>> Narrator: Live from Austin, Texas, it's The Cube
covering South by Southwest 2017, brought to you by Intel.
Now, here's John Furrier.
>> Hey, welcome everyone back for day two
of live coverage of South by Southwest.
This is the cube, our flagship program from Silicon Angle.
We go out to the events and extract the (mumbles).
We're at the Intel AI Lounge, people are rolling in,
it's an amazing vibe here, South by Southwest.
The themes are AI, virtual reality,
augmented reality, technology.
They got great booths here, free beers, free drinks,
and of course great sessions and great conversations
here with the Cube.
My first guest of the day here is Ben Parr,
a friend of the Cube.
He's been an entrepreneur, he's been a social media maven,
he's been a journalist, all around great guy.
Ben, thanks for joining us today.
>> Thank you for having me again.
>> So you're a veteran with South by Southwest,
you know the social scene, you've seen the evolution
from Web 2.0 all the way to today, had Scobel on yesterday,
Brian Fanzo, really the vibe is all about
that next level, of social to connecting
and you got a startup you're working on
that you founded, co-founded called AI?
>> Ben: Octane AI.
>> Octane AI, that's in the heart
of this new social fabric that's developing.
Where AI is starting to do stuff, keep learning,
analytics but, ultimately, it's just a connection.
Talk about your company.
What is Octane AI?
Tell us a little bit about the company.
>> So Octane AI is a platform that lets you
build an audience on Facebook Messenger
and then through a bot.
And so, what we do is allow you
to create a presence on Messenger because
if I told you there was a social app
that had a billion users every month,
bigger than Snapchat plus Twitter plus Instagram combined
you'd want to figure out a strategy
for how to engage with those people right?
And that social app is Facebook Messenger.
And yet no one ever thinks,
oh could I build an audience on a messaging app?
Could I build an audience on Messenger
or WeChat or any of the others.
But you can through a bot.
And you can not just build an audience but you can
create really engaging content through conversation.
So what we've done is, we've made it really easy
to make a bot on messenger but more importantly,
a real reason for people to, actually,
come to your bot and engage with it
and make it really easy to create content for it.
In the same way you create content for a blog
or create content for YouTube Channel.
Maroon 5, Aerosmith, KISS, Lindsay Lohan,
30 seconds to MARS, Jason Derulo
and a whole bunch more use us to build an audience
and engage their fans on Messenger.
>> So let me get your thoughts on a couple
of trends around this.
Cause this is really kind of, to me,
a key part that chat bots illustrate
the big trends that are going on.
Chat bots were the hype.
People were talking about, oh chat bots.
It's a good mental model for people to see AI
but it also has been, kind of, I won't say
a pest, if you will, for users.
It's been like a notification.
A notification of the economy we're living in.
Now you're taking it to the next level.
This is what we're seeing.
The deep learnings and the analytics
around turning notifications which can
be noisy after a while, into real content and connections.
>> Into something useful, absolutely.
Like look, the last year of bots.
The Facebook platform is not even a year old.
We've been in that fart apps stage of bots.
Remember the first year of mobile apps?
You had the fart app and that made
$50,000 a day and that was annoying as hell.
We're at that stage now, the experimentation stage.
And we've seen different companies
going in different, really cool directions.
Our direction is, how do you create compelling content
so you're not spamming people but you have content
that you can share, not just in your bot
but as a link on your social media
to your followers, to your fans, on Twitter,
everywhere else and have a scalable conversation
about whatever you want.
Maroon 5 has conversations with their audience
about their upcoming tours or they even
released an exclusive preview
of their new song, Cold, through our bots.
You could do almost anything with our bots
or with any bot.
We're just learning right now, as an industry,
what are the best practices.
>> So where do bots go for the next level?
Because you and I have known each other
for almost over 10 years,
we've seen the whole movement
and now we're living in a fake news era.
But social media is evolving where content now
is super important that glues
people together, communities together.
In a way, you're taking AI or bots, if you will.
