Will AI Replace Amazon? The Future of Shopping Revealed

Welcome to the Next Wave. I'm your host, Nathan Lands. And today we're going to talk all about the future of shopping with AI. You know, the last few months we've seen perplexity ad shopping and now ChatGPT has added shopping directly into ChatGPT. You can buy a product just by talking to your AI. Today we've got on AJ Bam, the CEO of Vyral, a hot startup in Silicon Valley. It's absolutely amazing because it makes video searchable and brands that are using this are already seeing their sales double. So I think you're going to learn a lot about where shopping is headed with AI as well as ways you can take advantage of this today in your business. So let's just jump right into it.

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Hey AJ, great to have you here today.

Yeah, thank you. How are you?

I'm doing good. I'm doing good morning here in Kyoto, but waking up and yeah, excited to talk with you today. You know the reason I wanted to bring you on is, you know, I've been thinking a lot lately about like what the future of shopping and E commerce is going to look like with AI. Right. Like a few months back you had Perplexity roll out. They're like kind of AI powered shopping which I thought was an okay experience, but I was like, okay, but I get where it could go. And then OpenAI recently launched their thing which I think they partnered with Shopify and they're kind of like baking shopping directly in to the LLM which is like nuts. Like you can, you know, I just imagine in the future just being able to chat with my AI and get exactly what I want. And I know you kind of play like a different role with your company Viral, where you're more on the the AI video side with the social shopping. So I'd just love to hear your thoughts on the landscape and where things are at.

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, thanks for having me on the show and I think you are spot on that. I think what's happening now is if you look at the Gen Zs, they're shopping now with all things video and I think the proof in the pudding is TikTok right, right. I mean, there's a reason why TikTok became a phenomena and TikTok proved that. When you have short form video at scale and it's authentic, interesting, funny, silly, perhaps as well, it works, you know, I mean, just reflecting back on my company, right, like what's really changed for us is life before TikTok and life after TikTok.

Right.

So before TikTok, you know, I'd be knocking doors both with brands and retailers. And I've always believed that at the end of the day, you know, people shop. Not because Kim Kardashian said you should buy a car, but people shop because your neighbor who looks like you said, hey Ajay, I just bought my new EV and I love it. And the reason I love it is it's doing 200 miles on one charge. And so what really matters at the end of the day is authentic opinions. Right, right. And where video is very transformative, where video makes a huge difference is you can see the product, the person and the emotions inside the video.

Right.

So what that leads to really is high brand trust, high product trust. Right. You can see the product in action. So even like simple thing as my headset, right. Just being able to see in a video whether this fits, you know, loose or tight, I have a round face. Right. Like just being able to see that versus someone telling you in a review that it's in text makes a huge difference.

You know what actually reminds me of is there's this book I've been reading. It's actually my second or third time reading it. Like Ogilvy on advertising. Oh yeah, yeah, of course, yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe you're like kind of preaching that Bible, I don't know. But they talk on that book about how they found in all their years of doing advertising that people thought that hiring like a huge celebrity work to promote something. But what they found was typically what happened is you pay those people so much money and then people remember the celebrity, not the product. But if you use a person that people don't know, it actually works better. Like they had like a, I think like a 80 year old grandma in France or something and they had her doing, I think it was a butter commercial or something like this and that was like a huge hit for like 30 years or something. It was like a long running ad they ran because people like authenticity. It's just like a real person using a product. So. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

I mean, I think you hit something very important here, you know, and we're seeing this trend as well. In the market, which is brands are moving away from very high paid influencers to more micro influencers and shoppers and authentic creators. Right. I mean, today in. One of the reasons TikTok has exploded is also TikTok brings that average creator who previously had to make a lot of effort on their phone to make a video. Now with TikTok tools, anybody in the world can be a creator, anybody can be an influencer, right? So in general we're seeing a trend where even in the market is, you know, I think between, I would say between 20, 2018 and 2023, influencer marketing was all the craze, right? And now what's happening is, you know, when you go online and you see another influencer, you're like, oh, not again. You know, he was paid to say this, Right? Right. And I think that's where now there's a massive Teutonic shift. And I think this is where again, you know, TikTok proved that when you have authentic content, it works. And I think also what changes that now with, you know, we all have smartphones, I would say give and take, 90% of all phones in the world can record pretty good these days, even in poor lighting. Right? So the previous concerns that brands had about, you know, light being poor or the camera not being right, or the quality of the video not being good, and it's not just the quality of the video as in capturing the video, but even like with our 5G networks now, I mean, you live in Japan. Japan has had fast, high speed phones and docomo was in fact a leader when it came to mobile shopping.

