February 12, 2025 • 18 mins
It's been a tumultuous first year for NZ's first AI-focused company to list on the New Zealand Exchange (NZX).
Following on from a recent article on BusinessDesk, we unpack that journey so far and look ahead to what might be next for the contentious but ambitious company.
This week, we have a double feature with an interview with entrepreneur extrodinaire Rowan Simpson to follow on Sunday, so make sure you subscribed to get that in your podcast feed when it drops.
The Business of Tech is sponsored by 2degrees Business.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's a rare thing these days that a company lists
on the enz X, and even rareer for one that
does to be a tech company. But last year Being
Ai burst onto the scene with a singular focus.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I'm personally a massive nerd, and I love technology, and
I love developing things, and I love buildings up and
just all the amazing tools and products and platforms that
are coming out of the AI space right now.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
That was David McDonald, group CEO and executive director of
Being Ai, speaking on the day he rang the bell
to mark the company's launch. This week on The Business Attack,
sponsored by two Degrees, We've got a little bit of
a change due to some scheduling matters. We're splitting the
podcast into two. On Sunday, we talked to a major
name in New Zealand's startup scene.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Rowan Simpson, is one of the most successful serial tech
entrepreneurs in the country and he's distilled what he's learned
into a new book, How to Be Wrong, a crash
course in startup Success.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Make sure you come back for that then, But now
we're talking about my reporting into Being Ai.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
I'm Ben Moore and I'm Peter Griffin. Being Ai the
listed education provider and artificial intelligence development house. Its shares
are currently suspended on the inst X. It's independent directors
have resigned, So I guess a lot of people are
asking what's going on? Can it survive? First off, give
us some background about this company's progress so far as
(01:27):
a listed company.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
That's a big question actually, like for a company that
has only been listed for about ten months via a
reverse listing.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
Back in April last.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Year, Ascension Capital wasn't it was listed.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, it was a listed company. It was basically not operating.
They backed into that show and they used it to
list on the ins X. So that was April last
year that they rang the bell, and since then it
has been a pretty tumultuous an eventful ride.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
I would describe it as so.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
First of all, their their share price shot up, which
caused a caused the nz X to issuer please explain,
So they had a little help there. That became a
little little wrinkle for them to start with. Whether or
not that was fair, it was really, you know, up
to up to your interpretation. But it was a notable
(02:27):
moment for them and a bit of a mar to
the start of their of their adventure on the n
z X since then, I I'm this morning. Actually a
story went live on Business Desk as we record so
Wednesday morning where I kind of talk a little bit
about what's been going on at the company, and if
you read that down the bottom, you'll actually find a
(02:49):
kind of list of stuff that's happened in their company.
So those include essentially a share price that has struggled
over time, sitting at twenty eight cents per share when
it was suspended. They've also faced a little bit of
criticism from an analyst, Mark Claire that led to some
(03:10):
legal proceedings that resulted in Clare Capital making one hundred
and fifty thousand dollars payout.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
Although it was a payout that.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Was a non admission payout, so I didn't do anything wrong,
but here's some money to settle the case.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
They've had a.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Series of kind of underwhelming or stalled acquisition attempts, and
they had application for a charter school, which was a
bit of a long shot because there was a lot
of applications, but that was unsuccessful as part of its
education endeavor. Also, as just mentioned, they have a couple
of schools on the books. They have a logistics company
(03:45):
on the books, but their primary focus reportedly was AI development. Originally,
it was planned to be kind of an AI consulting
firm with a AI product development firm and an AI
investment firm wrapped together in one company. The consulting business
(04:07):
was divested from the company at the end of last year.
The investments haven't really paid out yet, but again it's
only been ten months. And then you've got the product
side of things, which appears to be where a lot
of the attention from the executive branch has been. So
David McDonald, chief executive of the company, who we've had
(04:28):
on the podcast when the company first listed, he has
spent a lot of time and energy along with his CTO,
doctor Nicholas Fourier. I believe it's pronounced, but I could
be wrong. And they have developed a AI product that
they're kind of hoping to take to market soon. So yeah,
it's been complicated. It's it's been tricky, and I guess
(04:53):
that's kind of the story of the first ten months
of being AI on the NZX.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
And the thing about this copany is that it's listed
on the inst X, but there's not much publicly traded
shares happening here zero point four percent or zero point
four to eight percent off. The shares are traded on
the inz X. So the shareholding is held, you know,
predominantly eighty percent by Evan Christian and his wife Katherine
(05:21):
Alsop Smith. David McDonald has ten percent, and then other
sort of key shareholders make up the rest. So now
I really was excited when an AI centric company said
it was going to list on the inz X. Here
was an opportunity for the investor community to get on board.
