Brendan Cervin
I think the market is really ready for prompt engineering. Our clients aren't just coming to us looking for help in building AI; they have a problem that needed solving yesterday. Research used to take a long time and was expensive. You know, they give the researcher a brief and eventually receive a report.

Brendan Cervin
That process is well defined. Clients now just want to buy AI solutions with a click. They don't want to have to tell us how to do the job; they want the AI to simply do the job for them.

Georgie
Hello and welcome to 'In the Blink of AI,' where I chat with the brightest AI startups and innovators each week. I'm Georgie Healy, and this week I am speaking with Brendan Servin, CTO at Ideally.

Georgie
Ideally is a consumer insights platform, and their  customers, probably more at this point, are the who's who of ANZ corporates. Forbes recently called them a game-changer for brands wanting to iterate ideas within  hours, and they've just announced their $. million seed round with OIF and Ice Ventures.

Georgie
Today we talk about everything from using AI to provide next-level insights about customer behaviour to technology products that creep people out, like Google Glass, for instance. Huge thank you to Brendan for coming on the show. Let's jump into the episode. Hi Brendan, thank you so much for joining 'In the Blink of AI.'

Georgie
I would love to start us off by you telling me about Ideally.

Brendan Cervin
Sure. Ideally is one year old. We're formed from a venture studio, and we're a consumer research platform delivering overnight results. We're taking the process that researchers would normally do, performing that with AI, and turning what would be three weeks of research into overnight.

Brendan Cervin
It's pretty disruptive technology. We got  demographically representative consumers overnight, asking them what they like or dislike about a product that the client is testing. It could be a marketing message. These companies include ASB, Telstra, Dentsu, Opal V, Teagle, Asahi, you know, sort of corporate enterprise-type organisations that are selling to consumers as a whole.

Brendan Cervin
And we're covering New Zealand, Australia, and America at the moment.

Georgie
Yeah, I do note the New Zealand accent. Very excited to have a New Zealander on the show. Um, you're the CTO, Brendan. You're the best person to ask. Um, what's the decision behind needing AI to create this solution for your customers?

Brendan Cervin
I wish I had the genesis of the idea myself, but I've been given the keys to it.

Brendan Cervin
The Venture Studio that's formed ideally is from two organisations previously unavailable and TRA who were both innovation and research studios. So they've been, you know, doing research with clients for  years and then effectively turned their process into AI. So that's really the unlock.

Brendan Cervin
And with AI's advent, they've just sort of prioritised it.

Georgie
Amazing. Um, and you use AI to create consumer insights. Um, what, what were people doing before they used AI to, like, how did they get those insights before?

Brendan Cervin
Well, ordinarily a researcher. So we have a number of researchers on our team. Ordinarily, a researcher would be responsible for generating the insights from the research that's performed.

Brendan Cervin
So that involves reading through all the information that's returned by the consumers, analyzing it, you know, doing some regression analysis and categorisation, theming, and then ultimately coming up with the results. Some top-line insights that the management is looking to make a decision on. So this is all, you know, a traditional process that's been done either in-house by large organisations with research capability or often outsourced to agencies for research as well.

Georgie
Yeah. Okay. Um, I read an article in Forbes, you guys have been all over the media recently. In that report, it said that  to  percent of sales comes from recently released products and services. So if your companies don't use Consumer Insights, what would happen if they didn't?

Brendan Cervin
I think within an organisation that doesn't have research, there can be a battle of opinions.

Brendan Cervin
The highest-paid opinion can win in some situations. It can be that ideas are watered down by groupthink, you know, the essence of an idea could be shaved off and the whole opportunity of that idea could be missed just by the watering down of the edges of ideas as they go through organisations.

Brendan Cervin
And so ideas can languish as well. They might not be adopted by those around them, and with a little bit of evidence behind them, they can build momentum and actually make it through the organisation. So there are lots of reasons why ideas can be stifled without research. And we see.

Brendan Cervin
Um, its ability to be used more regularly. Um, you know, overnight, you can take that idea. We've had clients talk about, you know, they've taken the idea from the back pocket or the top shelf of the desk and just run it through the system. And the next day they've got, you know, real insights that the rest of the company is excited about.

Brendan Cervin
You can see the opportunity of the idea. So this is really just an opportunity. Increasing the accessibility of the research as well, you know, the research component is done by our system, and you can just bring your problem. You don't need to be a researcher. We've got the methodology; you can give the insights at the end, but you don't actually have to be the researcher or the expert to get it done.