You know, I lived in San Francisco for 13 years and it's crazy to me, I was like, why is the Internet not better in Silicon Valley? Like, what the hell is going on? You're supposed to be like in the Mecca of technology. Then you go to other places and it's like, oh, they have better tech, technology like infrastructure. They have at least better infrastructure. Right. So it's always kind of shocking to me, right?

I mean, Japan has been ahead in this game, to be honest with you, since 20 years ago. But even though you could pay in subway in Japan with your docomo phone, right? Which it's only arrived now, I think Covid was what changed. It took a virus to change our behaviors in the U.S. right? Yeah. But here we are now, I think Apple Pay has been accepted. But like I said, tectonic shifts in your hardware, in your software, in the way you create content and in the way you consume content as well. So you know, like watching a short form video today you can watch without disruption. Right. I mean, previously I remember like watching a video on the phone, you would have to wait for that lag, the latency on the video to happen. Right. And now I think so. All these factors have honestly have contributed to video really taking off when it comes to commerce.

So what you're saying makes me think that like the future of like, let's say E Commerce 2.0 or whatever this is going to be.

Yeah.

You know, beyond just Amazon ruling everything, it feels like there's probably gonna be two things. I, I assume that eventually we're gonna have AIs that understand us as a person very well and they'll probably be able to recommend things to us really well, maybe better than Amazon in the future. But then on the discovery side, you know, if you're somebody who wants to discover new things, you know, maybe that starts leaning into the videos. Right. Like, oh, I watched a video and you know, maybe my wife saw a video and she saw a person. It's like, who's got that purse? There's been a few times actually where we've seen people had a purse that she liked and literally once or twice I asked them where they got it and she was shocked that I did that. She's very introverted. I'm kind of, I just started talking to this woman, I'm like, my wife loves your purse. Where did you get that?

Right, right, right.

And so I could see in the future that being like a main way that people discover it just through social and especially if you just make it simple and just click a button or something and you buy it. That makes a ton of sense to me.

Yeah. What we're seeing is, and I think this is what Instagram and TikTok have really nailed. Right. I mean, the algorithm is able to figure out, you know, who you are, what your interests are. And based on your interests and your history, they're able to recommend certain products on your TikTok feed or your Instagram feed as well. Right.

People forget that TikTok was like considered like the big AI startup as of like five years ago. Right. It was like, oh, they've got the best algorithm, they got the best AI. And then LLMs came out. Right?

Yeah, right, right. And I think the shift that's happening now is this is moving now towards retailers and like Amazon. Right. I mean, if you go and shop on Amazon now, Amazon is leading all their product pages now with video content. So there is the branded video at the top of the page. There is a user generated content in the middle of the page. And then Amazon runs its own retail media network as well. They're showing competitor ads, video ads on the bottom of the page. Right?

Okay.

I mean, my guesstimate is Amazon has amassed 250 million video reviews and video on their platform. Right. So that shift is now video is now jumping, I would say, from social to retailers. And eventually we will see video across all different retailer and DTC and other sites. And so essentially it's bringing social commerce to your retail and your DTC shopping experience. Right? Now there are some challenges with that and I think one of the big challenges with video in general is no one has time to watch videos. Right? So what I mean by that is when you're in your shopping mindset, you do want to watch the video, but you just want to watch the right video. Right? So you're buying a car now and you're on the BMW website. You have selected your car model and there are 35 video on the page. Right? There could be some branded videos, BMW showcasing the product, the car features. There might be some testimonials from customers. Right? So let's say you're looking, Nathan, for a car with leather seats that is blue in color. How'd you know? And I'm looking for a car with child seats. Right. With a female driver. Right. So how do you know which video is talking about leather seats versus child seats? So as we move towards video content consumption, I think the next big problem is how do I find something in a video that's relevant for me? Right. Perhaps even personalized for me. I mean, how many times have you been on a fashion website where you're a guy and you're being shown videos featuring women? Right? I think video personalization is not there yet, but it's where things are headed, right? So coming back to the BMW example, today, most shoppers select a random video, so they want to find that answer about leather seats and they select a random video based on a thumbnail. A lot of videos today don't have description. And in fact, TikTok Instagram videos don't have a title and description anymore. Right? So how do you find something in a video? So I think finding ways to help shoppers find what they need inside the video, it's video search and personalization recommendations is going to be extremely important and key to really driving more conversion. And I'll tell you this, that video, just from our own experience here at Varo Video, increases brand trust by 20x.

