Dan Wagner, chairperson and CEO of Rezolve, was recently a guest on Benzinga's All-Access. Rezolve Brain is an AI-powered platform for e-commerce businesses to optimize their online stores with enriched taxonomies, personalized recommendations and a conversational AI-powered shopping interface. Rezolve began trading on the NASDAQ this month.
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00:00Dan, good morning and welcome to the show.
00:07Hey, good morning.
00:09You know, there are so many things for us to talk about, especially in the space of AI.
00:13But for the folks that might not be familiar with your company, give us a brief overview, please.
00:18OK, so what we're trying to do is level up commerce and e-commerce in particular,
00:22because e-commerce has been really left unchanged for the last 30 years.
00:28And Gen AI really can change that dramatically, can really, you know, level it up.
00:33And what I mean by that is that, you know, when you're dealing with digital commerce,
00:37you can't really ask opinions of the digital site.
00:40You can't get insight.
00:42And so what you tend to do, what consumers tend to do is they go to a website,
00:46they look at the products and they go off to YouTube and they do some research.
00:50They go and see some, you know, unboxing and all that kind of stuff and reviews.
00:55And so what we're doing is we are changing that by making e-commerce really the best salesperson on the planet.
01:02When you're talking to our brain commerce Gen AI sales agent,
01:07you're actually getting the best insights into the product.
01:10So you could ask a question like, you know, what's the best mobile phone?
01:14Is it an iPhone 14 or a Samsung S22?
01:17And you can get advice and opinions and interaction with what we would describe as the best salesman on the planet.
01:23How do you kind of take that?
01:25So I've seen, you know, AI use in different aspects of it.
01:28Even now drive-thrus are using AI.
01:31Customer service applications are using AI as well.
01:34How do we implement that, however, to the HR and IT service management space?
01:39Because I would assume, and I'd love for your insights,
01:41that that's a bit more of a personalized touch that you would need.
01:46Look, we, you know, we come from a commerce background.
01:49You know, we've been doing e-commerce and search technology for 40 years.
01:52I built the largest information business in the 90s and the early, you know, the late 90s and sold that to Thomson Reuters.
02:00And then I built the market leader in enterprise SaaS e-commerce in Europe and sold that to Oracle.
02:05So, you know, we come from a background of decades of running e-commerce and search.
02:09And so what we're doing now is we're just leveling that whole thing up in the context of e-commerce and digital engagement.
02:16So that when you are interacting now with, when you will be interacting now with commerce sites,
02:21you'll be doing so in the same way that you might do if you go into a physical store,
02:25where you get advice and opinions and interaction and you are actually led to a sale.
02:29We have built our own large language model, a foundational language model.
02:33So I think we're the only listed public company that owns its own foundational model, a 300 billion data parameter model.
02:40And so on the back of that, that model has been designed specifically for commerce and retail.
02:45And I think that where we are in AI at the moment is that there are a number of players out there that say,
02:50here is some tools to go build your solutions on.
02:54And we're going into market saying we've got the tools, but we built the solutions.
02:58We're solving real problems, which is, you know, basically upending the old style of e-commerce and creating a whole new environment.
03:08An example might be, you just pick your phone up and say, I need two tickets to a show on Broadway.
03:14I'd like to go to a popular show. I want to sit in the center stalls.
03:17You know, what have you got on Wednesday, the 27th of November?
03:20And you get the answer. You buy your tickets.
03:23And the process to do that today is search for Broadway, search for a date, get the results.
03:28You don't know if they're popular. You don't know if they're in the right category.
03:31You don't know if you've got the seats. You have to filter, filter, filter.
03:34That process is history in our view.
03:37It's interesting. We have like this trading competition.
03:39And we like I have to think about with along with the team of, hey, it's a take two clicks to sign up or one click to sign up.
03:45And it's kind of similar to what you're saying is like, hey, you've got to find a Broadway, the dates to show the ticket, your credit card information.
03:51There's a there's more of a process. And, you know, I want to talk about open AI.
03:55And then you mentioned the phone. So like Apple's, you know, working with open AI to kind of integrate those with their new iPhones as well.
04:01There's so much happening in this AI space.
04:04I'd love to know, how is what you're doing different from a solution from, say, an open AI that you may not have mentioned yet?
04:11Because I know you mentioned a few nuggets.
04:13So we don't see ourselves as competitive with open AI and those guys, because those guys are selling, you know, to use an analogy, they're selling concrete and glass.
04:23And they're saying to people, go build your skyscraper. And we're going to the market saying, look, we're a realtor.
04:28We've already got the property. We've got loads of skyscrapers and apartments and offices.
04:32And you can come take an apartment, take an office.
04:35I mean, that analogy, what I'm really saying there is that we build solutions to solve attrition and checkout in retail.