Georgie
Yeah, which sounds Fantastic. Especially when, you know, it doesn't come naturally to some people, but they still want to leverage that information. I'm sure, uh, we have rapid-fire questions at the end, but I can't help but ask a cheeky question up front. What's a major product release that a company has done that you can remember or think of that probably could have been avoided if they had done some consumer insights and research behind it first.

Georgie
I can think of a few if, if you need, if you need some time.

Brendan Cervin
Yeah, I was stuck on this one actually. I must've.

Georgie
Well, the one that comes to mind that continuously haunts me based on where I work now is Google Glass. So, um, and even a lot of the VR products, right. Um, apparently a lot of Nautia and things like that, that even if, even if it sounds like a great idea, even if.

Georgie
From a technologically interesting perspective, we could release this innovative technology for the actual consumer, for the actual wearer, not a great experience.

Brendan Cervin
Yeah, I think that there's a mismatch between society's expectations of privacy and what this device allows people to do. And so it just gives people the creeps, um, and rightly so.

Brendan Cervin
So there are some things you, you know, that look good on paper, but, you know, for reasons that aren't apparent, uh, just not good for society. I completely agree with that one. I

Georgie
have to ask you then, META's, uh, teamed up with Ray Ban, and this is one of the more recent launches. And they've got actually quite flattering looking sunglasses, but they take photos.

Georgie
How, how do you feel about that?

Brendan Cervin
I don't know. I think people are going to, technology always moves faster than society. So, you know, if they look good and people start wearing them, we'll, we'll figure it out as we go. Um, regulations tend to come a bit slower than technology, but people will decide with their wallet, I guess.

Georgie
Well, I do appreciate you, um, jumping with me off piste there for a moment. Let's dive back into building AI products. So with the AI tech that you guys use, as you gather customer data, am I correct in is this sentiment data? And if so, can you explain what that is?

Brendan Cervin
Sentiment is part of it. What's sentiment is a traditional analysis that.

Brendan Cervin
You know, how companies may have done on, you know, consumer feedback to look at whether or not they're positive or negative, we do more sort of categorisation, um, method where we, you know, everyone who talks about the recycling packaging is grouped together. And then we're, we're also asking how much they like a product or how unique a product is.

Brendan Cervin
So we perform a regression analysis to figure out, you know, of the people who talk about recycling, were they positive, is this impacting the product positively, or was it some aspect that was holding the product back? And so. We're, we're using multiple sort of questions to draw that analysis together rather than just sort of a sentiment from a single question.

Georgie
Interesting. And why, why have we moved on from sentiment data? Is it, is it just not as robust as it could be?

Brendan Cervin
I think when you, when you're just analysing the text, it's valuable and useful, um, and the, the system is analysing sentiment in the same way. In a similar way of what used to, but it's, it's centring it on other questions where they're asking for a definitive answer of how much you like this thing so that we can sort of position the themes and it's more tangible, it's more granular than a sentiment analysis.

Georgie
On the clustering, what, what kinds of data is the most meaningful, what, what, what would you be looking for as a business that would really help you with decision-making more than other kinds of data?

Brendan Cervin
Most companies will. Include a profile in question to identify whether the client is in a, you know, a high buying group or a low buying group and then within the high buying group, they might be looking for a particular demographic.

Brendan Cervin
They're trying to reach. So they'll be looking for the performance of the product for that specific demographic. So they might be looking for, you know, women, professional women, for example, so that we filtering by that and they'll often see. That the product, because it's targeted at that audience, has a higher performance against the average of the consumers.

Brendan Cervin
So they'll be looking for potentially indicators from demographics that are particularly interested.

Georgie
Amazing. Does a company ever pivot based on the data? Like, we thought we were targeting millennials, but actually it's boomers that are really resonating.

Brendan Cervin
They certainly have acted on the consumer feedback.

Brendan Cervin
There's been a number of projects that have pivoted in various ways. Whether it's. The product itself with the messaging that suggested, I think more often than product changes rather than the audience, the targeting changes, but yeah, it's, it's the whole point.

Georgie
Yeah, exactly. And then zooming out a little bit from there, you know, I'm learning about the AI space.

