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Explore your curiosity - Interesting people with fascinating stories.
Life consists of three things:
-The stories we tell others
-The stories others tell us
-The stories we tell ourselves.
Shauli, welcome aboard to the show. So happy to have you here today.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Ari. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:I I want to jump right into this. I feel like the purchasing, processes that happen online today could be so much better. And my personal experience of it is I just get emails from Amazon that my wife bought something and then every day something is showing at my doorstep, but she sends back a lot of stuff. So I wanna jump into the changing landscape of what consumerism in The United States actually looks like. So here's my first question for you, and I know this is a lot.
Speaker 2:Go ahead.
Speaker 1:Are are people buying differently today versus ten, twenty years ago, and what does that look like?
Speaker 2:So there's definitely an evolution in consumerism. You can see that people are buying people are buying more, you know, in general. There's definitely more offering. Prices are fluctuating for sure, but I think companies are ecommerce companies are definitely maximizing, optimizing their their website, and their offering to make sure that people buy and buy more, and there's obviously the technology layer that's stacked on top of it. In essence, the website, the way it is, hasn't really changed in the last ten years in many aspects, And now we've now we've we've seen the first revolution, which is the AI revolution.
Speaker 2:It really changes everything. But if you look at up to two years ago, I would say, before AI became became a thing, websites were pretty static. They're they were the same gave the same experience of a menu, of a search. Yes. You see reviews.
Speaker 2:Yes. You get to see some pop ups, but that's where it was. That's and that's where it stayed up until two years ago. And things are now changing because of the the ability to have deeper personalization, the entrance of Before machine learning AI
Speaker 1:get to to machine learning AI, there's been a few humps to get over. So I, you know, ten years ago said, look, there's a challenge selling clothes or shoes on the Internet because you want to wear the clothes and you want to test it out kind of and see that the shoe fits you or whatever. So so this issue is no longer an issue. Now I I I don't buy clothes on the Internet, but my wife does, and it's a lot. What has changed here?
Speaker 1:Like, why are we so comfortable today buying on the Internet and we weren't ten years ago? What's changed there?
Speaker 2:So definitely the amazing return policies that companies have, there's no doubt that that made a huge impact. The fact that you can return a bed after eleven months and pay down a mattress after you slept on it for eleven months, and that's possible. So people have no risk in buying those those things and saying, okay. I'm just going to buy a line, and worst case, I'll return it. And and a lot of people actually buy all different sizes that they can because they're not sure about sizing.
Speaker 2:Okay. I'm gonna buy small to extra large, and worst case, I'm gonna return, you know, almost all of them. And that happens.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. So I I get I get $300, and she's like, oh, don't worry. I'm gonna return almost everything. I'm like, okay.
Speaker 2:I get exactly the same exactly the same. And then I have to go I have to go to UPS and do
Speaker 1:Oh my lord. Thank god she she does that. I mean, once in a while I get tagged, but she does that. Whole Foods, right, they'll they'll do the returns as well.
Speaker 2:So we
Speaker 1:get a whole for Amazon. So, okay, so return policies have been a huge thing, but, you know, what about if you don't know exactly what you want, right? We've had these ideas for a long time about kind of putting the clothes on the person virtually. Did that ever take off or did that just die and never came around?
Speaker 2:It never actually materialized. I've never seen up to now, right? Maybe it's going to change soon, but I've never seen a way where they can actually, I would say, simulate the real experience. In essence, what, like, what a lot of retail online retailers, what they do is they they try to get you to measure yourself, and and then you have, like, size guides, and you never actually get it right, and what they get, by the way, is a lot of returns, a lot of returns.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And they deal with that. And and I know it's not great for them. They don't love it, but it's part of part of the business, part of how they see it.
Speaker 1:So so something exploded. I can't remember. Is it two years ago or more or less? Chateapiti came along. The industry once more, you know, it's been changing with the Internet over the last twenty years.
