If you look at the most successful tech companies over the past 20 years, they all have one fundamental element in common – their ability to scale quickly. It’s the underlying principle that saw Facebook explode when users flooded to create accounts, Apple (via iTunes) soared when music turned digital, and most recently TikTok emerged as the fastest growing social platform with its ability to publish millions of new videos daily.
Digging deeper into the common theme amongst the aforementioned tech successes, was their ability to capture their growth without disrupting their customer experiences thanks to backend infrastructure. In Facebook’s case, its basic browser-based platform enabled rapid account creation while iTunes was able to facilitate the digitisation of music by creating a platform that returned download sales back to artists. By offering itself as the intermediary between artist and fan, iTunes became an overnight hit as THE platform for music.
Most recently TikTok has provided a democratised platform for video uploads that has eliminated the shortcomings of its predecessor YouTube where excessive advertising and inaccurate performance metrics drove users away. For TikTok to achieve scale, it needed an insane amount of server power to capture the wave of video uploads and succeeded in a space where countless other video platforms failed, thanks to its ability to scale.
So with this ability to scale a platform and handle the requirements of customers paramount to any upcoming tech company, it’s understandable why Crowd Media (ASX: CM8) CEO, Idan Schmorak has his head down on building the scaling capabilities of their conversational commerce platform.
By building on years of data that has been banked from their chatbot legacy business, Crowd Media has developed a platform that enables artificial intelligence to have conversations with humans in real time. In a commercial sense, the platform allows any brand or company to open a new channel of communication with its customers. These conversations are humanised with sound and video in the form of a ‘Talking Head’ that can either be based on a real person (such as a celebrity), or entirely fictitious digital human.
“We can take anyone, a manager, a brand presenter or someone that we could create digitally and have them communicate in an efficient way in a one-on-one Facetime-like conversation with any clients, on any platform, on any device, at any time,” said Schmorak.
“By utilising Crowd’s conversational AI platform, any business could have a digital human representative that could speak on their behalf with prospective customers with the core aim of sales conversions. In many instances, it would save them substantial labour expenses for humans to have the exact same conversation but be backed by machine learning for more desirable outcomes.”
Over the past six months, Schmorak has released a variety of these Talking Heads that can have real-time conversations within a web browser for the tourism, entertainment and healthcare industries. But while fully functional with travel recommendations, horoscope readings and telehealth services respectively, Schmorak is focusing on developing Crowd’s scaling abilities, before opening the doors to too many clients.
“One of our competitive edges in terms of the costs is in the way we use servers to create the experience on a cloud, online, in real time.
“We are in a very advanced beta stage and where the focus is on delivering a beautiful product that we can replicate for use in any industry, rather than taking infinite clients right now.
“We see demand in various verticals like medical and entertainment. But we go all the way to customer care departments and would offer AI-based solutions to any company that wants to improve their customer intimacy and their customer relationships.”
Well versed in the need for timely communications with critical precision having previously served as a Captain in the Israeli Air Force, Schmorak is fully aware of the need to produce an agile platform without impacting performance. To do so, Crowd Media’s platform has a strong focus towards being lite which is where it will use its AI to facilitate thousands of conversations simultaneously, and in dozens of different languages.
“With ultra high technology that we are creating, we bring high margins.
“There are costs associated with the development of the technology that we have been working on for 18 months to make it more agile because when customers message a business, they want quick responses. They don’t want lag, delays or a message saying we’ll respond when someone is available.
“By being agile and capable of having thousands of conversationals simultaneously,, we are facing a different picture in terms of revenue, and ultimately profit.”
Unlike others building platforms in the space, Crowd Media has built its platform so that it can operate with very low bandwidth. Doing so will enable internet users with lesser coverage to still utilise the platform’s capabilities which is critical in applications such as telehealth and education where functionality cannot be compromised in remote locations.
Similarly, the platform will be able to function when there is a sudden influx of users such as online product launches where a celebrity Talking Head can present a product, answer questions, accept payment and organise dispatch all in one conversation.
Highlighting the rising trends towards online communication channels between brands and customers, a 2019 Meta (aka Facebook) survey revealed that 40% of conversational commerce buyers around the globe started their first shopping journey via chat.
While Crowd Media may be operating in a start-up space, they are well versed in the conversational commerce space having previously turned SMS chatbots into a business generating $30 million annually before retiring that business to focus on their lite Talking Head platform.
Crowd Media welcomes investors to join the Company’s mailing list for the latest updates and industry research by subscribing at: https://crowdmedia.com/newsletter
Jarryd is an experienced Investment Adviser at Emerald Financial Group
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