They clearly haven't and that raises question marks. And then
(05:45):
as your story, which we'll link to, notes, there has
been a lot of tension between Alsop Smith and Evan
Christian and then David McDonald in their philosophy about where
this business is going. And it seems to me as
though David McDonald he's very much a startup guy and
he's looking around the world at AI. I mean, the
(06:08):
company in the last couple of months really has pivoted
to AI agents with this treehouse product they're talking about.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
It's not to be clear, it's not building AI agents.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
We can talk a little bit about project a project
treehouse as they call it, but I do want to
talk a bit about that startup thing that you just mentioned,
and I think that a big part of what being
AI represents is a question for what is public money
for in New Zealand, because I guess from McDonald's point
(06:42):
of view, it was like this was a way of
raising money to fund a startup. He refers to being
AI as a startup. In New Zealand, we rarely would
refer to any nxex listed company as a startup because
that's not what we expect from our listed companies. Of
expect them to be a little bit more mature or
(07:03):
established and have a path to growth.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
And so you know, there has to be.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
A question of is there a different perspective in New
Zealand From New Zealand investors, particularly institutional investors, would also
retail around what money through the ENZX is for. Is
it for seeding a startup? It can be, I mean,
there's no rules against it, but maybe that wasn't as
(07:31):
clearly communicated, or maybe that just wasn't something that people liked,
and you know, that could be part of why the
company's independent directors. And this is my opinion here because
I don't know have any explicit information about why the
independent directors have left, five have come and gone over
the period of the company being listed. Perhaps they were
(07:55):
walking in expecting an established company that they would govern,
and what they actually was a startup that needed a
lot of time and energy investment to actually get it
to run. They wanted a listed company and they got
a startup. So I think that's a question that needs
to be considered in this situation.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
It's a classic dilemma for a startup founder. It's like,
I want to raise capital quickly, and an efficient way
to do that is to do a public offering and
try and raise capital once you're on a stock exchange,
but then you're open to all the scrutiny and the expectations,
and Peter Beck and others have referred to this the stress,
(08:44):
the added level of stress and complicating factors it comes
when you're listed. It builds a discipline where you have
to report every quarter. That is sometimes valuable, but it
also means if you're burning lots of cash and you're
thinking about pivoting to do something else, everyone sees that,
and so the market's confidence can rise and fall, and
(09:08):
we've seen a lot of volatility at one point to
share price was up over seventy cents. Any idea what
caused that?
Speaker 4 (09:15):
No, not really.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
You know, there is one school of thought, and again
this is not a fact, it's just what people have said,
which is this idea of a meme stock. It's become
a more common phrase over the last couple of years.
But this idea that people use a publicly traded stock
and they get a lot of further around it and
(09:38):
invest a lot in it and get other people to
invest and then try and get out at the top
to make a bunch of money, and then the price
goes down. See also meme coin in the crypto space.
So that's one theory. The other theory is that there
was just a lot of excitement about an AI company
being listed amongst a certain group of people, and that
(09:58):
those people all wanted to get in, and then once
they kind of saw the broader investor reaction, that they
decided not to.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Be in anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
I mean, I don't know where the truth is, whether
that's somewhere between those or if it's something completely different,
but yeah, that's the chatter.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
So it's currently it shares a suspended and this is
going on for a couple of weeks now, I guess,
So what do you think the future of this company is.
Obviously the consulting business is now what's it called now
Possible AI Possible AI, So that has been effectively delisted.
(10:40):
That is now just a private entity who's running that?