Okay?

It increases conversion anywhere from, you know, 5 to 28% and it drives deeper engagement. So when done right, it works its magic.

You're talking about like if somebody's seeing a product, like so they see someone using a product versus just reading about it or whatever. It's like a 20x jump.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like and again, brand trust, right. For someone to see how something works, right. Whether it's you're putting your furniture together in the house and it's a how to video or perhaps it's a makeup video and you're seeing actually how you can apply makeup for your skin. Right. All of this. Or you're looking for a recipe and you're just able to find in a 30 minute recipe you want to know how to braise the chicken. Right, right. If you're able to find those answers, that really creates a delight and ultimately that's going to drive a purchase or maybe people will spend more time on your site and do more. Right. I mean that's the ultimate goal, that brand. So search is a big problem and the other big problem is the no one has time to watch videos. They just want to both on the brand side, you know, when they get a lot of video data, they want to be able to find the video that's going to help their shoppers. Right. So how do they find those nuggets? And on the shopper side, how do you find the video that's going to answer your burning question so you can make a go no goodies or even a comparison video.

Right, right. How do brands do it today? I know you guys have been working on a solution for this like before viral, like how would brands do that? How would they find that?

Yeah, yeah. So to be honest with you, like I think before Vyral what we were seeing was brands are creat content on their TikTok, YouTube and Instagram. But we were seeing that most customers, I would say both brands and retailers are not utilizing that content on the e commerce site on their social site. So I would say the first thing is make sure you bring all your video content that you're producing, even on your social media to your e commerce site and website. So we're seeing that gap right now where they're producing a lot of content for social. But hey, they're forgetting that at the end of the day people do land on your website or your retailer on your product page and, and it's the last mile where they make the product decision. So if you can also influence them in that last mile in the shopper journey with video content that's going to be extremely helpful. So I would say that's number one. The number two is we see a lot of companies just putting a video carousel and the video carousel is just plays there. And again the problem is no one has if their 10 videos. I don't have time to watch 10 videos. I just want to find that relevant video. Right, so how do you bring that relevancy still a big problem on most sites. And then brands are also, they have a lot of videos, how to videos support videos and in most cases we just see a page with a list of videos. So again they're missing out by providing search, personalization, some sort of recommendation engine, they're missing out on really driving that self service journey, if you will, for the shopper to either buy your product or address a comment or concern they might have with the video.

So you're talking about like a person on social media. They're using a product and now the brand is leveraging that video to promote the product. I wonder if there's any way you could create this kind of like, you know, loop where the person who created the video also benefits from that being used somehow. Like there's like a, you know, a link to them or something because that could even incentivize like oh, now more influencers are going to want to use my product because you know, they might get mentioned now. Right, they might get a boost from that.

Absolutely, absolutely. I think that loop is coming circular if you will. So I'll give you just a couple of examples now where like we're seeing now brands ask customers for videos. So today it's a bit of a manual process, but then there are tools like Varl, like today after you make a purchase now with Varl, you can set up a QR code or a message to invite customers to make a video review. Right. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show first a demo example on our site and then I'm going to show you some live customers on how a number of our customers are using the video carousel. And more intelligent I would say at Varl, we have built the next generation video shopping experience if you will. And really what we do is so this is an example where you're buying an electronic toothbrush on an old B website, you land on the product page and there are five video reviews or videos on the page. So now that's awesome. How do you know which of these videos are talking about what? Right. So for example let's say I want to know what people are saying about it's electronic toothbrush. I want to know what people are saying about the brush. So I can instantly search. Voila. Varl found the videos. Now talking about search and you can see we generate all the key highlights and this is all AI and ML driven.