Which is a first, I mean, .5 version of
where AI is going.
Where content, now, is being blended into notifications.
How important is content in community?
>> Content in community are essential to any product.
And I feel like when you hear the word bot,
you don't think community and that you could
build a community with it because it's a bot,
it's supposed to be automated.
But you, actually, can if you do it in the right way
and it can be a very, very powerful experience.
We're building features that allow
you to build more community in your bot
and have people who are talking with your bot
communicate with each other.
There's a lot of that.
What I feel like is, we're at the zero point one
or zero point two of the long scale of AI.
What we need to do right now is showcase
all the use cases that really work for AI,
bots, machine learning.
Over time, we will be adding
more other great technologies
from Intel and others that will make
all these technologies and everything we do better,
more social and most of all, more personalized.
I think that's one of the big benefits of AI.
>> Do you see bot technology or what bots
can turn into being embedded into things
like autonomous vehicles, AR, is there
a stack developing, if you will, around bots?
What you're talking about is a progression of bots.
What's your vision on where this goes down the road?
>> I see a bunch of companies, now, building
the technological stack for AI.
I see a bunch of companies building
the consumer interface, bots is one
of those consumer interfaces.
Not just chat bots but voice bots.
And then I see another layer that's more enterprise
that's helping make more efficient things
like recruiting or all sorts of automation or driving.
That are being built as well.
But you need each of those stacks
to work really well to make this all work.
>> So are there bots here at South by Southwest?
Is there a bot explosion, is there bots
that tell you where the best parties are?
What's the scene here at Southby?
Where are the bots and if there were bots,
what would they be doing to help people
figure out what to do?
>> The Southby bot is, actually, not a bad bot.
They launched their bot just before South by Southwest.
It has a good party recommendations and things.
But it the standard bot.
I feel like what we're seeing is the best use,
there's a lot of good bot people.
What I'm seeing right now is that people
are still flushing out the best use cases for their bots.
There's no bot yet that can predict
all the parties you want to go to.
We got to have our expectations set.
That will happen but we're still
a few years away from really deep AI bots.
But there are clearly ones where you can
communicate faster with your friends.
There's clearly ones that help you
connect with your favorite artist.
There's clearly ones that help you
build an audience and communicate at scale.
And I feel like the next step is the usefulness.
>> Talk about the user interface.
Robert Scobel and I were talking yesterday,
we have some guests coming on today
that had user experience background.
With AI, with virtual reality, with bots,
with deep learning, all this collective intelligence
going on, what's your vision of the user interface
as it changes, as people's expectations?
What are some of those things that you
might see developing pretty quickly
as deep learning, analytics, more data stats come online?
What is the user interface?
Cause bots will intersect with that
as an assistant or a value add for the user.
What's your vision on?
>> I'll tell you what I see in the near term
and then I'll tell you a really crazy idea
of how I see the long term.
In the near term, I think what you're going to see
is bots have become more predictive.
That, based on your conversations, are more personalized
and maybe not a necessarily need
as much input from you to be really intelligent.
And so voice, text, standard interfaces that we're used to.
I think the bigger, longer run is neurological.
Is the ability to interface without having to speak.
Is AI as a companion to help us
in everything we do.
I feel like, in 30 years, we won't even,
it's, kind of like, do your remember
the world when it had no internet?
It's hard, it feels so much different.
There will be a point in about 20 years
we will not understand what the world was before AI.
Before AI assistance where assisting us
mentally, automatically and through every interface.
And so good AI's, in the long run,
don't just run on one bot or one thing,
they follow you wherever you go.
Right now it might be on your phone.
When you get home, it may be on your home,
it may be in your car but it should be
the same sets of AI's that you use daily.
>> Doctor Nevine Rou, yesterday,
called the AI the bulldozer for data.
What bulldozers where in the real world,
AI's going to do that for data.
Cause you want to service more data
and make things more usable for users.
>> Yes, the data really helps AI
become more personalized and that's a really
big benefit to the user to every individual.
