lead the conversation in the first months keep the retainer. The agencies that miss it and send back a research deck weeks later get scoped out of the next pitch.
The team also knows what's underneath the client's question. The client is not actually asking what is an avatar — the client is asking can our agency think for us about this category, or do we need to find someone who can. The pitch room is shifting, and the team has watched the shift before. CRM, then social, then content, then influencer, then programmatic, then AI in general, now AI avatars specifically. Each cycle, the agencies that walked in with category expertise and a working point of view kept the relationship. The agencies that arrived with someone else's research deck lost it.
Right now, the avatar expertise that most agencies can present is from someone else's research deck.
Healthcare shops with clients in pharma, specialty medical, hospital systems, medical device, and medical groups — categories where a single client conversation is genuinely consequential, and where avatar-readiness questions are arriving on the brief now, ahead of the broader market.
Marketing professionals who are ready to get some steps ahead of the competition, in the direction where the best avatars win.
Wherever a brand's customer-facing website would be better served by a knowledgeable conversation than by a form or a chatbot. The most common roles, in CHOPS deployments and across the category:
Avatars do not work around protected health information, without advanced programming and extensive testing. HIPAA-regulated workflows — medical records, claims data, anything touching PHI — stay where they belong, behind the brand's existing systems. The avatar lives in front of that wall, not on top of it.
Generally, implementing avatars is still in an "early-adoption" phase, and not for procurement-driven RFP relationships, mass-deployment SaaS buyers, or shops looking to add "AI avatar" to a slide as a capability check. Those buyers are better served elsewhere.
CHOPS is co-producer for Mimic Productions in the USA for avatar development. David Bennett, Mimic's founder, was the facial animation leader on the first Avatar film before opening his Berlin studio. With 500+ projects worldwide, Mimic is now the premium global partner in character creation.
Photo-real characters indistinguishable from filmed humans. Built on Unreal Engine at film-grade quality. The visual register Mimic established on Avatar, improved and delivered to high-end projects.
Mimic's artists capture facial expressions, lip sync, and natural body movement at the highest level. Digital Doubles and avatars exhibit the micro-detail of human presence and realistic emotions.
In healthcare, realistic avatars bring a high level of wellness expertise regarding symptoms and patient suffering, to help people gather information and find relief.
Website visitors may start out wary of avatars, until they learn that there is intelligence and empathy that helps them. Seniors and young people find companionship is easily accessible by tablets or phones.
CHOPS has direct access to the Berlin team for revisions, model updates, and ongoing deployment care. Mimic is a production partner well-known for its artistic and technical approaches as well as industry-leading service.
Featured by SXSW, AI.MAG, AWE, the United Nations, re:publica, and the Tech Awards, among others. A studio the broader category recognizes — not a partner the agency has to introduce.
The agency's client gets film-grade craft on real websites, for real purposes.
CHOPS is the producer that brings everyone together, to reach those goals.
The agency is in the room when the client's next AI-strategy meeting happens. The team's name is on the working group, not the vendor evaluation. When trade press writes about avatar deployments in healthcare, the agency is quoted alongside the brand. Pitch wins are coming on differentiation rather than price, because the shop has a working point of view about a category most competing shops cannot speak to credibly.
The brand has an interactive avatar that can answer real questions in its voice. Visitors who would have left the site after thirty seconds stay for five minutes. The contact information that gets captured at the end of the conversation is from prospects who already understand the offer, not from cold-form-fill traffic. Sales call durations get longer; objection handling at the top of the funnel gets shorter.
The agency brought the right partner in — early enough to lead, not late enough to follow.
Gaia on Humbrella in real time, on a video call with Gary — not a slide, not a recording. The conversation runs as long as it's useful. There's no pitch deck and no proposal until the agency asks for one.
What we cover: where the medium is right now, where it's going, and what a deployment for the agency's client could honestly look like — including what's still being tested with real visitors, what's waiting to be revealed by the technology, and where the early-adopter advantages live.
Gary takes the call himself.
Schedule a Live Demo Or reach Gary directly: 775-771-4330 · [email protected]