Oh, that's awesome.

So essentially we make all your video, the audio, text, images and transcription searchable and we generate the clips we were searching for. People are saying about the brush, you can instantly find all the clips about the brush. So now before Varal, you would have to watch the entire video. Now with viral you can just find the clips. And so what this does is this helps you find the answers you're looking for across one video or multiple videos. So if you look at the experience, right, we generate the video summary, which is very extremely helpful for SEO. So Google can read the summary and the tags and the transcript. We also generate highlights on top of the videos. So these are all the key highlights that we have generated on top of this about what's being said in the video as well. So if I go to the next video, it'll show you the next search result about talking about brush and it also shows you the highlights as well. Right. And what's cool is this is integrated with the shopping experience. So as a shopper you can just or the shopper website, this is integrated with Buy Now. So essentially a customer can hit Buy now and add the product to the shopping cart and make a purchase. So I'm going to just show you really quick a couple of other examples of live customers. So we have a beauty brand, rx. They do beauty products for women, especially for curly hair. And they have now added video content on all their sites. It's a very rich and engaging experience, as you can see. You know, the previous video didn't have any speech, so we didn't generate the highlights. But whenever there's speech, we generate the summary, we generate all the key highlights of what they're saying. So even as a shopper, you don't have to like watch the entire video. You can watch the clip that's relevant for you and make a purchase.

This seems great for brands. You know, I think for average like product videos are so boring, right? Yeah. And usually you watch them as like, okay, whatever, it's like highly edited, you know, whatever. But like something like this, like you actually see real people using the product. That would convince me more. Also for a brand, that's great, right? Because then they don't even have to spend all this money on this advertisement. It's not even going to work.

Exactly.

Show the real people using it. That's the ad.

Right. And the beauty is, you know, we have integrated with Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Dropbox, Google Ads. So we can bring all your TikTok content that you're producing, we can bring all that content to your E commerce site. So essentially we have built a mechanism to pull in all your videos that you have already produced. Or you can also leverage our platform to capture video reviews as well. So here's an example of a head. So this brand has increased their site engagement by about 3.8x. They've increased their revenue overall conversion on average by about 6% last quarter. So video has a direct impact because again, you can see these are real testimonials from customers. They're talking about how they can use the product and more. Right. So I'll give you another example. So here's a company that does hot sauce, right? So they have a number of recipes. You know, there's only so much heat I can bear. I don't need like very, very hot foods. So I want to know, is there a comment about heat? About the sauce? Right. So instantly it'll find the video talking about heat.

Right.

So this is a game changer. What is this doing? Right. This is going to help you instantly decide. Like, for example, this comment will help me decide whether you know, where I want to use the sauce. Is it talking about heat? It even. We generate all the key highlights about this hot sauce as well. Right. So here we bring search, personalization and SEO recommendation engine and buy now do all this content.

Yeah, I love that idea. I guess my one question there is like, it's almost like introducing a new user behavior though. Like, are people interacting with that feature a lot, the search? Because it's an amazing feature. I'm just curious if people know how to use it. Right?

Yeah, it's a great question. So what's happening right now is there's a couple of things happening, right? Like everything new, it's very clear on top of the videos. Right. That you can search. Right. So we're also in the process of integrating this video search with your site search. Right.

Okay.

So you have the site search. I mean, most people are familiar with text search. Right?

Right.

So when you start typing the product name or you look for a keyword, you will essentially find the videos. It will also surface video content as well. So we're actually building this as we speak.

You should do probably like Good suggestions as well. Right. Like almost like autocomplete. Absolutely. You're searching for that. It's like how hot is it? Or whatever. Something like this and then that's. And then it shows the videos.

