Currently
CTO, UneeQ
A personal dossier
— of one intensely curious operator —
Dallas · Remote · Everywhere
Tyler
Merritt.
At the intersection of technology and theatricality — building digital humans, shipping software, and running the occasional 140.6 for fun.
Tyler is a technology evangelist who genuinely believes customer experience is a brand moment — whether you manage it or not. He has spent the last seven years at UneeQ building the operating system for digital humans: AI agents that communicate with emotion, personality, and brand authenticity.
Before that: SAP, a bootstrapped field-service startup still running 13 years later, a stint shipping Ruby, and a passport that has seen the inside of fifty countries. He lives in Dallas with his family, commutes by bicycle when he can, and owes his sanity to long rides, Japanese stoicism, and the fact that AI is, in fact, a superpower.
“The nonverbal dimension of communication is what builds trust. Text alone never gets you all the way there.”
The short version: I help organizations transform customer experiences through conversational AI and digital humans — because every customer interaction is a brand moment, whether you manage it or not.
Customers remember how they feel — not what you said. A bad experience cannot be overcome by marketing spend.
Most companies investing in automation aim at chatbots — addressing maybe 7% of the communication problem. Adding emotion and personality through digital humans changes that equation entirely.
My work sits at the intersection of AI, emotional intelligence, and brand experience. I bridge the technical and commercial worlds — architecture one minute, negotiating a contract the next, writing integration code at midnight because the demo is tomorrow.
50+
Countries visited
3 of them lived in.
140.6
Miles. One day. Ironman.
Swim. Bike. Run. Survive.
13yrs
Field Harmony, bootstrapped
Zero outside funding. Still profitable.
2
Fluent languages
English. 日本語. Working on a third.
1%
In the curiosity category
ADHD is real. Also a feature.
01
A working résumé.
Selected roles · chronological · most recent first
2024 — NOW
UneeQChief Technology Officer
Leading customer-facing technical vision and solutions strategy for the Digital Human Operating System. Real-time WebRTC streaming, LLM orchestration, Unreal Engine animation, on-prem deployment. Fortune 500 enterprise clients: Dell, NVIDIA, Deutsche Telekom, Qatar Airways, Pearson.
Dallas · Remote
2019 — 2024
UneeQVP Solutions & Sales · VP Platform Dev.
Owned sales and solutions engineering across the Americas and Japan. The guy who negotiates the contract and writes the integration code to make everything work. Also the guy on the red-eye to Tokyo.
Americas + JP
2013 — NOW
Field HarmonyFounder & CEO
Bootstrapped field-service platform for appliance repair & home-service businesses. Hundreds of thousands of jobs tracked, zero outside funding, still profitable after thirteen years. Proved that solving a real problem well beats chasing rounds.
Hawaii + 🌎
2018 — 2019
SAPDirector, Presales Strategy — S/4 HANA Cloud
Presales strategy for SAP's flagship enterprise cloud platform.
SAP
2015 — 2017
SAPDirector of Product Innovation · Sr. BD Mgr
Built relationships with customers, partners, and integrators across the SMB space. Promoted and evangelized SAP Anywhere.
Dallas
2015
TitleMaxRuby Developer
Ruby, CoffeeScript, SASS, and the occasional 2am Postgres tuning session. Remembered fondly.
Dallas
02
Swim. Bike. Run.
The day the body learns the mind was right
A Personal Best
One
Forty
Point Six.
Finisher · full distance · no asterisks
Swim
2.4
miles · open water
Bike
112
miles · aero down
Run
26.2
miles · one marathon. at the end.
Also a cyclist. Also a snowboarder.
On any given weekend I am on two wheels, or on a single fiberglass plank, or spectacularly between them. All of it counts as research into what the body will negotiate with.
Training & engineering share a secret.
They both punish the person who skips the boring reps. They both reward the person who shows up when it is raining.
A father first.
The hours add up. The kids notice. That's the whole scoreboard.
03
A full atlas.
Dozens of countries · three called home · one favorite airport nap spot
20+
Visas, stamps, red-eyes, and long dinners. Travel taught me that most problems are less interesting than the people you meet solving them.
I lived in Japan, in Hawaii, and in the continental U.S. The Japanese language is a gift that keeps giving (and confusing).