The more personalized the experience,
the less you have to do.
>> Alright, so what's the most amazing thing
you've seen so far this year at Southby?
What's going on out there that's pretty amazing?
That's popping out of the wood work?
In terms of either trend, content,
product, demos, what are some of
the cool things you're seeing.
>> So, as it is only Saturday,
I feel like the coolest thing
will still come to me.
But outside of AI, there have been
some really cool mixed reality, augmented reality demos.
I can't remember the name.
There's a product with butterflies flying around me.
All sorts of really breaking edge technologies
that, really, create another new interface honestly
where AI may interact with us through
the augmented reality of our world.
I mean, that's Robert Scogul's thing exactly.
But there's a lot of really cool things
that are being built on that front.
I think those are the obvious, coolest ones.
I'm curious to see which ones are going to be the big winners.
>> Okay, so I want to ask you a personal question.
So you were doing some venture investing
around AI and some other things.
What caused you to put that pause button on that mission
to start the chat bot AI company?
>> So I was an investor for a couple of years.
I invested in ubean, the wireless electricity company
and Shots with Justin Bieber which is always fun.
And I love investing and I love working with companies.
But I got into Silicone Valley
and I got into startups because
I wanted to build companies.
I wanted to build ideas.
This happened, in part, because of my co-founders.
My co-founder Matt, who is the first
head of product at Ustream and twice into
the Forbes 30 under 30.
One of the king makers of the bot industry.
The opportunity to be a part of building
the future of AI was irresistible to me.
I needed to be a part of that.
>> Okay, can you tell any stories about Justin Bieber
for us, while we're here inside the Cube? (laughs)
>> I wonder how many of those I can, actually, tell?
Okay, so look.
Justin Bieber is an investor in a company
I'm an investor in called Shots.
Which is now a super studio that represents
everyone from Lele Pons
to Mike Tyson on digital online
and they're doing really, really well.
One of Justin's best friends is the founder, John Shahidi.
And so it's just really random.
Sitting with John, who I invested in
and just getting random FaceTime's.
Be like, oh it's Justin Bieber,
say hi to Justin.
As if it was nothing.
As if it was a normal,
it's a normal day in his life.
>> Could you just have him retweet
one of my Tweets.
He's got like a zillion followers.
What's his follower count at now?
>> You don't want that.
He's done that to me before.
When Justin retweets you or even John
retweets you, thousands of not
tens of thousands of Justin Bieber fans,
bots and not bots, start messaging you,
asking you to follow them, talking to you all the time.
I still get the tweets all the time
from all the Justin fans.
>> Okay don't tweet me then.
I'm nice and happy with 21,000 followers.
Alright, so next level for you
in terms of this venture.
Obviously, they got some rock stars in there.
What's the next step for you guys right now?
Give us a little inside baseball
in the venture status where you guys are at.
What's the next step?
>> We launched the company publicly
in November, we started in May.
We raised 1.6 million from general catalyst,
from Sherpa Ventures, a couple of others.
When we launched our new feature, Convos,
which allows you to create shareable bots,
shareable conversations with the way
you share blog posts.
And that came out with all those
launch partners I mentioned before like Maroon 5.
We're working on perfecting the experience
and, mostly, trying to make a really, really
compelling experience with the user with bots
because if we can't do that,
then there's no use to doing anything.
>> So you provide the octane
for the explosive conversations? (laughs)
>> Yes, there you go, thank you, thank you.
And we make it really easy.
So we're just trying to make it easier to do this.
This is a product that your mom could use,
that an artist could use, any social media team could use.
Writing a convo is like writing a blog post on media.
>> Are moms really getting the chat bot scene?
I, honestly, get the Hollywood.
I'm going to go back to Hollywood in a second but
being a general, middle America kind of tech/genre,
what are they like?
Are they grokking the whole bot thing?
What's the feedback from middle America tech?
>> But think of it this way.
There are a billion people on Messenger
and it's a, really, part of the question,
they all use Facebook Messenger.