Georgie
The listeners are hoping to. Um, hopefully get educated in the AI space, what you do a form of NLP or natural language processing, and perhaps you could kind of explain the context for all of us

Brendan Cervin
a little bit more. Ever since Chair TPT was released and sort of popularised, uh, a lot of the previous AI technologies, um, like NLP have kind of been redundant.

Brendan Cervin
AI is this pocket mice, this universal tool now. So all of the language analysis is just AI. Gen AI now. Um, and I treat it as like you're just giving an instruction to someone. So if you wanted to do a sentiment analysis, you can instruct a person to perform a sentiment analysis in the same way you can instruct the AI.

Brendan Cervin
So there's, um, but there's a lot of flexibility. So we use, you know, we're using, you know, AI for all sorts of, uh, specific purposes within the research area that sort of replace previous methodologies like

Georgie
NLP. And only sharing what is publicly available knowledge. How do you do that? How, like, do you leverage multiple different existing models or like, how does that work?

Brendan Cervin
I mean, I'm sure that everyone's building their own AI stacks in slightly different ways nowadays. And I think that there's a lot of difference in how you build it. Uh, you know, they've got your, your low level. Um, language frameworks like, uh, DangChain or SemanticKernel. And then you've got, you know, all your AI, AI providers that can be wired up.

Brendan Cervin
Um, we use OpenAI because it's ranked the highest in terms of its intelligence. We'd switch to whoever has the most intelligence. But the, the problem I think that the technology creates is it puts the person who knows what is good AI output far away from the code, you know, the engineers are writing the prompts effectively that the AI isn't answering, but the person who knows the best prompt is the researcher who's written a thousand prompt, a thousand research documents before.

Brendan Cervin
So we've been trying to build our stack so that the researcher controls the prompt and there's no pollution or modification to the prompts that they work on in the production environment. So they get a like for like in terms of what they're doing. Trying to get as an outcome, um, and we're trying to remove the engineer from the actual prompt process so that they have no responsibility for how the comps are structured.

Georgie
So this is fascinating to me. Um, as an AI startup and as the CTO or founder, I didn't know that you could essentially, you said open AI is the. The most sophisticated currently the best model that exists currently, but you, you would switch. Um, if you had to, are the switching costs quite low in this industry?

Georgie
I would have thought that you'd have to, you know, completely reeducate yourself.

Brendan Cervin
No,

Georgie
no, no,

Brendan Cervin
no. The costs are low. Like the, you know, they're simply an AI as a service. You know, developers are already building frameworks to aggregate. The service. So you can just plug in anything you want. It's not, you know, if you want to switch service, you might just need to sign up and count and switch over the APIs.

Brendan Cervin
And there, there is some complexity in the details, but I don't think that the complexity is enough of a barrier to switch. There are certain features people are trying to build it. Like OpenAI is trying to build that created a little bit of vendor lock-in, but everyone's building these features and, and the vendor lock-in won't last long.

Georgie
Wow. That is fascinating. And no wonder the tech companies are all racing because if the switch can cost so low. You're only as good as your last release, right? Okay. A recent post on your LinkedIn, um, you said that synthetic data in the context of generative generative AI was almost your favourite subject.

Georgie
So I have good news. I've got some questions about synthetic data. How is synthetic data built or made?

Brendan Cervin
This is a great question because I've been discussing this last week with another sort of Um, and I specialists and they were lamenting the sort of previous generation of AI synthetic data, which are based on models where you'd put in some values and you get a predictable result at the other end of this model.

Brendan Cervin
And you could look at the model and you could scientifically validate the output of that model and you knew why it was making the decisions that it was making. And this might be. Forecasting sales figures or something like that, but invariably the model had scientific research that backed it and it's a formula or whatever it was with generative AI.

Brendan Cervin
You're just talking to chat bot, right? So if you say to it, imagine that you are, you know, a university student in this city doing. At this university during this course, and we want to talk to you about your experience, everything that I outputs is synthetic data and it's only just, you know, the, the, the line between what generative AI puts out a synthetic data and what doesn't, it's just the label that we choose to put on it.

Brendan Cervin
There's no scientific background to say that the genetic data, the generative AI outputs is correct or, um, accurate. It's like the, I think there's a gap in the industry at the moment where. In order, anyone who's doing synthetic data, you have to, A, trust the business and its process to generate the synthetic data, and as a consumer, like the output of the synthetic data.

Brendan Cervin
Is it telling you something new and novel? Or is it reaffirming your assumptions? But either way, like, The expectations of historical synthetic data in new GNI were that the research behind synthetic data now just doesn't exist.