Speaker 1:I still remember my dad saying, oh, the Internet's never gonna be a thing. Like, he actually said that. So, you know, the Internet has been changing, but it's been changing slowly over twenty years. And now, ChatuchPity came along. It's been accelerated a hundredfold.
Speaker 1:What's changed since ChatGPT in the consumer arena?
Speaker 2:So before I before I jump into that, I have something funny to say is that when we started the company, my cofounder and I, that was was back in 2020. Right? And we went to a bunch of investors with this great idea of AI selling selling, you know, for ecommerce, and all investors, basically, almost buy almost all of them said the same exact thing. AI is never gonna take off. AI is never gonna be a thing.
Speaker 2:Sorry. We're not investing in AI.
Speaker 1:I said that. I said AI is not a thing. I said I'm an investor too so I guess I fall into that category. I said, look, there's no such thing as AI. It's just machine learning and these models are kind of crap.
Speaker 1:They have huge mistakes. Dude, I will I will say I said that. But then Chattypitty came along and and I was like, holy shit. Something changed. Like, the world has changed.
Speaker 1:And the thing that I said will be coming in ten years, it's here now.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. No. It's it's crazy. And it's changing everything.
Speaker 2:Every industry, no doubt. Every industry. And we see it up and up close from the ecommerce space. Right? That's where that's what we came to change.
Speaker 2:And then we see the way consumers that when we started a company and when we had our first, like, first product out, people were very hesitant about talking to the AI, or they had an idea of what the chat on the website could do. For them, the chat on the website is to complain about, you know, where's my order? I wanna return all this stuff. They never even thought about the idea
Speaker 1:that success. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Can AI actually help me in as as a as a real in store salesperson could? Then then there's no doubt in their mind that there was not even, that possibility. It's there to to yell at. That's what it's Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah. It was and didn't even believe it could do that at that stage. Right? It just wasn't good enough.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. What we see now, which is amazing in the last last two years, basically, and it's growing every month, is the adoption of Yeah. Of this form of a chat.
Speaker 2:So people are so used to chat, to AI chat, that it just replaces everything. Replaces search on the website, replaces, anything that they know. They just prefer talking to the to the AI chat versus anything else.
Speaker 1:Right. It it's crazy. I mean, this it's almost like everything we knew about user experience, user interfaces is just up for change. And the whole way that we consider and I I feel bad about even calling them chatbots because the whole chatbot failed two years ago. This is what's happening now is something completely different.
Speaker 1:It's AI driven websites. I think it's a different philosophy which people feel much more comfortable with because it's not that small little chat on the bottom right of the screen where you know, you try to talk to it and you're cursing it after three minutes because it doesn't understand what you want and then you're waiting for a, you know, a human being because the whole idea is let's try to filter out customers so they don't hit the agents. That's not what's happening today. It's completely different. Here's my question.
Speaker 1:Is this opening up an appetite with the big stores? So are the Targets and the Amazons and the Ares of the world, right, are they suddenly saying, hold on, something's changed. We need to go in deep now. We need to pull out our checkbooks and start spending money?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. You can see that. I mean, the adoption definitely goes from the, I would say, the bottom all the way to the top.
Speaker 2:So obviously, the the small e commerce websites are eager to, like, yes. Let's get in. Anything that could save our business, anything that could get us to sell more, we're in. And the the big ones are moving slower, of course. But you definitely see this big adoption.
Speaker 2:It comes now from the Walmarts of the world. Definitely Amazon is fully in with their I don't know if you've noticed this. Rufus, that's their AI and a website that that its job is to do Yeah. The same exact know. Ask Rufus, and its job is to to get you to to to buy and buy more, and, you know, it's doing a great job.
Speaker 2:And, they're they came late to the game in that sense, but they're they're fully invested in it. So there's no doubt that that the future is ecommerce websites are going to transform into chat experiences, AI chat experience.
