 Live from Austin, Texas. It's theCUBE. Covering South by Southwest 2017. Brought to you by Intel. Now, here's John Furrier. Back for day two of live coverage of South by Southwest. This is theCUBE, our flagship program from SiliconANGLE where we go out to the events and extract the signal noise. 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, great free beers, free drinks, and of course, great sessions and great conversations here with theCUBE. My first guest of the day here is Ben Parr, friend of theCUBE. 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 of South by Southwest. You know the social scene. You've seen the evolution from Web 2.0 all the way to today. Had Scoble on yesterday, Brian Fonzo. 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. Octane AI. Octane AI. That's in the heart of this new social fabric that's developing. Where AI is starting to do stuff, deep 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 cannot just build an audience when you create really engaging content through conversation. So what we've done is we 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. Moon 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 I want to get your thoughts on a couple trends around this. This is really kind of, to me, a key part, the chat bots kind of illustrate the big trends that are going on. Chat bots where the high people were talking about, oh, chat bots, it's a good mental model for people to see AI, but it's also has been kind of, I won't say kind of a pest if you will for users. It's been like a notification. Notification economy we're living in. Now you're taking it to the next level. This is kind of what we're seeing, kind of some of 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, it's the Facebook platform is not even a year old. It is, we've been in that fart app stage of bots. Like, remember the first year of mobile apps and you had like the fart app and that made like $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 like 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. Rune 5 has conversations with their audience about their upcoming tours or they even released an exclusive preview of their new song Colb through our bots. You can 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 kind of glues people together, communities together. In a way, you're kind of taking AI or bots, if you will, which is kind of a first, I mean, .5 version of where AI is going. Where content now is being blended into notifications. I mean, how important is content in community? Content in community are essential to any product and I feel like when you hear that we're a 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 and we're building features that allow you to build more community in your bot and have people who are talking to your bot communicate with each other. There's a lot of that. What I feel like is we are at the 0.1 or 0.2 of the long scale of AI and 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 of their 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 kind of embedded into things like autonomous vehicles, AR, is there a stack developing if you will around bots? I mean, what you're talking about is kind of a progression of bots. What's your vision on kind of where this goes kind of down the road? Well, I see a bunch of companies now building kind of the technological stack for AI. I see a bunch of companies building like the consumer interface. Bots is one of those consumer interfaces. Not just chat bots but voice bots. And then I see this 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? I mean, is there a bot explosion or is there bots that tell you where the best parties are? I mean, what's the scene here at South by? And we're the bots and if there were bots what would they be doing to help people figure out what to do? So there are a couple, like the South by bot is actually not a bad bot. They launched a bot just before South by Southwest and it has like good party recommendations and things but it's like the standard bot. I feel like what we're seeing is the best use, like 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 wanna go to. And we gotta like have our expectation 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 artists. There's clearly ones that help you build an audience and they have to communicate at scale. And I feel like the next step is the usefulness. Talk about the user interface. Robert Scoble and I were talking yesterday. We have some guests coming on today that have a 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? I mean, what are some of those things that you might see developing pretty quickly as deep learning, analytics, more data sets come online? What is the user interface? And cause bots will intersect with that as an assistant or value add for the user. What's the vision, 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 gonna see is bots that become more predictive that are a little bit, that based on your conversations are more personalized and maybe doesn't 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 you remember the world when it had no internet? It's like, it's hard. It's like, it feels so much different. But there will be a point in about 20 years we will not understand what the world was before AI. Before AI assistants were assisting us mentally, automatically and through every interface. And so good AI's over 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. Dr. Naveen Rao yesterday called the AI the bulldozer for data. What bulldozers were in the real world, AI's going to do that for data because 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. All right, so what's the most amazing thing you've seen so far this year at South by? What's going on out there that's pretty amazing, it's popping out of the woodwork 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 kinds of demos. I can't remember the name, the product with like butterflies flying around me. Like 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 Skobel's thing, exactly. But there's a lot of really cool things that are being built on that front. And so I think those are like, those are the obvious like coolest ones. I'm curious to see which