Right. And I think to your point though, we're doing sort of a crawl, walk, run approach. Right. The crawl approach is, hey, let's put an amazing video experience on your side. The walk approach is let's make sure we integrate search across your entire site on all your pages as well. Right. It could be even. You might even have a support page for your brand. Right. So we have different implementations. You can put essentially on. Even on your homepage or your product page. You can also put videos as well. Right. So essentially Varval has a set of e commerce tools where you can bring search capability for your site, search for your homepage. We also bring a very rich video experience, as I just showed you, on your site as well. It's a whole new way of shopping that's never happened before.

Yeah, it seems awesome. I guess one thing that keeps popping my head is like I'm sitting here thinking about like the future of the web and my slight concern like, does ChatGPT eat the web? Do people like, you know, basically live in ChatGPT? They're not even, you know, maybe the future during the browser, like you literally just like open up the ChatGPT app and that's your like surface into the web versus using a browser.

Yeah.

Kind of worry about that.

I think, to be honest, like Nathan, it really is going to come down to trust.

Yeah.

Can you trust ChatGPT to complete your transaction? I think there's already enough scams and frauds with payments and whatnot. Right?

Yeah.

The challenge Is with any LLMs is even if they are able to, I mean like to your point, if you go on perplexity, it shows you. I was looking for oral B toothbrush. It essentially brings up a quick pop up with the image. It summarizes the reviews from multiple platforms. So I think there's a benefit to getting that review, perhaps a summary of the reviews on ChatGPT. But ultimately my reward points are tied to Amazon. My reward points are tied to Target. Right. You see where I'm going with this? So ultimately I believe that when a person is shopping, they might even want to do comparison shopping. And as you can imagine, retailers do a fairly decent job now showing your similar recommendations for similar products across multiple brands. Right. And it also will depend on the size of the purchase as well. So for example, like you Know, people definitely buy. If the product is under $50, you're very likely to purchase it on TikTok Instagram. I think the amount is much lower for trust and fraud to worry about versus when you're buying a car or when you're buying a $300 cappuccino machine and really want to see all the videos on how the machine works. The espresso machine works. Right. So I would say that the last miles still happen on the retailer or the brand website. Yeah.

I feel like what's probably going to happen is ChatGPT will send people to websites still. I hope that's what's going to happen. Right. Yeah. I've been seeing. That's actually been a big thing I've been thinking about and seeing people post on X about is that everyone's saying that traffic from ChatGPT is converting better than Google.

Yeah.

Which is just like, oh crap. So what does that mean? That's a huge disruptor to Google long term, which Google's now getting good at. AI but it feels like people will still go to the website and then when they're looking for the products. Yeah. A lot of people would love to see a video of a real person using it.

And again, you know, also don't forget in store shopping experience, I would say 90% are still, you know, big purchases happen in store as well. Right. So. But can bring video to in store shopping. You know, we're seeing more and more packaging with QR codes. We're seeing even on televisions in stores as well as they're playing different product reviews and product videos. You are now actually able to just scan the QR code and open a video experience to read the reviews or watch the videos in store as well.

Right.

So my point is I think it's going to be an omnichannel experience at the end of the day.

You know, there's a few places in Japan. I'm not sure if America has this yet, but when you shop, you just put the product down and then they know how many of the products you have. I'm not sure exactly how they're doing that. Yeah, you literally just put the products there and there's no scanning. It just knows how many of the products you have. That'd be really awesome in the future if there's some area in stores where it's like you just put the product down and then it's just like, oh, here's on social media, you know, all these people, maybe there's like one famous person, but then there's people who are not famous and it's kind of a mixture and you could just click it and watch the video. That'd be so cool.

Again, the future of commerce with video is going to be very different. Right now I would say it's more two dimensional video. Wouldn't be surprised if we see 3D AR VR experiences as well with video content and reviews, which you might be able to just experience with your phone. And maybe as you're seeing more smart eyewear come through, I can see an application where you just stare at a product with your eyewear and it's literally pulling the video review on your screen. I'm not kidding.

Right, right.

It's coming. It's a matter of time.

Yeah, I can definitely see that in the future you're looking at a product, you see the reviews. I want to see videos as well. That's so cool.

So I think this might be a good segue into talking about, you know, what viral does behind the scenes.

Yeah, for sure.

I'll do a quick demo of the dashboard. Just a very teaser demo.