Speaker 1:So you know, I'll say something about late to the game. Apple with the iPhone were also late to the game. They were not the first people to have a touch phone, they were not the first to have a smartphone, So this whole, you know, first to market, I'm not a big fan of it because I see people that come late to the market and dominate. So I don't know if Rufus is any good. I haven't tried it, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt even though they're late to the market, so to speak.
Speaker 1:What do you see the future? Like, okay, so we're seeing these chatbots kind of become more an integrated part of the website to the level that they're almost not chatbots anymore. They're just AI prompting inside of the website. What's the future hold? How is this gonna even morph even more?
Speaker 2:So there there was definitely an evolution from AI as a chat on the website beginning of, I would say, like, ChatGrady came out, there was full AI that is able to we have a full conversation in a point where, like, you can't even understand is that a human or an AI. But what it was what I would say was lacking is the ability to perform actions, right, in the back end. And then AI agents came along, right, and all of a sudden, the AI has powers to do things, to do actions.
Speaker 1:So to Hold on. Let let's explain this because this is this is Yeah. Yeah. No scary and also very exciting at the same time, and we'll get to the scary in a second. So what does this mean perform actions?
Speaker 1:Right? In the past, you went into your chatbot. You asked them a question. Maybe they knew, maybe they didn't. Very often they didn't.
Speaker 1:We didn't have GPT power yet, LLMs. So we're kind of stuck. Now we have the LLM power and it's like, oh, sweet. This can actually carry a conversation. It has answers.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. But we've taken the next step and the ChatGPT version of this is called Operator. There's, I think Manus is the Chinese version, but the startups like yours is basically saying, well, we can do an operator inside of this website. We can pull up the shopping cart. We can add carts.
Speaker 1:We can, you know, pull up a product. We can actually manipulate the website experience to the level that this is not a chatbot. This is now fully integrated into the website. So it's a whole different experience that if you have bitter feelings from chatbots from two or three years ago, this is something else, right? It's the operator version of the B2C purchasing experience.
Speaker 1:So I just wanted to stop for a second and bring our audience with this journey. Where do we go from here?
Speaker 2:So the way I see it going is in a few years the chat experience is going to be more important. So the way the way mobile came to our lives and was first like a nice gimmick, and then at some point in transition, people said, hey, mobile first, mobile more important. And today, you know, you can look at the e commerce websites, the traffic there is 90% mobile, 10% desktop. So desktop start desktop is definitely losing to the in in the war with with mobile. And the way I see it is now there's a new experience, right, the the AI chat experience.
Speaker 2:And that's now maybe has a small scale, but later on, it's gonna take more of the the traffic of of the website. And at some point, it's gonna completely replace the website. There would be no need for the static website. We scroll down endlessly, let's say, looking for products, especially because mobile is so common now, 90%, like I said, the experience is really bad. Right?
Speaker 2:So the scrolling and browsing for products, it can take ages just seeing 20 products, just moving between them. Right? So why do you need that when you can move to AI chat where you can just say, hey, recommend something for me. You know me better than me. I know myself now.
Speaker 2:You know everything about me. I'm looking for a new shirt. Just go and find me something, right? And then it asks you a few questions in a conversational way, just like an in store sales assistant that can say, okay, sure. No problem.
Speaker 2:Looking for something special or you have some event to go to. And then it can tailor the option for you. So that's where it's going. More conversational, less website, and I think that, really feel bad for all the Wix of the world. I think that, know, their, you know, their role is
Speaker 1:gonna Wix be is going down.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:They're not that good to start with because they're not optimized to search engine up and, like, they're pretty bad. It's like, if you just anyway, I won't go down that route at all. I'm I'm not a fan of Wix. Okay. So here's my prediction.
Speaker 1:Within way less than ten years, any website that you come into, it will look like a website, but every single one of them will have a prompt at the bottom. Yeah. End of story. That's my prediction. Every single website you go into will have a prompt and sure, you can navigate the website, but you can also just start typing.
Speaker 1:As you start typing, it's gonna change the website.