ones are going to be the big winners. I forgot to ask you a personal question. So you were doing some investing, venture investing around AI and some other things. What caused you to put that pause button on that mission to start the chatbot on AI company? So I was an investor for a couple of years. I invested in U-Beam, the wireless electricity company and shots with Justin Bieber, which is always fun. And I love investing, I love working with companies. But I got into Silicon Valley and I got into startups because I wanted to build companies. I wanted to build ideas. And this happened in part because of my co-founders, my co-founder, Matt, who was the first had a product at Ustream and twice in the Forbes 13 to 30 and one of the king makers of the bot industry. And 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? I wonder how many of those I can actually tell. Okay, so look. So 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 Ponds to Mike Tyson on digital online and they're doing really, really well. And it's like Justin's, one of Justin's best friends is the founder, John Jahidi. And so it was just really random sitting with my friend with John who I invested in and just getting a random face times. They're like, oh, it's Justin Bieber. Say hi to Justin. It's like, as if it was nothing. And it's as if it was just a normal, it's a normal day in his life. Can you just have him retweet one of my tweets and he's got like a zillion followers? What's his follower count now? You don't want that. He's done that to me before. When Justin retweets you or even John retweets you thousands if 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 got a nice happy with 21,000 followers. All right, so next level for you in terms of this venture, I'll see you guys rock stars in there. What's the next step for you guys right now? I mean, give us a little inside baseball in the venture status where you guys are at. What's the next step? So 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. And we launched our new feature Convos, which allows you to create shareable bots, shareable conversations of the way you share a blog post. 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 for 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. We provide, yes, there you go. Thank you, thank you. And we provide, we make it really easy. So we're just trying to make it easier to do this. This is a product that like 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. Our mom's really getting the chat bot scene and obviously you get the Hollywood, I'm going to go back to Hollywood in a second, but general, middle America kind of tech genre, what are they like? I mean, are they rocking the whole bot thing? What's the feedback from middle America tech? But think of it this way, there are a billion people in Messenger and a lot of the, and it's a really part of the big question, they all use Facebook Messenger. And so they may be communicating with a bot without knowing it or they want to communicate with their fans. It's all about, it's not about the technology as much as this is like connecting with who you really care about. Like 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 and that experience. Is it one-on-one or a group? Cause it sounds like a town hall, perfect for a town hall situation. It's one-on-one at scale. So you could have a conversation with a bot while the audience is having a conversation, each of the audience members have a conversation one-on-one, but you could choose different options and it could be a different conversation for each person. All right, so I got to ask for the Hollywood scene. You mentioned Justin Bieber, I wanted to go down there. And cause Hollywood really has adopted social media pretty heavily because it can go direct to the audience. We're seeing that obviously with the election, Trump was on Twitter, he goes direct bypassing all the press, but you know, Hollywood has done very well with social. How are they using the bots? They are kind of a tell sign of kind of where it's going. So you share some anecdotal 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 and a half, two months before Maroon 5 launched their new song, Sing, New Single Cold, they came to us and wanted to build a distribution. They wanted to reach your audience in a more direct, personal way. And so we helped them make a bot. It didn't take long. And we helped them write convos. And so what they did was they wrote convos about things like, you know, 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 them, like they got a URL just like you would get any, like a blog post URL. They shared it up with their 39 million Facebook fans. They shared it with their Twitter followers. They shared it across their social media. And tens of thousands of people started talking with their bot each time they did this. About 24 hours before the bot, before their New Single released, 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 like viral graph happen. And the next day when they released a single, thousands 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. Lindsay Lohan. Lindsay Lohan is one of our most popular bots. Her fans are really dedicated. Awesome. And so you can see this almost connecting with CGI. I mean, looking at what CGI is doing in filmmaking, you can almost have kind of a CGI component built into. So it's all this stuff kind of coming together. Multimedia matters. All right. So what do you think about the Intel booth here, AI experience that got some, you know, kinetic photo experience, amazing nonprofit activities, using deep learning to find missing children. What do you think? This is some of the best use cases for AI, which is people think of AI just like the direct consumer interface, which is what we do. But AI is an underlying, kind of like an underlying layer to everything we do. And if it can help even 1% or 1,000%, you know, 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. All right, Ben Parr, great guest. Inventure Capitalists, 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 backstage passes to room five. There will be some fun times in the future, I know it. All right, Ben Parr. 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.