Georgie
Wow.

Brendan Cervin
Well, I haven't seen a lot of it. I think it's, it's a, it's a problem for the industry.

Georgie
Correct me if I'm wrong. Say, because the categorisation, the tagging of synthetic versus not synthetic is, You don't choose your own adventure. You're only really hurting yourself. If you call something human data, if it's not right, like that would only hurt you.

Brendan Cervin
However, you're getting the synthetic data.

Brendan Cervin
I'm specifically, probably, I should probably care better. These are my thoughts around consumer market research data, not other types of generative AI synthetic data. So when you're asking it to emulate consumer behaviour. You know, you're really looking for is it, can it tell you, um, with some degree of accuracy, what number of people in Sydney like to have ice cream at the beach versus at the cinema, you know, and like those are that started, you could go out to the market and ask, um, and it started that you could get synthetic data.

Brendan Cervin
You could use synthetic data to answer it. We don't know how accurate it is. And there is no specific process to answer it that is well documented and understood and scientifically backed. Every company who tries to answer that question is going to answer it in a different way.

Georgie
It almost feels a little bit dangerous.

Georgie
It reminds me of um, scientific discovery. If something's been discovered, how often do people go back and repeat the study? It's like, Oh, it's already been done. Proven or disproven or whatever, actually it hasn't been disproven because no one's gone off to disprove it. So is it dangerous to kind of have synthetic data at all almost?

Georgie
So

Brendan Cervin
I think that there are practical applications for synthetic data in consumer research. I think it comes down to the question you're asking and maybe, maybe the importance of the question you're asking as well to a degree. Because there is real cost in asking people to give you their time and feedback.

Brendan Cervin
So let's say you're asking this university student what their favourite soft drink is. Oh sorry, you're asking them what they think of a new soft drink product and you're asking them to describe how unique this product is in the market that they live within, you know, how does it compare to Coke and Pepsi or whatever.

Brendan Cervin
If you were to ask Synthetic Divers to do that and you were to pick, you know, any of the products that exist in the world, that student lives in Sydney. He sees certain advertisements about certain products, his shop stocks certain products, every city has different products, every, every person's going to see different advertising.

Brendan Cervin
I don't believe that the AI the capability of. telling a business how unique a product is in the market when it doesn't live in the real world. But if you were to ask the AI, when do you like to eat? Ice cream. Um, what are the occasions you like to eat ice cream? This is one of the very interesting questions that marketers ask is when do you do this thing with your product?

Brendan Cervin
Um, and you're going to, AI is going to canvas all the potential things, and you don't really care about exact accuracy, but you do want to know You know, where things are leaning and, and, and what the spread is. I think AI will always give you a good range of answers. The accuracy may not be good, but you're looking for the range when you're asking that question.

Brendan Cervin
Like I might think of three good occasions for ice cream, but the reality is probably . AI will find that  for you and the top five will be the top five.

Georgie
This fascinates me, this kind of prompt engineering topic. Um, and I've listened to a few podcasts about people that are, you know, building the models and from what I hear, the models will trip over themselves to give you an answer.

Georgie
That is how they're built is to give you an answer, even if it's incorrect. Brendan, do you think that you need to educate even your customers in how to prompt the models in order to, you know, ensure that they're asking the right question? Like how you. Like how you explained

Brendan Cervin
I'm going to see the way a little bit.

Brendan Cervin
I don't think I don't think the market is really ready for prompt engineering. Like our clients aren't coming to us looking for help in building AI. They're, they're looking, they have a problem. They have the problem yesterday. And it was, you know, research took a long time and it was expensive, you know, they know that they give the researcher a thing and they get a report at the end.

Brendan Cervin
That process is well defined in and out. Clients are just wanting to buy AI with a click, you know, they don't want to have to post, they don't want to have to tell us how to do the job, they want the AI to simply do the job for them. So there isn't a lot of interaction, you know, the clients aren't, the clients expect us to know how to do it, they don't want to have to help us to do it.

Brendan Cervin
And so all the AI that you're seeing adopted in businesses, it's the case of, you know, if I get the same output using this AI as I did from another process, then I will use that AI because it is a thousand times faster. And so, but it's easy to buy products when there are like for like comparison to what maybe the clients used to.