Speaker 2:Exactly. So I think even more. What you'd see is sort of like a a chat experience, right, straight away, maybe with a nice background, but the chat is gonna be in the middle. There's there's no reason to have anything else. Just come in and talk.
Speaker 2:And there's yeah. There's gonna be pictures and images in the in the background, but the the chat is gonna be the center, no longer the the bottom right side, like you said. It's gonna be the center and say
Speaker 1:Absolutely not.
Speaker 2:Let me know what you're here for. I'm here to help. Right?
Speaker 1:Shauli, what an what an absolute delight. You know, let's go to the dark side for a second. Yeah. Go go for it. Okay.
Speaker 1:Our audience won't allow me not to to do that. AI is getting really sophisticated. Like it can really calculate complex matters. Now our PII is really not private. Is available through, you know, third parties, have all this information collected about us.
Speaker 1:You know, this is what, fifteen, ten years ago where a person started to get like diaper ads before the husband knew about the pregnancy, It's at that level and it hasn't gotten any better, it's gotten worse, right? So now you have personal information from all kinds of websites being combined with a smart AI that can process that information, that is being combined with its ability to actually do things in certain websites, but also outside of that website. Like, it can go and do something in your bank account, it can go and order you a flight to wherever you want to go. So we're seeing AI not just give you answers inside of the chat, but it can also do stuff, right? Yeah.
Speaker 1:This is starting to feel like we don't have to have general artificial intelligence in order for something to go really wrong. We need is a bad prompt and some bad permissions.
Speaker 2:On a personal level, yeah. Like, personally, yeah, there there's no doubt that I think that in some some point, you're you're gonna use your own operator to do everything for you. Right? You're not gonna do things day to day things. You're not gonna do chores.
Speaker 2:You're just gonna let the operator run things for you. And it's it's very likely that the operator will make mistakes based on the things that the operator thinks that that you want to do. Right? Like, I don't know, like, it could be I can give a I don't know, let's say a Many chances for the wrong Exactly. Exactly.
Speaker 2:Oh, you know, someone's birthday is coming. Maybe they'll they'll buy a gift when it's not someone's birthday, and they're like, I don't wanna
Speaker 1:I don't wanna buy a gift
Speaker 2:for that person.
Speaker 1:Gift to the lover, and then your wife gets the the the the vacation. It's like
Speaker 2:this Exactly.
Speaker 1:I mean, it just feels and, like, okay. So whatever system you give permissions to the AI and it can manipulate, Like think of somebody malicious coming along and the worst thing that they can do, the AI can be making a mistake. That's one part of it. But hold on, let's bring security into this. What if your AI agent, which has permissions to your stuff, gets hacked by a malicious AI?
Speaker 1:Like it just it's starting to get really scary. How do we think about all this private information with all this intelligence to process the data and yet I don't want, you know, organized crime or hackers getting access to my agent, to my AI. If it's my website and I'm a commercial entity or if I'm a private person running, you know, my operator to do stuff for me, how do we protect ourselves?
Speaker 2:I mean, we're talking about really big companies in the end, like OpenAI and Anthropic, and they're facing those problems every day. There's no doubt that they're facing problems of security and they're trying to really secure your operator or your client, your AI client, and they're trying to make sure it's secure and there's no way for you to access that without a two way authentication. And so they're doing their best to do that. But obviously, there's going to be open source AI models, then we'll give their services for free, and they might not be that secure. Or if you're using a Chinese one, and that's definitely not as secure as you might think.
Speaker 2:So there's no
Speaker 1:way in hell that Chinese, you know, Manus and and all those guys are not backdoor to the government.
Speaker 2:Oh, for sure.
Speaker 1:Going into your social, what do they call it? Their social score. Right? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, no way in hell that the social the Chinese social score is not being fed by, you know, you're prompting an AI. Like, no way. Like, I don't believe that.
Speaker 2:I agree. I agree. I agree. And, yeah, so so it's like, let's say, at your own peril, if you're using any of those, you know, those cheaper somewhat cheaper versions of of ChatGPity, basically. So, yeah, so there's a lot of security risks.
