Zero Click by Profound | New York | 2025 | James Cadwallader (CEO & Co-Founder, Profound)

Good afternoon, everybody. We've got some pillar, pillar action here, so I think you're going to see speakers today kind of parrying the pillars on stage. But yeah, fantastic to meet you all. I'm James Cadwallader, co-founder and CEO here at Profound, and welcome to Zero Click. 2025, the first one. Yeah, thank you so much to everybody in the room for, for being here. It truly is an honor to host you all. Today is going to be a lot of fun. I think, you know, when I was trying to think about how to explain the platform shift that we're experiencing right now, I found this analogy of the front door of the internet is changing for the first time in 25 years. And this is actually not just for narrative effect. Honestly, honestly, I was going through my notes this morning on what I was going to say in the room, and it dawned on me that the analogy is actually incorrect. That really, when you think about it, the front door to the internet hasn't really changed that much. It's still the same open web. It's still a map of index pages and essentially links to various URLs. I think when you really think about it, what has changed is that we as human beings no longer need to use that front door to the internet. Instead, we go to a platform like ChatGPT and it will send a machine, you could say a bot, a crawler interchangeably here, but effectively a machine will go through that door into the open web, explore, interpret, read, consume all of the information on the open web, and then come back through and serve it up to you as the end user. And I think really when you boil it all down, the internet is no longer a destination that you visit as an end consumer. A presence that you speak to. So yeah, I think in 20 years from now, we will look back at this period that we're in, the 2020s, or the mid-20s maybe we'd call it, as the era of AI and superintelligence, just like we look back on the proliferation of the personal computer in the late 1990s, or the, you know, the web in the early 2000s. And yeah, here at Profound, we're building a marketing platform for an age of superintelligence. That's what we're trying to do. And I believe that when that machine walks back through the door with the information, whether it mentions your brand, your products, your competitors will become the highest order priority for every company on the planet. So we're a technology company. That's what we do. And I think we're lucky enough to count many of you in the room as customers. We've got some incredible people. I mean, frankly, the event was extremely oversubscribed, so I don't know if this is going to be able to get this across in the right way. Maybe it sounds obnoxious, but if you're in the room, it probably means you're pretty cool. Lots of very important people here today. Really, I'm not just saying that. Sycophancy. It's, uh, there's lots of very exciting people in the room. And yeah, I, I feel truly privileged to be able to build technology that smart people like yourselves want to use. Um, so yeah, we're here to serve you all, and Profound's mission is to empower you to do your best work, to push the boundaries of your marketing efforts, of your communications, and ultimately to help you understand and control how AI talks about your brand, your products, your services. So thank you so much to every customer that's, you know, we're a 14-month-old company. It's new, and I think it's outrageous that we get to call some of the huge brands in the room a customer, and we do not take it for granted. And I just want to say thank you to anybody that we do work with in the room for partnering with us, and I'm really excited to to meet with you all afterwards and speak with you. I also want to say a special thank you to the team at Ramp. This is whose building we're in today. So Ramp are not only a customer, but I believe they are one of the most exciting marketing teams of today, but also maybe one of the most exciting companies of today. And I really mean that as well. So yeah, thank you for allowing us to be in your beautiful space. Ramp team, if you're here, thank you. I also want to say thank you to the team very quickly. There's lots of team around the fringes of the room. There's this thing where we get this compliment and it really is one of my favorite compliments to get. When we get it, it makes me warm and fuzzy, and it's when, and we get it quite frequently, customers or outside people will say, "Well, you guys have lots of, you know, your shipping velocity is amazing. How are you shipping so fast? What, you know, what the speed of Profound is amazing." And I think, you know, we lap that up, it's such, it's so great to hear, but really I have to acknowledge that there's another side of the curtain, which is a group of extremely talented, hardworking people working long days, long nights, weekends, The inputs match the outputs and they're working really hard to build this platform that we believe in and I just want to say thank you so much to the team while we have everyone in the room. So yeah, Zero Click, you know, what are we trying to do here? Our belief is that the future of the internet will be AI-driven and I think we wanted to put together a conference right here in New York, which despite my accent is our hometown. And yeah, bring some of the brightest minds together to just discuss, pull apart this space, to, you know, to think about what's coming, what's happening now and what will come. And I'm really excited to get off the stage and actually just watch a lot of the content. I'm not going to do much speaking today, so I'm excited to to see some of the content that we've got coming up because frankly, I've not seen anything else like this and it's going to be cool. So, yeah, we have some really incredible minds coming up on stage. We have some of the best minds from SEO. We have the team from Reddit coming up on stage, which is very exciting. We have some of the agency titans, and I really mean that, like the big, big dogs coming up here to talk about what they see, which is very cool. The team at Ramp are coming up to do an off-record kind of inside lane chat about what they're working on and how they're showing up in this space. And then of course some of our team will be coming on stage to go through research. We're even going to show you our product roadmap to give you a view of what we're trying to do here at Profound. So yeah, I think, I think the content will be incredible. I'm very excited. I think this should also be an opportunity for— like, I'm already seeing like faces that I recognize who probably don't know each other but should. So you definitely— I really— it's not me saying it for dramatic effect. There's lots of really cool people in this room. You should definitely take advantage of the fact that the programming finishes at 6 p.m., so it's not super long. This won't be a drag, and there's going to be drinks afterwards and you should mingle, chat with each other, have our team connect you with other interesting people. And I've actually heard as well that there's like a secret after-party happening somewhere. I actually, I don't know if I formally got the invite to it, but yeah, so if anyone wants to carry on, they can. So yeah, that's my bit. I do want to say thank you so much to everybody. I think we've been blessed by the universe with this opportunity. I mean, Profound, our team, to build. In such an exciting time, and I don't take it for granted. I don't come up on stage like this with any hubris or ego. It's, you know, we owe it back to work really hard and build something incredible in return. So yeah, we feel extremely lucky. And yeah, I'll wrap up there with maybe a quote. I don't know if there's any David Deutsch fans in the room, but one of his favorite lines that I love that kind of speaks to the future is where he says, we're at the beginning of infinity. So, yeah, thank you all for coming, and, yeah, I'll be welcoming up Josh and Sartaj from our team to go into some good content. Thank you.