Brendan Cervin
If the AI is doing something new and novel, then it's a bit harder to evaluate whether or not it's useful. And I think that the barrier to buying a product when you just have to click is so much lower versus the investment of knowing how to prompt, use, complex tool clients are just, it's that early, it's that, that instant adoption phase, you know, three years time, it could be that AI just runs everything and there's a general, you know, there's one AI that rules your life and there's, but for a few years, I think there's going to be thousands of AIs solving specific problems in different businesses.

Georgie
Yeah. And, and thank you. That is a great. I wanted to learn how to use a new tool. I probably wouldn't be paying that much money for someone to come and consult me on the matter. Even, even with image, right? Like I've used certain text image models and it's like, Oh no, you need to do layers and layers before you can even.

Georgie
Get anything close to something in reality. And I'm like, Oh, well, nevermind.

Brendan Cervin
There's an arts to prompting. Um, but I think there's also IP to prompting, you know, like being a business that solves a problem. Well, I've been challenging, um, our researchers to sort of treat the AI as like a place where we keep a thousand questions that a researcher would want to ask about research.

Brendan Cervin
And. The AI can ask that question to every test and it never misses anything. And it's doing a better job than a human because it's, you know, it's a sum of human capability, capability and knowledge. All the researchers just throwing their questions in. And if there's an AI, if the AI can give a relevant response, and it gets highlighted to the user.

Georgie
What's the perfect blend of synthetic versus natural occurring events when it comes to your consumer-specific audience?

Brendan Cervin
We don't do any synthetic gear.

Georgie
You don't do any.

Brendan Cervin
No, we don't. But I have been building in previous, uh, organisations. I think that we're evaluating how we will bring synthetic data into our product.

Brendan Cervin
We're concerned around confusion it may create for our consumer, for our clients. You know, the, uh, Come to us today for real consumer research. It's got AI on the side, and we already field questions about some big data we don't want necessarily for people to misunderstand the value of the product we're producing.

Georgie
I have to request feedback almost daily in my day-to-day job, and it is Really hard. People don't want to give feedback. People don't want to do surveys. How do you approach this?

Brendan Cervin
So we actually outsource the, um, the sort of consumer finding process. So there's a number of international companies with hundreds of millions of Consumers that they reward, um, with money based on the amount of time they spend.

Georgie
That's what I'm not doing. I'm not paying them. Oh, it's so obvious now.

Brendan Cervin
So, um, so we have a third party that provides that for us and, you know, they have a massive business trying to incentivise people and find people that can be available to complete their surveys and it can take hours to find these people.

Brendan Cervin
Um, so that's why, I mean, that's probably the slowest part of it. Our research process at the moment is just the time it takes to get hundreds of people to complete the survey.

Georgie
You've really articulated clearly how you gather the data and the kinds of, um, natural data that you're, you're gathering, um, for ideally, but then how do you give that back to the customer?

Brendan Cervin
Um, we're effectively returning a report, which is a mixture of graphs and executive summaries, um, but with, you know, interactive filtering so that you can go back to your demographics. You know, we've, we've got dozens of summaries within the reports, uh, trying to answer specific questions about the data that's particular pieces of data within the report.

Brendan Cervin
So there'll be an AI summary that looks specifically at demographics and identifies the key demographics and the low-performing demographics. And there'll be another AI that specifically looks at what themes were positive or negative. And there'll be another one that will be comparing products to each other.

Brendan Cervin
And another one that's talking about the profile groups of the, of the buyers. So there's. You know, there's a structured process to the research and there's a structured process to the AI that we're producing at the end as well.

Georgie
I find it so, like, I used to be a consultant and the firms I work for are the huge lists of customers you have now, and I know they have data engineers there, and I know that they have.

Georgie
Marketing professionals there. And how come you guys reached product market fit within a year, despite the huge teams that I would have assumed were doing exactly what you're offering?

Brendan Cervin
I mean, OpenAI released ChatGPT how long ago now? Three, maybe three years ago. I was fortunate enough to be in a company that was using OpenAI at the time.

Brendan Cervin
But I think, you know, The industry is still waking up to the technology. I think that working with consumers creates its own complexity around, you know, pricing and monetisation and it's an expensive process. So I think that there's, you know, it's not the simple SAS product that traditional SAS geeks maybe are drawn to because you've got to, you know, you're in a sort of market where you're paying for consumers and it's a bit messier than a traditional SAS business.

