You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebek on Bloomberg Radio Live.
Person. I don't know if you check out the share price, Matt, it was up about twenty one percent yesterday, gay Back, I think are in eleven twelve percent today's session. But the company reported earnings beat expectations, gave a forecast that was above analyst consensus for second quarter EBITDA. There are some analysts that a little bit cautious on the growth page can.
Just run over ibit dah and not explain it. Does everybody know what ibit dies?
Earnings before interest, taxes, appreciation, Nubritization Live Person works with the likes of NatWest, Chipotle, BT and Brewery, connecting the companies digitally with our customers. So let's get into it. Rob Locasio is back with us. He's the founder and CEOT Live Person. He's on zoom in New York City. Rob, how are you?
Thanks for having me back?
Well, good to have you tell us a little bit about the quarter in the outlook. What's going on?
Yeah, so we beat the high end of our IBIDA. We're at the high end the rage of of our revenues.
No, we basically got very focused on, like a lot of companies, you know, starting to make money, and now we're focused on, you know, turning up the growth engines.
We just launched our new generative.
AI products last week, so a lot of excitement at the company.
I just want to just follow because a lot of there were a few analysts that actually cut their price targets on you guys today by an average of seventeen percent, and the stock is down about fifty percent. There's two sales tenholed. I'm just curious, what is it that you think the investment community is potentially missing or what do they hammer you most about.
We did a big restructuring last quarter, and we even we took out about seventy five million in revenue that was not on core and we.
Even sold a business.
So I think it's really the investors digesting taking that much revenue out.
But then we got positive eve DA and now we're.
On a path for a positive cash flow as a company, So.
So that's I think they just got to digest it.
Yesterday we did what we said we were going to do. This will be the four I'll call it the first clean quarter and now we're kind of off to the races.
I mean, I think a lot of companies rob that did really well during the pandemic like you did. I mean, whose stock did really well during the pandemic have just gotten crushed since then and brought down below twenty nineteen levels because the pendulum swung too far in both directions, right, I mean, you were trading for forty bucks a share at the end of twenty nineteen and now it's four
sixty five. What do you think it's going to take or how long until you can get back to those pre pandemic levels.
Look, we have a very you know, good sound strategy, which is, you know, with the leader in enterprise AI and working with the biggest brands of the world and now AI and everything around Jenner of AI.
Is about the hottest thing that you can expect.
So I think for us, there's win in our sales to continue to actually to you, you're right, there's a disconnect right now. But you know, we just got over the next couple of quarters, I think two or three quarters re establish our growth rates and then you know, then we could get back to those you know, pre pandemic rates.
But the pandemic. We grew like weed.
You know, contax centers shut down, they need to do messaging in chad in AI and bots, and we were at the right place at the right time, with the right tech. Obviously that growth has come down, but now there's generated AI and that's a whole other way of growth.
So that's really what we're focused on.
So HOLP was that like, you know, when you say that you're the leader in enterprise prize AI and you are working with some well known companies. When you have an average deal, what kind of revenue do you book on that and what kind of visibility or long term visibility does it actually ultimately give you.
Yeah, So our our poofs around six hundred and seventy million, six and sixty million, six and sixty thousand, but an average enterprise customer paces anywhere from three to ten million dollars a year. And this would be a large bank and large telco insurance company. And they're really using it to drive the transformation from traditional voice calls into digital. And now what they're looking at is how do we automate those conversations at a very high rate.
And we've been able to do a very good job up to now.
But with all the generative AI stuff, we're going to be able to automate conversations.
And we just even released a thing.
Called Voice AI that we can automate voice conversations. So this is really, I think an interesting time for us on the product side and the platform side.
We talked to the CEO of gup shop yesterday and they do this kind of thing for Verizon and City, and I have to say I fully body slammed the technology because I recently had a problem with Verizon and I noticed, I mean, the bot doesn't work, it's not giving me anything, and I would honestly like pay money to be able to skip past that part and just get to the agent, the human agent that I want
to talk talk to. How long until rob this technology works well enough that you know, somebody with specific problems, not just FAQs, is going to be satisfied talking to AI rather than and even maybe prefer talking to AI than a human.