Speaker 1 (10:44):
So that is run by Nissa Waters, who was part
of the founding team. She was brought into being a
I to run the consulting basically, and so she's essentially
continuing on with that under the new name.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
Yeah, and I guess is a possibility that the thing
just delists. I mean, because it's so concentrated in ownership,
it doesn't have huge ramifications for a lot of shareholders
who have come on in the last year anyway. So
maybe the tidiest thing is if the management team and
if there's dispute as to what the future of the
(11:20):
business is. I mean, this was a collection rather a
peculiar collection of things. You had these schools, this logistics company,
you had this sort of R and D lab for
AI projects. You had the consulting business. I think at
the start of where everyone was thinking how is this
going to work? And clearly it sort of didn't work
particularly well.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Yeah, not so far. I mean, and to be clear,
there is some really strong ip within the business potentially,
and I refer to it in the story. We talked
about it earlier. It's called Project tree House. I don't
know what the final name will be, but I'll give
a quick description of what it is. So think about
(12:01):
open AI's Operator if you're familiar with that. We talked
about it previously. It's an AI agent. You can ask
it to do something. I'm going on a trip to Paris,
book me accommodation and some restaurants. Here's the budget. It
goes off and it does it. Open Operator wants to
do it by the agent actually navigating websites. And I
(12:23):
think I mentioned last week or whenever we talked about
Operator that that's kind of a little bit inefficient for
a machine to try and operate a website that is
designed for humans. What Being AI wants to do is
create a place where all of the APIs from different
companies come in together so that agents can come in
(12:46):
and use more native machine.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Language to deliver on what you actually want.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
So you say, I want go to Paris, give me
some accommodation, Da da da, and it goes off into
the Project Treehouse World, and it can very quickly go, Hey,
all your businesses out there with your APIs plugged into
this system. What are some places? Okay, those look good?
What's the budget, what's the guidelines? Okay, yep, yep, yep. Hey,
(13:14):
I found this. Do you want me to book this
for you? And it's much quicker and much more efficient
than trying to do it by navigating human centric websites.
Essentially how he describes it as he kind of says,
Google at the moment is where everybody goes to find
to get access to companies and applications. For the most part,
(13:35):
what we want to be is kind of the Google
for AI agents all in their native language.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
Well, great idea.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I think there's a lot of players that will be
going after this space, so it's going to be super competitive.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
You know.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
At the moment, the attention has been on the creators
of the agents, so the salesforces, the Microsoft's, the Oracles
and out who have all suddenly got these agents. But
the key thing is will the integration making them useful
cross app and we were at the Samsung launch recently
off their new phone, and they were really raving about
(14:10):
this cross app interaction where Spotify and your text messages
and Google Maps, you can basically speak to Gemini on
your phone and mention all of these things and it
will pull information from across these apps and put it
in one place. To date, that's been hard to do,
and this is what the sort of the agent world
(14:32):
is bringing us towards. But to do that you have
to have this seamless integration in the background. It shares
all of that information, all of those inventories, all of
the booking systems. That is incredibly complex. So I like
where they're going with that, but boy, they've got I
think a big hill to climb, particularly now when there
(14:52):
certainty about their listing and their ability to raise capital
to fund this. There's definitely a question mark over there.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Yeah, as there are a lot of question marks, like
you know, will essentially that technology be spun up into
a new private company that you know, that's one possibility
that will go to perhaps seek VC or whatever else.
But I think also that does there is the barrier
of the AI agent contextual understanding between it and it's
human as well. So it is also going to rely
(15:21):
on a little bit more progress from the AI LLM
based companies to actually make sure that they're delivering something
that is capable of reaching the level that is required.
Then there's the privacy, and then there's the you know,
credentials and logging in and using payment systems and stuff
like that.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
So there is still a fair bit of.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Integration work I would imagine to go. You know, it's
a big bet on a future that a lot of
people are saying is likely, and if they can get
in there at the right time, with the right tech,
into the right people, with the right funding, it has
a possibility to be very successful. And McDonald said he's
been working extremely hard on this with his you know,
like I said, with the CTO up to three am
(16:02):
coding to try and build this thing within ten months.
So I don't want to downplay the work that's being done.
But amid that, you've also then had the tension of
the majority shareholders who are out there saying, well, you know,
we've got a show shareholder value.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
We've got these.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Logistics company that we said we were going to improve
with AI.