Brendan Cervin
So I think that there's, I think that the whole sort of market of customer research is a little bit underserved because of. The messiness.

Georgie
And who, who within the companies do you, do you provide this data to? Is it the C suite? Is it like, which, which business professionals do you work with most closely?

Brendan Cervin
Uh, sort of the marketing and innovation departments generally is sort of the, the main ones. And within that, you know, you could be a product specialist who's working on, you know, FMCG supermarket products, or you could be a marketing manager doing an at-home campaign. For a services business. From that sort of, uh, more marketing based to the innovation base and everyone in between and up to the C suite we've seen clients that have, um, one particular client said, uh, you know, we, we spend X hundreds of thousands of dollars on consumer research per year.

Brendan Cervin
So we'll try ideally for a year with that. A portion of that, and I'll consider it, consider it a success when all the research has been consumed because they believe that everyone should be doing more research.

Georgie
Yeah. Um, one company that comes to mind is Woolworths with the amount of, well, I don't know behind the scenes, but it does appear that they've got considerable amount of spend towards their marketing and also.

Georgie
So their, their platform and their data that they're gathering. And, you know, even they've got their marketplace within the Woolworths app. Now they're clearly trying to gather data to see if they should compete with the Amazon or they're like, I'm not sure if you have any comments on that or if you've, if you could think of anyone,

Brendan Cervin
the supermarket industry is an interesting space because obviously.

Brendan Cervin
Lots of suppliers sell to the supermarkets and the supermarkets, they monetise the data that they have internally, you know, the price lists are sold back to the suppliers. So if you want to understand how much something's selling for, you have to pay the supermarkets. So the supermarkets aren't just a company in the industry, aren't just a particular client in the industry.

Brendan Cervin
They're actually a whole area of complexity into themselves. You know, the depth of data around purchasing that they hold is, um, Value the whole country. So, but yeah, many of our clients are researching products before they hit the shelves and even going to the supermarkets and providing our research as evidence, um, for the product to the supermarkets as to why the supermarket should.

Brendan Cervin
In fact, list the items. So they might be saying it serves a new demographic or it performs better than a competitor or, you know, it might be they're going to an overseas market. They've been sold to before clients, for example, testing wines and then going up and giving them a test goes up and up in the UK.

Brendan Cervin
So the supermarkets are definitely part of our industry and we're, but we, we're more common. It's more common for our clients to be testing products and then communicating them to the supermarkets and for the supermarkets themselves to be testing on our platform. I'm sure they will one day.

Georgie
Yeah. I have a friend that works for one of the suppliers.

Georgie
It's a big beverage supplier and it's just fascinating to hear, um, even the data that gets used about geographies in Sydney where, where diet versions versus the full sugar versions and based on location and all of that stuff is fascinating.

Brendan Cervin
Yeah, I'm sure that they'll have so much data that we analysing it to death.

Georgie
Yeah. Okay. So, so switching track a little bit, you guys recently raised five and a half million from very prestigious VCs. Congratulations. Um, how much of that funding for an AI startup has to go towards compute or, or is it very much the same as any other startup where it's going towards hiring and growth and international expansion and things like that?

Brendan Cervin
Yeah, no.

Georgie
Magic number.

Brendan Cervin
There's no, there's no massive cost associated to AI. I think it's different for every business in terms of how their solution works and how much, how AI intensive it is, you know, how solution is consumer intensive. You know, we've got time from people that's the real cost of doing research compared to AI, which is comparatively low.

Brendan Cervin
Yeah. I'd say that, you know, our, our AI costs are actually in the development of the application rather than the running of it.

Georgie
And what, what would be your, um, Goal for the product this time next year, if I was to get you back on the show, what would you hope that ideally is looking like from a product standpoint at that stage?

Brendan Cervin
I've got some pretty crazy ideas. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if any of them will actually land on the roadmap. Um,

Georgie
I'd love to hear them. It's not AGI is it Brendan? Because I mean, that is a bit ambitious.

Brendan Cervin
No, but I think that AI should be able to understand any survey that someone's done historically. So why not?

Brendan Cervin
You can't, you know, plug into any historical survey and produce a report that a researcher would produce and that means that it needs to understand the correlation between all the questions in the survey and dynamically build out a methodology to answer the survey without ever being told what the survey was about just by reading the survey itself.