Well, I mean, look, we do a billion conversations a year and where there's seventy five percent of us have automations and twenty five percent automations, and so you're right, bots to me is a four letter word, but the way we do it with our customers because we have a very rich set of tools, we also have this amazing data set, we're able to do very high quality automations.
With our customers.
So the generative AII stuff, when it does, it just opens up a lot more on the long tail. Like we were looking at one of our airlines and we have a lot of the biggies and we found people ask about iguanas like I'm looking for an iguana, So I'm looking to take an iguana on the flight. And we would never write a bot for that. But the large language models hits the data set and comes back and then gives a reply like it's they have to be forty five pounds or less.
We're going to guana on a flight. So this is the stuff that's really powerful.
You take the data set and the models, and the models are basically taking the data set and making them conversational without building a bot.
And bots will go away. You know, they'll eventually go away.
That's awesome. You know, the average weight of a male iguana is eight point eight pounds according to that.
You know, Rob, now he's going I saw it was under forty five.
He's now gone down an iguana rabbit hole.
I really want to be sitting locked to somebody on my next flight.
Oh lost him. I want to ask you something. Enterprise AI roughly almost seventeen billion and twenty twenty two in terms of market size. I think that's a global market size. We're looking at maybe one hundred and three billion by twenty thirty. Maybe it gets even more with all of this excitement over generative AI. But you are dealing with some big players Microsoft, IBM, Salesforce, and Video Like. There's a lot of people that are involved in it, not
all of them are enterprise AI exclusively. How do you ultimately compete against some of these bigger players who again going back to you know, those bigger players who are doing this kind of day in and day out, are maybe going to be a cheaper option and maybe a better option.
Yeah.
Look, we're I would say there's about ten of us in the race of enterprise AI.
You named a few of them. What makes us unique is we've got a.
Data set that's one of the most comprehensive and detailed data sets around conversational add these are chats transcripts. If you want to power high quality conversations. You need that data set, and we have the largest data set out there. The second part is we're starting to build tools so other people in the organization can get access to that
data set. For instance, one in marketing can say, tell me today why people are not liking us or our products, or tell me the top ten reasons that the website is having issues, or build a marketing.
Campaign that I could sell.
Let's say, tell sell service to families in New York and it would generate the ad campaign. And so you have to be able to do that using the unique data set. And what makes AI powerful is when you have the language language model, right plus the data set, and the data sets like half of the problem.
And we have one of the best data sets in the world for business outcomes.
It's true. We heard that from Ed Ludlow yesterday. He was at Google in Mountain View and he said, the data set is key.
Wow, the data sets can and I think you're going to see their companies just valued on the data sets. Like if one day that the value of our company could be what is the data set? How much is that worth? It's tremendous because it delivers these business outcomes.
Right, which is why exactly any McAfee talking about right, this stuff is only as important as the data you put into it, the amount accumulation of data, and it just gets smarter and smarter.
Got to have the IP.
Got to have the IP. Rob, Thank you so much. Fun to check in with you again, Rob the Cossio. He's a founder and CEOT live person joining us on Zoom in New York City. Yeah, it's what.
Are you going to do?
We're talking about A again. We should do a whole show on A. We should just do an hour, one hour nightly show on artificial intelligence.
Isn't that isn't that coming?
Yeah, we should have an AI. I would do A do the show because you.
Just want to get home earlier. But it's about No, it's it's fascinating. I mean, like all of a sudden, the conversation. I think about the last year or two, like right, we were all kind of all in on crypto and we're all obsessed with that, and I'm still all in. I know, I know you are, and we're not. We're still figuring that out. But now it's all about AI generated it just moves along.
The two can work together, Yes, they AI can work with the blockchain.
A I could maybe make crypto work. Maybe maybe there you go.