Yeah. So if you could show me how Vyral works, show me the tech behind the scenes, you show me the widget. So that's cool. But like, how would a brand actually use this?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So essentially, you know, the good news is most brands that do 5 million plus in revenue already are producing video content. So as I mentioned before, the biggest challenge today is making all your video content searchable and making it useful. So really what I'm showing you is a demo for Oral B. It's really a sample snapshot of some of the data. So in this case, we captured 24 video reviews. The brand was interested in managing videos for a few of their electronic toothbrush products. So what we did was we captured reviews from customers via QR code campaigns and we also captured reviews from social media. So in this case, these 24 video reviews came in from either social media or via campaign. So essentially on the viral platform, a brand can essentially set up a QR code. So here's an example where you can set up a QR code campaign and you can invite your shoppers. So the brand actually sets this up and they set up the personalized experience. And what you're seeing is actually a mobile experience they might issue, give you a reward for making a video. It's optional campaign description, brand instructions. And the big problem we have solved, Nathan, is licensing. So the biggest fear that brands have is someone putting a video on their site or something that has Been unlicensed and they get into a lawsuit.

Yeah. Okay.

How do you capture video reviews at scale? Right. Is the problem that the viral has solved. So now with us, you can essentially create a campaign and it generates a QR code and you can tie this QR code to your shopping experience. So you can, after a customer makes a purchase, you can invite the customer to upload a video review. So when they scan the QR code, it will prompt them with the campaign details and it will invite them to upload a video. And what happens is the video directly comes on the viral dashboard and it gets analyzed. So in this case, we have 24 reviews that came in. The video is social. We track your social media engagement. We track demographic, who's in the video by age, ethnicity and gender. So you'll notice at a glance that there are 40 to 50 year olds missing in the video. So we have actually analyzed who is in the video. And by the way, we don't store any personal information. This is simply at a very high level, helping brands understand, you know, are people making your videos, aren't they on target with your demographics? So you notice there's no 40 to 50 year olds in the video. So maybe if they're targeting that demographic, they should have videos featuring 40 to 50 years old. And then below we launch a rating system. So at a glance, brands can decide whether they want to publish the videos or not. So for these products, for this SKU, we captured 11 reviews and they have a score of 89. So the higher the score, better the video. So if the score is about 60, the brands can promote the video. If the score is below 40, it's very negative. And we even generate the highlight. So if you select the video, it will take you inside the video to the key highlight. So as a brand manager e commerce team, you don't have to really spend time watching all your videos. Now, what makes Varl really special and unique and you know, recently we just landed a contract with TikTok to power video reviews for TikTok for 500,000 TikTok shops. And the reason we got that contract is we have 150 different filters on the platform. So on the right you see all these filters. So essentially it's a mechanism for brands to moderate their video content. And all of this is offered via an API. So you can now search by positive sentiment. You can say, show me everyone in the video that's 18 to 24, 25 to 30 to 30 to 40 years old. And I'm looking for a video that Talks about battery life that I want to promote. So you can instantly search the word battery life or a product feature. It'll show you all the comments about battery life. And not only can you see the comment, you can even open the video. It'll take you inside the video. So essentially either TikTok will help capture a video after the purchase is made on TikTok shop and then Varl will analyze the video and we'll have a Merchant dashboard where TikTok merchants can log into the viral dashboard, they can see all the insights for all the video reviews, and they can then publish that content to the TikTok shop. So TikTok has given us exclusive right to be able to publish video reviews that are vetted. Right.

Oh, that's awesome. That's huge.

Because TikTok has 30 rules, you know, you cannot mention the word Amazon in the video. The video has to be less than three minutes long. You cannot have minors in the video. It has to be brand safe. It has to be properly licensed. Right. There should be no profanity in the video. So Varl is building a filter, a TikTok filter, an Amazon filter, or a Walmart filter to be able to vet this content. With these filters we have on the. Right, Right. That's the use case for TikTok for other brands and retailers. They can use our platform to manage all their video content across multiple SKUs across multiple platforms. So we have one dashboard. We are now going agentic as well. So we just launched an AI E commerce agent where you can ask questions about your video data and you can get answers. So here's a couple of examples. You know, I wanted to know what are some of the top topics being discussed in the videos?