Speaker 4 (16:22):
We've got these schools.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And we said we were going to improve the world
of education with AI, so we need to get going
on that as well. And the consultancies maybe not playing
out how he wanted it to, and it.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Sounds like two different businesses.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Really, yeah, I think that was the case. And McDonald
is a tech guy. He wanted to build, he wanted
to focus on what he was doing, so to be
the to be named as the group CEO, maybe that
was a slight miscalculation. That's my perception. I can't say
that as a fact. So it's complicated because I think
(16:55):
there has been a little bit of people have spoken
about being AI very pejorative and in conversations sometimes, and
I think that you know we're actually talking about is
people within an organization fundamentally, and while the organization may
have had its troubles, it may not have been, you know,
run as smoothly as you would expect. McDonald's view was that, actually,
(17:16):
that's just the way that it is in startups sometimes,
is that you have these disagreements and you have these
kind of you have to work through these problems, and
you have to pivot and you have to make decisions.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
And the problem was they were on the ends of X.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
They were a public company, and so it made everything
a lot more magnified.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
It's a pivotal time they've really got a make or
break situation ahead of them.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah, there's a lot of decisions to be made, I think,
and there's probably working through it diligently at the moment,
and I think I'm going to hopefully speak to them
more once the once they've worked through those things and
those decisions have been made, So we'll keep an eye
on Being AI and see where that startup story goes.
If you're interested in learning more about the history Being AI,
(18:00):
you can check out some.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
Of my previous reporting.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Links are in the show notes at Businessdesk, dot co,
dot MS. You just check out the podcast section.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Form follow the Business at Tech on your podcast platform
of choice.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
We're also streaming on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Get in touch with your feedback and topic suggestions. We're
on LinkedIn and blue Sky.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Don't forget to catch us on Sunday for that interview
with Rowan Simpson.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
See you then,
It's a rare thing these days that a company lists
on the enz X, and even rareer for one that
does to be a tech company. But last year Being
Ai burst onto the scene with a singular focus.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
I'm personally a massive nerd, and I love technology, and
I love developing things, and I love buildings up and
just all the amazing tools and products and platforms that
are coming out of the AI space right now.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
That was David McDonald, group CEO and executive director of
Being Ai, speaking on the day he rang the bell
to mark the company's launch. This week on The Business Attack,
sponsored by two Degrees, We've got a little bit of
a change due to some scheduling matters. We're splitting the
podcast into two. On Sunday, we talked to a major
name in New Zealand's startup scene.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Rowan Simpson, is one of the most successful serial tech
entrepreneurs in the country and he's distilled what he's learned
into a new book, How to Be Wrong, a crash
course in startup Success.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
Make sure you come back for that then, But now
we're talking about my reporting into Being Ai.
Speaker 3 (01:04):
I'm Ben Moore and I'm Peter Griffin. Being Ai the
listed education provider and artificial intelligence development house. Its shares
are currently suspended on the inst X. It's independent directors
have resigned, So I guess a lot of people are
asking what's going on? Can it survive? First off, give
us some background about this company's progress so far as
(01:27):
a listed company.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
That's a big question actually, like for a company that
has only been listed for about ten months via a
reverse listing.
Speaker 4 (01:39):
Back in April last.
Speaker 3 (01:41):
Year, Ascension Capital wasn't it was listed.
Speaker 1 (01:43):
Yeah, it was a listed company. It was basically not operating.
They backed into that show and they used it to
list on the ins X. So that was April last
year that they rang the bell, and since then it
has been a pretty tumultuous an eventful ride.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
I would describe it as so.
Speaker 1 (02:04):
First of all, their their share price shot up, which
caused a caused the nz X to issuer please explain,
So they had a little help there. That became a
little little wrinkle for them to start with. Whether or
not that was fair, it was really, you know, up
to up to your interpretation. But it was a notable
(02:27):
moment for them and a bit of a mar to
the start of their of their adventure on the n
z X since then, I I'm this morning. Actually a
story went live on Business Desk as we record so
Wednesday morning where I kind of talk a little bit
about what's been going on at the company, and if
you read that down the bottom, you'll actually find a
(02:49):
kind of list of stuff that's happened in their company.