And so, they may be communicating
with a bot without knowing it.
Or they might want to communicate with their fans.
It's not about the technology as much as this is like
connecting with who you really care about.
If I really care about a Maroon 5 or Rachel Ray,
I can now have that option.
And it doesn't really matter what
the technology is as much as it is
that personal connection, that experience is good.
>> John: Is it one-one-one or group?
Cause it sounds like it's town hall,
perfect for a town hall situation.
>> It's one-on-one, it's scale.
So you could have a conversation with a bot
while each of the audience members
is having a conversation one-on-one.
When you can choose different options
and it could be a different conversation for each person.
>> Alright, so I got to ask about the Hollywood scene.
You mentioned Justin Bieber.
I wanted to go down that because Hollywood
really has adopted social media pretty heavily
because they can go direct to the audience.
We're seeing that.
Obviously, with the election, Trump was on Twitter.
He bypasses all the press but Hollywood
has done very well with social.
How are they using the bots?
They are a tell sign of where it's going.
Can you share some antidotal stories
or data around how Maroon 5, Justin,
these guys are leveraging this
and what's some of the impact?
>> Sure, so about a month 1/2, 2 months before
Maroon 5 launched their new song, new single, Cold.
They came to us and wanted to build a distribution.
They wanted to reach their audience
in a more direct personal way.
And so we helped them make a bot.
It didn't take long.
We helped them write convos.
And so what they did was they wrote convos
about things like exclusive behind the scenes photos
from their recent tour or their top moments of 2016
or things that their fans really care about.
And they shared em.
They got a URL just like you would get,
a blog poster URL.
They shared it out with their 39 million Facebook fans,
they shared it with their Twitter followers,
they shared it across their social media.
And 10's of thousand's of people
started talking with their bot
each time they did this.
About 24 hours before the bot,
before their new single release,
they exclusively released a 10 second clip
of Cold through their bot.
And when they did that, within 24 hours,
the size of their bot doubled because
it went viral within the Maroon 5 community.
There's a share function in our convos
and people shared the convo with their friends
and with their friends friends
and it kept on spreading.
We saw this viral graph happen.
And the next day when they released the single,
1000's of people bought the song
because of the bot alone.
And now the bot is a core of their social strategy.
They share a convo every single week
and it's not just them but now Lohan
and a whole bunch of others are doing the same thing.
>> John: Lindsay Lohan.
>> Lindsay Lohan is one of our most popular bots.
Her fans are really dedicated.
>> And so you can almost see it's, almost
connecting with CGI, looking at what
CGI's doing in film making.
You could almost have a CGI component built-in.
So it's all this stuff coming together.
>> Ben: Multimedia matters.
>> So what do you think about the Intel booth here?
The AI experience?
They got some Kinetic photo experience,
amazing non-profit activities in deep loading (mumbles),
missing children, what do you think?
>> This is some of the best use cases for AI
which is, people think of AI as just
like the direct consumer interface
which is what we do but AI is an underlying
layer to everything we do.
And if it can help even 1% or 1,000%
identify and find missing children
or increase the efficiency of our technology stacks
so that we save energy.
Or we figure out new ways to save energy.
This is where AI can really make an impact.
It is just a fundamental layer of everything.
In the same way the internet is just
a fundamental layer of everything.
So I've seen some very cool things here.
>> Alright, Ben Parr, great guest, in venture capitalist
now founder of a great company Octane AI.
High octane, explosive conversations
looking forward to adopting.
We're going to, definitely, take advantage
of the chat bot and maybe we can get
some back stage passes to Maroon 5. (laughs)
>> (laughs) There will be some fun times
in the future, I know it.
>> Alright Ben Parr.
>> Ben: Justin Bieber.
>> Justin Bieber inside the Cube right here and Ben Parr.
Thanks for watching.
It's the Intel AI Lounge.
A lot of great stuff.
A lot of great people here.
Thanks for joining us.
Our next guest will be up after this short break.
(lively music)