Right, right.

So I can ask questions now. So it gives you an answer. So that's awesome. So now brands can, instead of watching having to watch videos, they can spend more time on action and content. They can instantly get insights. So they want to create content. Well, they just launch a new toothbrush. Hey, what are customers thinking about cleaning? They get a summary along with the clips.

Right, right. You probably could get unique insights from that too. Like people in Japan are talking about this or whatever, what are they saying? And like you can actually learn about new opportunities for your brand through that too.

And speaking of insights, these are all the insights we deliver. And I'll just give you a quick example of an insight. So if I open the speech report, by the way, brands love the speech report. They use it for SEO for identifying competitor mentions and trend analysis. So we can take you inside the keyword and you can even play the clip. It'll take you inside the video. Right, right. So we have different reports and I want to show you one last thing. The level of insights we offer for our customers and the way we make the video searchable. We generate the video summary, we detect the sentiment score, whether people are saying positive, negative about your product or brand. We detect languages, sentiment analysis, topics, demographic. We have marketing workflows. You can do sentiment analysis of the audio. We even break it down by product feature, which has never happened before. So we have built our own models, so it's not LLMs. We actually have our own AI, about 18 plus models that understand everything inside your video review and your video content.

You say 18 models?

Yes. So that's why we've been at this for a while and we're going deep with our models in E commerce. Right. So here's where we give you all the insights on your content. So we then have mechanism to publish content. So you can build your own carousels or programmatically you can publish content to your site and you can customize the whole widget, the colors, whether you want the highlights, whether you want the search or not, and instantly. And you can enable a search experience. So we installed the holy gate of comics, which is in video search, personalization, SEO recommendations, and Buy now inside the video.

So cool. Yeah.

So that's a quick, very short demo.

Yeah. One thing that like really stuck with me, I was thinking one of the big values was like having the more organic videos talking about a product. And so it seems like most brands are only doing the opt in is that like they have like a campaign, Is that the main thing they're doing?

Well today what happens is outside Varl, if they're not using Varl, they usually do branded and influencer videos.

Right.

The problem is how do you capture licensing rights from your shoppers at scale?

Right, right.

So with Viral, you can now program the QR code either with our API or with our campaigns on your store.

Yeah.

And after a customer makes a purchase, they get the QR code. So essentially the customer scans the QR code, makes a video, accepts the licensing terms. They're sharing their licensing terms, by the way.

Right.

And essentially they're giving the right to use the video at scale.

Yeah, Random idea like I would imagine, like now you could take something like, I don't know, the new Gemini 2.5 or something like that. I'm not sure how well this would work at scale, but it seems like A really easy experiment. But you could have that email or contact all these people and like hype it up where your name's going to be linked on there and stuff. So you may gain some followers. Like if you're someone who has like 200 followers or a thousand followers and like a brand's contacting you and it's like they're going to show my face and they're going to like link to me somewhere. Like, I think a lot of people, if there was like a one click opt in, you know, and then you got the contract, it's like, okay, it's fine now.

It's good.

I'm not sure if you guys would do that. That is something worth considering in the future.

Yeah. I mean, I'll just give you an example, I think where things are headed. I'll give you a fun example. So imagine you just watched Mission Impossible movie and you're coming out of the theater and you bought a ticket on Fandango or AMC theaters. And imagine you get a quick nudge by the time you're home from Tom Cruise saying, hey, Ajay, do you have a minute to chat with me? So this is where future of commerce and conversational AI is going with video reviews, Right? So imagine you open the video and you're just intrigued. Hey, Tom wants to talk to me. Right. So you know, it's a license avatar of Tom Cruise, just to be clear. Right. And imagine like Tom Cruise says, hey, I have three questions for you. Do you think I should make Mission Impossible 5? Right. And how was the theater experience and what else can we do better? Right. Or any other ideas?

Right, right.

So this is where brands can program 25 questions. Right. Maybe Tom Cruise, his production company could have asked 25 questions to his fans and followers.

