B (3:18)

That's amazing. Thank you. Yes, of course. We always talk about the story, the genesis of launching a platform, a product or a solution to a problem. There's some sort of story behind it. Those are always fun and exciting and interesting most of the time. And yours is the same. It's just amazing. I love the story of how we kind of learn the hard way, right? We post something and then of course we get some backlash. But I love your product, obviously allowing AI agents to do some simulations prior to sending out a post. And I think that's important. That's kind of the safe way. But also get better engagement as well. Vivek Social Trait blends generative AI with community simulation can you explain how your platform works and what makes it different from traditional market research tools?

A (4:03)

We have built like AI agents. You're hearing about AI agents everywhere, right? And people talk about one AI agent. So a few AI agents, but we have built over half a million AI agents in the virtual world right now. So for our clients we build AI agents that behave like real people. So the goal is to allow business to create virtual communities consisting of thousands of AI agents that mimic their target audience. So they have demographics, psychographics and they have salient history just like us. They can watch, listen, read any kind of digital content and consume information, you know, just like you and me. And then we group those agents into communities that mirrors brands, actual segments like loyalty moms in Minneapolis, sneakerheads in la, et cetera. Teams can run experiments like large scale surveys, simulated surveys, focus group image or video rackings, attention heat maps, just like any attention heat where you can actually literally see where your target audience are looking at an image or a video and inside this synthetic world and watch opinions form in real time and the output is deeper, wise actionable insights at a fraction of a cost in time. So if you think of for example like a global food brand, cut a 30 day position study to few days choosing the winnings messages after 1,500 AI shoppers ranked 13 taglines. So the question is why? It's game changing. 48 hours cycles versus 6 weeks panels reusable virtual audiences, so no recruitment fees, so there is no research fatigue. And you can uncover deeper whys and action insights which you cannot do with the traditional Methods.

B (5:47)

Awesome. Thank you, I appreciate that. Building a half a million agents that behave like humans in this synthetic world, as you call it. These agents obviously have similar backgrounds to humans, interests, likes, et cetera. But what I really like, and I think it's going to be attractive to your customers is, you know, no more surveys, no more multiple week surveys, no focus groups, no research fatigue. Of course you're going to save a lot of money on that. So I appreciate you breaking that down for us and for our audience. Vivek, many startups struggle to scale AI solutions. What challenges did you face in developing social traits, virtual focus groups, and how did you overcome them?

A (6:23)

Obviously there are a lot of tech related issues, but it was something different. To be honest, our biggest challenge wasn't technology. Yes, they were getting the right GPUs, getting all those things. Infra ready is a common among most of a tech startup at the moment, but it was actually keeping up with the demand of customers, you know. And when the ChatGPT went mainstream, our inbox lit up with Fortune 500 leaders who who all wanted AI pilot. Yesterday, bandwidth became a bottleneck. We had world class engineers, but not enough market research muscle to run 10 enterprise studies at once. So we hired seasoned insight leaders from top brands to not only kind of help us to execute some of those early pilots, but also to give us feedback on our products so we can scale quickly. They translated client briefs into rigorous study designs while our engineers kept scaling the agent platform. We also built self serve dashboards so clients could experience platform firsthand without waiting on our team result. In six months, we went from handling three concurrent pilots to 20, did more than 300 research projects while keeping the turnaround under 72 hours. And a key takeaway in B2B AI, you scale trust first, software second.

B (7:41)

Now that's amazing. B2B, you scale trust first. I love that and not the software. I think that's important and I think that's going to be foundationally throughout anything we do going forward, especially in this disruptive market we have with AI. It's interesting that I've heard bottlenecks, but your biggest challenge was the bottleneck keeping up with the demand. It wasn't the technology. A lot of time, technology can be the issue. I appreciate you sharing some of the struggles and challenges you had early on. Vivek, the last question I have for you this evening, your time. What's next for Social Trait? Are there any upcoming features, markets or partnerships that you're particularly excited about?

A (8:19)

I think there are plenty of them, but yeah, we're building a way for brands to a b test the virality itself. That is one of the biggest challenges in the industry. To understand the spread, we are launching a social media simulation world populated by millions of AI agents who scroll like comment and create content 24 bars old. Just like us. They consume the news information and they just behave like that. But the world with only AI Personas in it. So the usage is a marketer can drop a post or an ad into this universe and watch in real time how fast it spreads, who boosts it, where backlash sparks. Because the agents behave organically, we can forecast reach curves, influencer lift and crisis flashpoints before a single real consumer sees the campaign. On the partnership front, we are integrating this engine with top tier retail media network so creative can be fine tuned moments before it goes live. Our North Star is an audience behavior simulation layer that every marketer taps before spending a dollar in the wild.

B (9:26)

That's awesome. I appreciate that and you're taking the AB testing to the next level. But I like that you're going to create this social media virtual world with all these AI personalities and we're going to get some amazing insights through this testing before it's even launched out to the real world. So I appreciate that and I'm excited to follow you going forward and looking forward to have you back on the podcast. I appreciate your time today, it was such a pleasure and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.

A (9:52)

Yeah, same here. Thank you so much Brian. So nice talking to you.

B (9:55)

Bye for now.