Alongside an impressive financial turnaround where artificial intelligence company Crowd Media (ASX: CM8) improved its cash flow by 46% in the June Quarter, its Directors like what they are seeing behind closed doors, significantly increasing their holdings over the quarter.
On target to commercialise their Talking Head platform in 2022 (a voice-and-visual platform powered by AI), as the next frontier of eCommerce, Directors acquired $545k in CM8 shares via the exercising of Convertible Notes.
The conversions further strengthened the Crowd Media balance sheet while increasing Chairman Steven Schapera’s ‘skin in the game’ as well as former Director Robert Quandt who stood down from the Board immediately after the conversions to preserve the Company’s expenses.
Cash on hand to further development of their platform is critical to the Company’s success where transformational changes have improved cash flow. Through FY21, Crowd Media generated $13.6m in customer receipts for net outflow of just $970k. This was delivered primarily from legacy technology which Crowd is monetising but not actively pursuing, rather concentrating their efforts towards the Talking Head platform which has much more commercial upside.
With the revenue-generating products, a very rare situation for an AI company of Crowd’s market size, the Company has $3.1m cash in the bank and more than enough runway to progress the Talking Head platform to commercialisation in 2022 and beyond.
Investors got a glimpse of the platform in June when Crowd released a beta update of Digital Dom, a digital avatar of Crowd Director Domenic Carosa that was created entirely using digital media. This included 3D imaging for the visuals with reactive facial expressions and voice cloning to replicate tones and inflections of the real Carosa.
This was largely just a small insight into the intention of Crowd Media when they fully integrate their Q&A platform into the beta. Upon integration, the avatars will be able to have fully immersive conversations, drawing on the 180 million user-submitted questions answered by Crowd via text with the engine currently undergoing text-to-audio conversion.
“The Plan is coming together: it all hinges upon the integration of Crowd’s Q&A tech with our Investee Partner’s tech. Combined, they are the conversational commerce platform that delivers the product,” said Chairman, Steven Schapera.
“Although it might seem clunky and fake to you today, by the end of next year it will appear very real indeed.”
Such realism referenced by Schapera includes the cloning of real celebrities and influencers who initiated conceptualisation of the platform’s potential. As more celebrities have used social media to transition towards direct communication with their fans, they simply don’t have the time to have personalised conversations with their fans.
Identifying this gaping opportunity to combine Crowd’s existing AI tech with social commerce, the Talking Head platform was born in 2019 with plans to commercialise it before the end of 2022.
At present, the current standard of conversational commerce is text-only but with Crowd’s voice-and-visual component, the AI company is primed to disrupt a market Boston Consulting Group estimates will reach USD $130 billion by 2025, in the United States alone.
Emerald Financial released a report on Crowd Media in July 2021 which can be accessed here.
Alfred Chan is a Business Reporter at The Sentiment specialising in ASX-listed small cap companies, a bloodstock enthusiast and former equities analyst.
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