Yeah, that's definitely gonna happen. So I'm not sure if you know this, but the original way I was using Lore is I was actually lore.com is I was partnered with Barry Osborne, the producer of Lord of the Rings and the Matrix.

Yeah.

And he helped create Weta with Peter Jackson. Right. The big special effects company. They also do a lot of the gear. And so I got like a VIP tour of Weta. And what I was shocked by was they had the facial scans of so many famous actors. And apparently all of these studios and production companies, they already were thinking about A.I. oh, yeah. Like for a long time now they're like, yeah, in the future you're going to want to have Tom Cruise's rights to be able to use it in other products. And you have some kind of revenue share with him or whatever, his estate in the future. It's crazy. That's coming.

Even with your podcast. I wouldn't be surprised if another six months a pop up comes up and you are chatting with me on your site. You're an avatar view and saying, hey, Ajay, what podcast should I be making? What topics are you interested in? And you're actually chatting with me to capture some information from your visitor site. Visitor.

Right, right, right.

So I'm telling you, like where things are headed. I think the future is going to be amazing. I can't wait. It's going to be fun.

It's going to be fun.

And also, just last thing I would say is I think all these platforms, including Varo, you know, we have to be transparent, honest about what's AI generated versus not. Right. I mean, just a quick point I'll make is that when it comes to video reviews, people do not want AI generated video reviews, I'll tell you that. So we're building tools to identify, to make sure that our review is human generated and we're validating it's a human on the camera and not something else.

If you were building a business today, how would you be preparing for these changes that are coming with shopping? How could you take advantage of the changes that are happening?

Well, I think from a company perspective, I would say that it's really important now that all your employees are up to speed and trained on AI and how what AI does AI works? In fact, I would say that the first question in the interview should be AI related.

Right.

So I would say that training is very important. The other thing is also make sure you are on top of things like whatever domain you're in. There's plenty of newsletters, there's plenty of tools. Now I would say be hands on. Like, I think we live in an age right now where whether you're a CEO or whether you're, you know, everyone in the company. Right. At all levels, Right. Need to be playing with tools because. And now, you know, tools are free, right. They're easily accessible on your browser. There's no reason to complain that you don't have access. Right. I think that excuse has gone away. Right. And also like getting your employees to play with tools as well. Let's have people try different things.

Right.

And in general, there's a transformation happening as well. Right. And then eventually figuring out, you know, what is going to make your job easy, cost effective, how can we bring more efficiencies for employees with AI. I think that's starting to happen. We're already seeing that in our company as well, right?

Yeah. I've been seeing tons of different CEOs starting to share, like almost like an AI first approach to hiring, like not trying to have less people, but make sure that everybody you're hiring knows how to use AI, because that's just going to amplify their outputs by so much more.

Yeah.

Well, it's been awesome talking with you. I think I learned a lot, especially about TikTok and by how people are finding products through social videos. It makes a ton of sense. Like, I think in the future it'll be like, how can I describe in the beginning where the LLMs will know you very well. They'll be really great for like buying basic things, but there'll also be things where you want to discover new products. And you know, seeing social proof is huge there.

It's huge. I would say, like there are five areas directly that will be impacted in future with AI, like or with ChatGPT, and that is content generational, conversational AI with video personalization, SEO. I think the reason now LLMs are doing a better job is they're able to better understand content than ever before. Right. I think that's the problem they've solved. Right. Whether it's video or audio or text. So SEO will get better. SEO will improve significantly with LLMs as well. I'm now even coining the word LEO, which is LLM based engine optimization, if you will.

Oh, okay.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. I've been saying aio.

That's true.

Doesn't exactly make sense, but it's kind of catchy. Where should people check you out? Like should they check out your website or are you active on social media anywhere?

Absolutely. So, you know, we're very active on LinkedIn. You can check out my website as well. So if you just go to viral.com commerce, if you want to play with the experience, you can do that. By the way, the word viral, it's a play on the word reality. Videos go viral.

Right.

But it's spelled a little bit differently. It's VVI R I L L. So it's viral.

Right, cool.

Again, Viv R I L L.com Varl.com.

Cool. Yeah, we'll put a link in the description. So yeah, it's been great. And yeah, hope to see you again sometime. Thank you. Awesome.