As the son of an entrepreneur, Benson Tracy understands the frustrations with ineffective marketing. He is the founder of Thalio, an AI-powered marketing technology service that aims to streamline the content creation process.
A senior entrepreneurship student at the University of Utah, Tracy didn’t originally plan to start a company. He entered college on a pre-med track before realizing entrepreneurship offered a more exciting path.
“I have a lot of entrepreneurial examples in my life — my dad, a lot of my family, some close friends,” Tracy said. “It seemed a lot more interesting, so I figured I might as well give it a shot.”
The inspiration for Thalio AI came from a challenge he saw in his own life. His father owns a medical spa business and previously operated a larger chain that was eventually sold to a private equity firm. After hiring marketing agencies and seeing disappointing results, Tracy decided to make a change. His goal: to teach artificial intelligence how to analyze a company’s content and identify exactly what marketing strategies work.
Tracy is working with the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute for help to grow his company. He is participating in the new Lassonde DevLab software incubator where he is receiving coaching and mentoring to move his business forward.
Today, Thalio AI helps businesses streamline content creation by analyzing previous marketing performance and then generating content ideas. The company focuses heavily on video content, a media format that AI struggled with at first. “When I started out, the biggest problem was that AI models didn’t really have a good way to understand video,” he said. His original vision required AI to review dozens of hours of content and then identify patterns to determine which marketing methods performed best.
So he created his own workaround. “I had to build a really janky solution,” he said. “I would download videos, break them into screenshots, combine them with the audio, and have the model piece everything back together.” While this method took a lot of trial and error, it was much more effective than relying on AI to process the video.
In addition to technical hurdles, Tracy faced other challenges. One of them being the need to pivot his original prototype to better serve his customers. Initially, he believed business owners lacked the creativity and content ideas. However, after speaking with customers, he realized many needed not only the ideas but a better understanding of logistics and the entire marketing process. “I thought med spa owners were happy filming and editing their own content and just needed ideas,” he said. “That wasn’t true.”
The company went through several iterations. He experimented with AI-generated video creation, but ultimately found the technology wasn’t advanced enough to deliver the quality clients expected. Instead, Thalio AI evolved into a hybrid solution that combines AI-driven content strategy with automated editing, captioning, music integration, and publishing tools. “It’s gone through a whole bunch of stages of what I wanted people to want and what people actually want,” he said.
Despite building a growing business, Tracy remains a one-person operation. He handles the coding, product development, customer support, and business strategy himself. While this business is something he is passionate about, it involves hard work and late nights. “I’ve had many 4 a.m. and 5 a.m. nights trying to get one last thing built before shipping it,” he said. “But it’s super fun. I really enjoy it.”
Looking ahead, he plans to continue growing the company while participating in the University of Utah’s Sandbox program, which allows student entrepreneurs to focus full-time on their ventures while receiving academic credit. As the company grows and revenue becomes more stable, he hopes to expand his team and hire a sales representative.
Thalio AI continues to evolve as both AI technology and customer needs change, but its mission remains the same: helping businesses create more effective content with less effort.
Thalio can be found online at thalio.ai or on Instagram @thalio_ai.