Brendan Cervin
What I'd like to know in a year's time is that All of our customers are happy with the product numbers in the business. But I think that the hearing from customers and monitoring all the feedback the company gets from customers, be that across the sales support, whatever it is, just a finger on the pulse.

Brendan Cervin
Our customers happy with this as the product market fit continuing in the way we expect. I think that just having happy customers in a year time is not an easy thing to do. And that's what will make me happy.

Georgie
Um, what's one core metric you might be looking for that would dictate success?

Brendan Cervin
ARR is what SaaS businesses run on, but I think customer happiness is, is my key metric.

Georgie
Amazing. And technically, you know, as CTO, what, what's something that's really challenging about building a product like this and what are you and the team really focused on at the moment?

Brendan Cervin
I find it exciting and refreshing, you know, having built SAS businesses for  years, the technology that we use to build SAS businesses has evolved drastically over that time.

Brendan Cervin
Having the opportunity to start a new business today. It's like building with all the latest, all, all of the opportunities that technology has today without any of the legacy decisions that businesses have been in with. So it's greenfields, the engineers having a great time. It's highly productive. The problems are all, you know, easier problems to solve today than they've ever been to solve.

Brendan Cervin
So it's a highly productive and rewarding time.

Georgie
I can clearly see you're super passionate, especially on LinkedIn and the socials that I do recommend people check out the articles you've written. So the investor Robbie Paul, CEO of Ice House Ventures, who participated in your recent round, said of you guys that your growth was really incredible.

Georgie
He said, of the  plus software companies we've funded, the average time to one million in revenue is four years. And  million takes close to six years, ideally past the  million mark in half the average time and is on track to hit  million just as rapidly. Don't be shy.

Brendan Cervin
It's a very complicated math problem you gave us to do in our head when you described it that way.

Brendan Cervin
And I don't think, I don't think the maths, I think, uh, you know, half the time is two and a half years, but we, we reached a million in a few months. So yeah, we were several million in the first year. And so, yeah, it's, it has been great first year.

Georgie
Did you expect it when you were going into it? You've been CTO a number of times.

Georgie
Clearly you, you have some,

Brendan Cervin
It's all this gamble.

Georgie
Some things you can identify at this stage.

Brendan Cervin
Yeah, I think I'm getting better at picking them. I don't know. There was a, there was a whole raft of decisions that went into the opportunity. I think ideally, It's definitely, you know, in the same way that there was a revolution for the cloud era and in the mobile era, AI is a new revolution and having an AI first start, I think is, um, you probably couldn't have done it three years ago or, you know, it's just the right time.

Georgie
Yeah. Perfect market timing to be a CTO. Congratulations, Brendan. We've reached my favourite part of the show, the rapid-fire questions. Are you ready? What's the best thing about being a startup in New Zealand?

Brendan Cervin
I think it's just the fact that it's New Zealand and we don't have to deal with the rest of the world.

Brendan Cervin
You know, like there's a simplicity to living in New Zealand. Um, you know, there's great talent in the industry locally. Um, companies are, um, you know, growing experience and growing the skilled number of people in the industry. So there's definitely a critical mass in New Zealand, but at the same time, You're not living in Europe or America where the world seems a little bit crazier.

Georgie
Yeah. You guys definitely, you know, outperform per capita, I feel like in terms of startup success stories. So there's something in the water over there, isn't there?

Brendan Cervin
It's easier to ship software overseas than it is to ship. Anything else. So I think that there's an attraction for us to, you know, like, because we're remote and because software has this attraction, it has a natural affinity, I think.

Georgie
What's the worst thing about being a startup in New Zealand?

Brendan Cervin
Oh, time zones to clients overseas. Easy.

Georgie
What's your worst client time zone possible?

Brendan Cervin
UK.

Georgie
Really?

Brendan Cervin
It's the whole opposite.

Georgie
I lived in London for a few years and my friends that still live there, I find I just don't respond to their messages by accident because I'll read it either in the middle of the night and think, Oh, I'll respond later.

Georgie
Or I get it, you know, as I'm half asleep in the morning and I think I'll do it after daycare drop off or after lunchtime and it just never happens. It's terrible.

Brendan Cervin
It can definitely be disruptive. It's hard to, it's hard to manage.

Georgie
Now, in your opinion, you're an open AI fan, clearly. Will ChatGPT , which is.

Georgie
At point of this episode, rumored to be released in December, be a success or a flop, Brendan?