So those include essentially a share price that has struggled
over time, sitting at twenty eight cents per share when
it was suspended. They've also faced a little bit of
criticism from an analyst, Mark Claire that led to some
(03:10):
legal proceedings that resulted in Clare Capital making one hundred
and fifty thousand dollars payout.
Speaker 4 (03:15):
Although it was a payout that.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Was a non admission payout, so I didn't do anything wrong,
but here's some money to settle the case.
Speaker 4 (03:23):
They've had a.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Series of kind of underwhelming or stalled acquisition attempts, and
they had application for a charter school, which was a
bit of a long shot because there was a lot
of applications, but that was unsuccessful as part of its
education endeavor. Also, as just mentioned, they have a couple
of schools on the books. They have a logistics company
(03:45):
on the books, but their primary focus reportedly was AI development. Originally,
it was planned to be kind of an AI consulting
firm with a AI product development firm and an AI
investment firm wrapped together in one company. The consulting business
(04:07):
was divested from the company at the end of last year.
The investments haven't really paid out yet, but again it's
only been ten months. And then you've got the product
side of things, which appears to be where a lot
of the attention from the executive branch has been. So
David McDonald, chief executive of the company, who we've had
(04:28):
on the podcast when the company first listed, he has
spent a lot of time and energy along with his CTO,
doctor Nicholas Fourier. I believe it's pronounced, but I could
be wrong. And they have developed a AI product that
they're kind of hoping to take to market soon. So yeah,
it's been complicated. It's it's been tricky, and I guess
(04:53):
that's kind of the story of the first ten months
of being AI on the NZX.
Speaker 3 (04:58):
And the thing about this copany is that it's listed
on the inst X, but there's not much publicly traded
shares happening here zero point four percent or zero point
four to eight percent off. The shares are traded on
the inz X. So the shareholding is held, you know,
predominantly eighty percent by Evan Christian and his wife Katherine
(05:21):
Alsop Smith. David McDonald has ten percent, and then other
sort of key shareholders make up the rest. So now
I really was excited when an AI centric company said
it was going to list on the inz X. Here
was an opportunity for the investor community to get on board.
They clearly haven't and that raises question marks. And then
(05:45):
as your story, which we'll link to, notes, there has
been a lot of tension between Alsop Smith and Evan
Christian and then David McDonald in their philosophy about where
this business is going. And it seems to me as
though David McDonald he's very much a startup guy and
he's looking around the world at AI. I mean, the
(06:08):
company in the last couple of months really has pivoted
to AI agents with this treehouse product they're talking about.
Speaker 4 (06:16):
It's not to be clear, it's not building AI agents.
Speaker 1 (06:20):
We can talk a little bit about project a project
treehouse as they call it, but I do want to
talk a bit about that startup thing that you just mentioned,
and I think that a big part of what being
AI represents is a question for what is public money
for in New Zealand, because I guess from McDonald's point
(06:42):
of view, it was like this was a way of
raising money to fund a startup. He refers to being
AI as a startup. In New Zealand, we rarely would
refer to any nxex listed company as a startup because
that's not what we expect from our listed companies. Of
expect them to be a little bit more mature or
(07:03):
established and have a path to growth.
Speaker 4 (07:06):
And so you know, there has to be.
Speaker 1 (07:08):
A question of is there a different perspective in New
Zealand From New Zealand investors, particularly institutional investors, would also
retail around what money through the ENZX is for. Is
it for seeding a startup? It can be, I mean,
there's no rules against it, but maybe that wasn't as
(07:31):
clearly communicated, or maybe that just wasn't something that people liked,
and you know, that could be part of why the
company's independent directors. And this is my opinion here because
I don't know have any explicit information about why the
independent directors have left, five have come and gone over
the period of the company being listed. Perhaps they were
(07:55):
walking in expecting an established company that they would govern,
and what they actually was a startup that needed a
lot of time and energy investment to actually get it
to run. They wanted a listed company and they got
a startup. So I think that's a question that needs
to be considered in this situation.