04:42Right. And we can do it in any one of 95 languages.
04:45And we can do it in a way that allows people who are not familiar with products to have a conversation with a salesman.
04:52When I say a salesman, it's a gen AI generated, you know, artificial intelligence interaction.
05:00But it is a solution to a problem. And we're solving that problem.
05:04And we provide it as a tool set. Now, retailers and brands, they're not very sophisticated in building products.
05:10So they go to third parties and they say, look, have we got an open AI? Can you build this on top of it?
05:15And, you know, it's a process and they often get it wrong. And we've seen that in the past.
05:19You know, so what we're doing is we're saying we've got the solution, we solve the problem.
05:22It's AI, it's gen AI, it's great. But it's just a foundation to deliver a solution and we solve problems.
05:31You know, I buried the lead here. I should have started with this and I apologize for that.
05:34But you just, you know, you're on the Nasdaq now, you're trading, you know.
05:37So welcome to the financial markets in the public space.
05:40What do you want the investors to know about this big development?
05:44Because a lot of time people forget that, hey, this was a private company that has seen success.
05:47And now they're going public. What do you want the potential investors to know that are watching right now?
05:53OK, so I want them to know this, right? I'm 40 years a tech entrepreneur.
05:57I built businesses in the space over that period, market leaders.
06:01And there has never been a bigger opportunity than what gen AI offers the market.
06:07It's the biggest shift in technology that I've seen in my career, in my lifetime.
06:11And we are sitting at the forefront of one of the biggest opportunities, which is commerce and retail with a suite of products that solve significant problems and do so without the customer having to build anything.
06:22Right. We've solutioned it. It's built in solutions over the last eight years we've done that.
06:27So we're ready to go to market and pick up a market position, which we believe over the next couple of years we're going to dominate.
06:36So that's the opportunity. Now, people can play the markets. They can play the opportunity. They can take a view.
06:41I would say that we are a serial winners. We're sitting at the forefront of a massive opportunity with a fantastic suite of products that are at the moment not comparable by the players in the market.
06:55And we have competitive advantage of owning our own large language model. So we don't have the cost base of some third party having to pay open AI or somebody else for those services.
07:06So we are competitive. So we have all of those features, plus our own patents in the space that give us, I think, competitive advantage.
07:14Now, I've got a couple of minutes with you, but I feel like any company that is in the Internet space, especially in the space of AI, needs to worry about privacy and security of customer data.
07:24Because now more than ever, we are giving companies our data, not just from our phones, but the Internet.
07:31Now even our cars can track kind of where we're going and say, hey, you spent this much time out of target.
07:36So maybe there's just so much happening. How do you ensure that privacy and security of customer data is safe with you?
07:43So first of all, we're PCI level one compliant, which is the payment card industry standard. The highest level of security is bank level security.
07:50But more importantly, we're not an independent provider of solutions. We are a technology provider that provide those technologies to retailers.
08:01So it is the retailer that is using our tech as part of their site. They have their own policies and procedures in managing security and infrastructure.
08:11Most of them do it pretty well, certainly the large ones. And so we are just providing technology to them to level up their interaction with their customers.
08:19You know, I think that it is really meaningful to be able to go to say, and this is not a customer, I'm just using an example, Home Depot and saying, hey, when I'm talking to the site, either through my phone or typing into the site or speaking to the site, I'm saying something like, hey, look, I need to build some shelving.
08:36What do I do? And to get an answer, you need some shelves, you need some varnish, you need some nails.
08:43This is how you can put it together. You get a proper conversation, which is the kind of conversation I might have with a very good salesperson at Home Depot.
08:51So that's kind of where we're coming from. We're trying to say that there is a real step change in the interaction with digital platforms as a result of our tech.
09:01Something that we say often here at Benzinga is if you want to invest in the thing behind the thing, where the technology behind what you may be seeing is what you want to kind of try to figure out and see what's happening.
09:12So like if a bunch of cars are going to be sold, well, look at the tire manufacturer, right? Because no matter which car manufacturer is going to win, everybody needs tires.
09:21But it was a great talking to you again. Congrats on being listed on the NASDAQ. Congrats on being open to the public markets.
09:28Is there anything else that I missed that you wanted to talk to our viewers about before you go?
09:32No, I just think that we're new onto the market. It's a great opportunity to buy into the growth of AI and Gen AI in particular.
09:38Vertical is very focused, a great opportunity. There's plenty of other opportunities in vertical markets.
09:44But I think that we're focused on one of the biggest, a multi-trillion dollar retail and commerce marketplace. And we think that we're going to win.
09:54Hey, I look forward to having many more conversations, especially after your first earnings report.
09:58Maybe we can cover those things and talk about possible guidance as if you provide them as well.
10:02But thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it, Dan.
10:04It's a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me.