Speaker 2:There's no no doubt, but it was the same thing with using social media and the fact that your, you know, profile is public and someone can hack your profile at any moment. Yeah. So it's this it's the same thing. The the risk is obviously bigger. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's it's not as you know, when someone has your Facebook profile, they can blast, you know, tell your, you know, all your friends that something bad about you. But here, it's yeah. You're right. It's much it's have yeah. It's gonna have access to your bank account probably.
Speaker 2:Right? Yeah. So yeah. There's no doubt.
Speaker 1:It's it's maybe it's not tomorrow, but it's gonna happen. Like, why, like, why wouldn't we ever get to that stage? So it does become scary. Every time I use Manus, I'm like, I love Chairman Mao. With his permission, let me ask the following prompt.
Speaker 2:Try to ask questions about the Chinese government. Oh, it's funny.
Speaker 1:It makes it disappear a second later. Right? It's like, oh, tell me about Tiananmen Square. It's like, this answer cannot be provided. But it gives the answer and then it disappeared.
Speaker 1:Like that was a thing for a while.
Speaker 2:Was a point where like, don't know what you're talking about. Nothing happened.
Speaker 1:It was all good. It was all good.
Speaker 2:Nothing happened.
Speaker 1:I, you know, I don't believe that the Americans don't have a back end backdoor into chachapita. They're just much more subtle about it. But, you know, all governments are are doing that. Right?
Speaker 2:There was a big story of of, you know, the American government US government obviously having a link to Facebook and being able to retrieve information. So don't know. Might be the same.
Speaker 1:Don't know. I mean, this generation, right, to a degree, my generation, we're the same generation and our kids, they've kind of relinquished all privacy, so it's almost like we don't care anymore. But I think that's dangerous. So and then like, oh, why are we blaming government? We're just giving this stuff an open profile.
Speaker 1:Exactly.
Speaker 2:They definitely prefer they definitely prefer convenience over privacy. Like, if it could do stuff for me, I don't need to work. Yeah. Give give my details. No problem.
Speaker 1:Yeah. That's gonna bite us in the ass one day, and we're gonna figure it out.
Speaker 2:Oh, for sure. For sure. But it's gonna be companies that that's their job, and then they, you know, cybersecurity companies is gonna rise, they will secure people, you know, that's No. No. No.
Speaker 2:No. No.
Speaker 1:It's the virus antivirus paradigm. Right. I completely agree with you. I think that's very insightful. Okay.
Speaker 1:Shauli, we have only one this has been so much fun. We're out of time. There's only one question we ask every single guest.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:If you had to go back, and this is a personal question. It's hard to answer. Take your time. If you had to go back to 20 year old Shauli, what would the advice be that you would give him?
Speaker 2:What would the advice be? So when I was in my twenties, I went to I traveled, traveled the world for a year. I was traveling in all over South America, so a whole year. So my advice would be to extend the trip
Speaker 1:and travel more. You know, I think that's, you know, we don't travel that much. In fact, if you know the stats, I think 50% of Americans, something like that, don't have a passport. Right? So so I'll just reinforce your your your comments.
Speaker 1:And let me ask you this. What did the international travel South America, what did it do for you? How did it change you? In what way?
Speaker 2:So I think that that was that was the first time in my life I was really exposed to other cultures. Lot of other cultures. It was, like, basically, all the backpacking backpackers from all over the world, so, you know, so many different nationalities. And, obviously, the places where I visited, so from Argentina all the way to Colombia, and I got to really, you know, learn the the local culture of of Latin America, which was amazing. So for me, it was mind opening just like to really understand that there's a bigger world out there and different people out there and accept other people.
Speaker 2:So that was definitely a big change for me.
Speaker 1:I love it. Shauli, thank you so much for joining today. This has been absolutely delightful.
Speaker 2:Thanks, Ari.