🏠 Japan
🏠 USA
🏠 New Zealand
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Belize
Canada
China
Colombia
Costa Rica
Denmark
France
Germany
Guatemala
Honduras
Ireland
Italy
Jamaica
Malaysia
Mexico
Netherlands
Panama
Philippines
Portugal
Qatar
Singapore
South Korea
Spain
Switzerland
Thailand
UK
Lived in
Visited
Partial list · memory-sorted
04
Two tongues.
One of them took a long time.
Fluent · 01
English.
The working language of presales decks, midnight integrations, and the occasional poorly delivered dad joke.
Fluent · 02
日本語。
Lived it, worked it, negotiated in it. The language that makes the other one look easy and the world look bigger.
05
Mantras on repeat.
Things I say to myself at mile 90, mid-deploy, or pre-keynote
“Trust, but verify.”
— A reminder, daily
無常
impermanence
mu·jō
“I never met no evil baby.”
— On nature vs. nurture
忍耐
endurance
nin·tai
“I know that I don't know what I don't know.”
— Operating principle
“Trust the process.”
— Training & shipping both
不屈
indomitable
fu·kutsu
06
Speaking & writing.
On digital humans, customer experience, and the nonverbal 93%
A topic I will not shut up about.
Chatbots address maybe 7% of the communication problem. The rest — tone, pacing, eye contact, warmth, the tiny signals that say I'm listening — that's where digital humans live, and that's where the real brand moment happens.
Available for keynotes, podcasts, panels, and the occasional classroom. Bilingual sessions welcome.
01
Beyond the Chatbot: Emotional Intelligence as the next UIA working theory of why people remember how you made them feel.
02
The Digital Human Operating SystemReal-time WebRTC, LLM orchestration, Unreal Engine, and the enterprise deployment story.
03
Bootstrapped for thirteen years — a love letter to constraintWhat a field-service SaaS taught me that no fundraising round could.
04
AI as a superpower for the intensely curiousADHD, pattern recognition, and the new leverage loop.
05
Selling enterprise software in two languagesNotes from ten years of presales across the Americas and Japan.
07
Field Harmony.
A bootstrapped field-service platform for appliance repair — thirteen years running, still profitable, still not for sale.
“Stop losing money on appliance repairs.”
The office and field, in harmony.
13yrs
Bootstrapped · zero outside funding
40%
More daily service calls · per operator
25%
Less parts inventory waste
95%
On-site payment collection rate
Field Harmony is a complete field-service platform for appliance repair companies — dispatch with GPS-routed scheduling, a mobile technician app that works offline in a basement, on-site payment processing, parts management with exploded diagrams, professional invoicing with custom branding, and reporting that tells you per-job profit margin down to the screw.
I built it thirteen years ago and have been running it ever since. Bootstrapped. Profitable. Quietly growing. It's the project that taught me the difference between solving a real problem well and chasing rounds — and why I still believe constraint is the most under-appreciated business advantage in software.
The customers aren't hypothetical: independent repair shops and growing service companies across the US, running their entire operation — from first call to collected payment — inside one app.
08
Finlity.
A privacy-first financial literacy dashboard for the question most calculators dodge.
Stop guessing. Start projecting.
Finlity is a self-hosted portfolio tracker and retirement planner I built for the question most tools wave off: will my money last? It runs on your own machine — nothing leaves your device — and layers professional-grade analytics on top of a 10,000-run Monte Carlo engine with black-swan and golden-swan modeling.
Drop in a CSV from Schwab, Fidelity, or Vanguard and it sorts itself into the right accounts. Then ask the hard questions: withdrawal rates at 65, 70, 75. Concentration drift across sectors. Sharpe, Sortino, VaR, CVaR, beta against the S&P. The scenarios an advisor will charge you to run — and probably won't run honestly.
Built in Python and FastAPI with an extensible plugin system so anyone can add a new brokerage importer, a custom risk metric, or a dashboard widget. Self-hosted by design.
09
What I'm doing right now.
Updated when I remember to update it
Building
The Digital Human OS.
Pushing on-prem deployments, lowering latency on real-time LLM → TTS → avatar pipelines, and finding the seams where emotion can actually be measured.
Training
Base miles. Again.
Cycling through the Texas winter, snowboarding when the snow will have me, and quietly eyeing another long-course race on the calendar.
Reading
More than I'm writing.
A steady diet of papers on multimodal agents, a worn copy of something in Japanese I will never finish, and footnotes leading to more footnotes.