Brendan Cervin
I think they won't release anything but a success. If it's not a success, it won't be released. Like they, they know that they've got to outperform, um, the market and all the existing, um, models there. But they're, it's, you know, they're making improvements to their architecture in a way that, uh, improves, um, AI output.

Brendan Cervin
Which is. More than just building new models, like the way that they're doing reasoning with chain of thought and one preview. That's not necessarily all about a massive new model. It's just about the architecture that they're putting around the models, which is drastically improving the output. So, you know, model, new model or no new model.

Brendan Cervin
They're making improvements all the time, which we just passively benefit from.

Georgie
You don't think they're under pressure to doing you releasing? It's been a little while now or?

Brendan Cervin
Christian from the fanboys.

Georgie
Are you a fanboy?

Brendan Cervin
I don't, I don't know what problem today. Can't be solved by the AI that we have that will be solved by the AI tomorrow.

Brendan Cervin
I think that we're just in the early adoption phase and people just haven't tried to solve problems yet. The AI that was working today, it's incredibly capable. Um, there's a, there's a hundred more use cases that haven't been applied to it. So. You know, I don't think that the performance of the AI is what's holding back the industry at the moment.

Georgie
Agree. I feel like it's going super fast already and I would like it to slow down just a little so we can all catch up.

Brendan Cervin
This is fine, guys. You can take the foot off the brake a little bit.

Georgie
A little bit, right? Now, um, I counted on LinkedIn five times minimum you've been CTO. What makes a great CTO?

Brendan Cervin
Um, I think CTOs are generalists.

Brendan Cervin
I try not to prescribe a process or decisions. I think that You know, engineers like to live in a meritocracy, which is great,  percent of the time. And then you have to play ref in a few occasions to just sort of, uh, you know, everyone's passionate about decisions and engineering. And sometimes there's just a call you tosses to which way to go.

Brendan Cervin
So I'm always asking questions about the process that's being followed. Um, I try to hire people who are experts in the area and go deeper into the problems. Um, that I have time to do a focus on a process is often better than just the decisions and, and even the process itself is something which the team should take over and control.

Brendan Cervin
So they should be evolving it every six months in the startup. The process you had six months ago will not work today.

Georgie
Amazing. Which other AI CTO do you admire the most?

Brendan Cervin
I think the person that's making the biggest impact at the moment is Jensen Huang, who's the NVIDIA,

Georgie
um, CEO

Brendan Cervin
technically, but he's a, he's, he's a person by trade, I think.

Georgie
Why do you admire him? Yeah.

Brendan Cervin
I think that aside from all the software AI improvements that OpenAI has been leading in, you know, the way that transformers, underlying technology has been adopted across all sorts of AI implementations. But they're all, um, reliant on processing and Nvidia has been releasing, I've heard the next chips, um, and the performance they're expecting from them and the fact that the next chips are purely designed by AI themselves.

Brendan Cervin
The first time I think that they've said that their chip is  percent AI and it's like, that's A ridiculous improvement in performance and the chip industry is going through its own boom at the moment, aside from the software boom that's happening with AI. And that's going to, you know, lift all boats, you know, every AI application in the world is going to benefit from a hundred X, uh, performance on, uh, from the chips that are coming out in the next, uh, in the short term.

Brendan Cervin
And then, you know, text AI is just one small discipline of AI. There's all these other ones out there that NVIDIA is getting involved with around training Robots and D environments and vision AI, there's, there's a lot of AI going on at the moment.

Georgie
You've ended on such an exciting, fun note, and I love having a CTO of an AI startup on the show so that we can dive into, frankly, waters that are a little deep for me, but I find Really fascinating.

Georgie
This is how me and I'm sure the listeners learn the most. So thank you so much, Brendan. To finish us off, um, what would you like to shout out to anyone that might want to know a little bit more about Ideally?

Brendan Cervin
If you're tired of slow research, then come and talk to Ideally today. It's that simple.

Georgie
Amazing.

Georgie
Thank you so much for being on the show.

Brendan Cervin
Thanks a lot. Appreciate it.

Georgie
for listening to In the Blink of an Eye. You can check out the show notes for anything discussed in this week's episode. And we will be back next week. This podcast was produced by day one with music by Dan Hanson and visual artwork by Sophie Tyrell. If you loved the episode, please tell your mates and I love AI news.

Georgie
Please share your thoughts and suggestions to GeorginaRoseHealy at gmail.com.