Speaker 3 (08:20):
It's a classic dilemma for a startup founder. It's like,
I want to raise capital quickly, and an efficient way
to do that is to do a public offering and
try and raise capital once you're on a stock exchange,
but then you're open to all the scrutiny and the expectations,
and Peter Beck and others have referred to this the stress,
(08:44):
the added level of stress and complicating factors it comes
when you're listed. It builds a discipline where you have
to report every quarter. That is sometimes valuable, but it
also means if you're burning lots of cash and you're
thinking about pivoting to do something else, everyone sees that,
and so the market's confidence can rise and fall, and
(09:08):
we've seen a lot of volatility at one point to
share price was up over seventy cents. Any idea what
caused that?
Speaker 4 (09:15):
No, not really.
Speaker 1 (09:17):
You know, there is one school of thought, and again
this is not a fact, it's just what people have said,
which is this idea of a meme stock. It's become
a more common phrase over the last couple of years.
But this idea that people use a publicly traded stock
and they get a lot of further around it and
(09:38):
invest a lot in it and get other people to
invest and then try and get out at the top
to make a bunch of money, and then the price
goes down. See also meme coin in the crypto space.
So that's one theory. The other theory is that there
was just a lot of excitement about an AI company
being listed amongst a certain group of people, and that
(09:58):
those people all wanted to get in, and then once
they kind of saw the broader investor reaction, that they
decided not to.
Speaker 4 (10:09):
Be in anymore. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (10:12):
I mean, I don't know where the truth is, whether
that's somewhere between those or if it's something completely different,
but yeah, that's the chatter.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
So it's currently it shares a suspended and this is
going on for a couple of weeks now, I guess,
So what do you think the future of this company is.
Obviously the consulting business is now what's it called now
Possible AI Possible AI, So that has been effectively delisted.
(10:40):
That is now just a private entity who's running that?
Speaker 1 (10:44):
So that is run by Nissa Waters, who was part
of the founding team. She was brought into being a
I to run the consulting basically, and so she's essentially
continuing on with that under the new name.
Speaker 3 (10:57):
Yeah, and I guess is a possibility that the thing
just delists. I mean, because it's so concentrated in ownership,
it doesn't have huge ramifications for a lot of shareholders
who have come on in the last year anyway. So
maybe the tidiest thing is if the management team and
if there's dispute as to what the future of the
(11:20):
business is. I mean, this was a collection rather a
peculiar collection of things. You had these schools, this logistics company,
you had this sort of R and D lab for
AI projects. You had the consulting business. I think at
the start of where everyone was thinking how is this
going to work? And clearly it sort of didn't work
particularly well.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Yeah, not so far. I mean, and to be clear,
there is some really strong ip within the business potentially,
and I refer to it in the story. We talked
about it earlier. It's called Project tree House. I don't
know what the final name will be, but I'll give
a quick description of what it is. So think about
(12:01):
open AI's Operator if you're familiar with that. We talked
about it previously. It's an AI agent. You can ask
it to do something. I'm going on a trip to Paris,
book me accommodation and some restaurants. Here's the budget. It
goes off and it does it. Open Operator wants to
do it by the agent actually navigating websites. And I
(12:23):
think I mentioned last week or whenever we talked about
Operator that that's kind of a little bit inefficient for
a machine to try and operate a website that is
designed for humans. What Being AI wants to do is
create a place where all of the APIs from different
companies come in together so that agents can come in
(12:46):
and use more native machine.
Speaker 4 (12:49):
Language to deliver on what you actually want.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
So you say, I want go to Paris, give me
some accommodation, Da da da, and it goes off into
the Project Treehouse World, and it can very quickly go, Hey,
all your businesses out there with your APIs plugged into
this system. What are some places? Okay, those look good?
What's the budget, what's the guidelines? Okay, yep, yep, yep. Hey,
(13:14):
I found this. Do you want me to book this
for you? And it's much quicker and much more efficient
than trying to do it by navigating human centric websites.
Essentially how he describes it as he kind of says,
Google at the moment is where everybody goes to find
to get access to companies and applications. For the most part,
(13:35):
what we want to be is kind of the Google
for AI agents all in their native language.
Speaker 4 (13:41):
Well, great idea.
Speaker 3 (13:43):
I think there's a lot of players that will be
going after this space, so it's going to be super competitive.
Speaker 4 (13:49):
You know.
Speaker 3 (13:49):
At the moment, the attention has been on the creators
of the agents, so the salesforces, the Microsoft's, the Oracles
and out who have all suddenly got these agents. But
the key thing is will the integration making them useful
cross app and we were at the Samsung launch recently
off their new phone, and they were really raving about
(14:10):
this cross app interaction where Spotify and your text messages
and Google Maps, you can basically speak to Gemini on
your phone and mention all of these things and it
will pull information from across these apps and put it
in one place. To date, that's been hard to do,
and this is what the sort of the agent world
(14:32):
is bringing us towards. But to do that you have
to have this seamless integration in the background. It shares
all of that information, all of those inventories, all of
the booking systems. That is incredibly complex. So I like
where they're going with that, but boy, they've got I
think a big hill to climb, particularly now when there
(14:52):
certainty about their listing and their ability to raise capital
to fund this. There's definitely a question mark over there.
Speaker 1 (15:00):
Yeah, as there are a lot of question marks, like
you know, will essentially that technology be spun up into
a new private company that you know, that's one possibility
that will go to perhaps seek VC or whatever else.
But I think also that does there is the barrier
of the AI agent contextual understanding between it and it's
human as well. So it is also going to rely
(15:21):
on a little bit more progress from the AI LLM
based companies to actually make sure that they're delivering something
that is capable of reaching the level that is required.
Then there's the privacy, and then there's the you know,
credentials and logging in and using payment systems and stuff
like that.
Speaker 4 (15:40):
So there is still a fair bit of.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Integration work I would imagine to go. You know, it's
a big bet on a future that a lot of
people are saying is likely, and if they can get
in there at the right time, with the right tech,
into the right people, with the right funding, it has
a possibility to be very successful. And McDonald said he's
been working extremely hard on this with his you know,
like I said, with the CTO up to three am
(16:02):
coding to try and build this thing within ten months.
So I don't want to downplay the work that's being done.
But amid that, you've also then had the tension of
the majority shareholders who are out there saying, well, you know,
we've got a show shareholder value.
Speaker 4 (16:17):
We've got these.
Speaker 1 (16:18):
Logistics company that we said we were going to improve
with AI.
Speaker 4 (16:22):
We've got these schools.
Speaker 1 (16:23):
And we said we were going to improve the world
of education with AI, so we need to get going
on that as well. And the consultancies maybe not playing
out how he wanted it to, and it.
Speaker 3 (16:32):
Sounds like two different businesses.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
Really, yeah, I think that was the case. And McDonald
is a tech guy. He wanted to build, he wanted
to focus on what he was doing, so to be
the to be named as the group CEO, maybe that
was a slight miscalculation. That's my perception. I can't say
that as a fact. So it's complicated because I think
(16:55):
there has been a little bit of people have spoken
about being AI very pejorative and in conversations sometimes, and
I think that you know we're actually talking about is
people within an organization fundamentally, and while the organization may
have had its troubles, it may not have been, you know,
run as smoothly as you would expect. McDonald's view was that, actually,
(17:16):
that's just the way that it is in startups sometimes,
is that you have these disagreements and you have these
kind of you have to work through these problems, and
you have to pivot and you have to make decisions.
Speaker 4 (17:24):
And the problem was they were on the ends of X.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
They were a public company, and so it made everything
a lot more magnified.
Speaker 3 (17:32):
It's a pivotal time they've really got a make or
break situation ahead of them.
Speaker 4 (17:37):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
Yeah, there's a lot of decisions to be made, I think,
and there's probably working through it diligently at the moment,
and I think I'm going to hopefully speak to them
more once the once they've worked through those things and
those decisions have been made, So we'll keep an eye
on Being AI and see where that startup story goes.
If you're interested in learning more about the history Being AI,
(18:00):
you can check out some.
Speaker 4 (18:02):
Of my previous reporting.
Speaker 3 (18:03):
Links are in the show notes at Businessdesk, dot co,
dot MS. You just check out the podcast section.
Speaker 1 (18:09):
Form follow the Business at Tech on your podcast platform
of choice.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
We're also streaming on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 3 (18:16):
Get in touch with your feedback and topic suggestions. We're
on LinkedIn and blue Sky.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
Don't forget to catch us on Sunday for that interview
with Rowan Simpson.
Speaker 3 (18:24):
See you then,
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