00:00Before we get into it, I just want to give you the opportunity to explain to us a little bit
00:04more about what Applied AI does.
00:06Your flagship platform is called Opus.
00:09What do you do and how is what you're offering different from what's already in the market?
00:14Thank you, Joanna.
00:16Honored to be here.
00:16We at Applied AI do one thing, which is help enterprises rewire to become AI native.
00:23We call ourselves the world's most boring AI company because we really focus on kind of the real business gains
00:29in the back office.
00:30Okay.
00:30How do you stand out then?
00:32So we believe innovation begins in parts that are very boring.
00:39So the first thing we do is we help enterprises do business process reengineering.
00:43So to really understand what is the intention that they want to do that process and how to reimagine it
00:48and have it deployed in a way that's highly regulated.
00:50So we see it as helping orchestrates between AI and humans on a kind of this dance where the AI
00:59does the carbs and the human does the protein of the work.
01:02Okay.
01:02That's a good way, a good analogy.
01:05So your clients are enterprises, right?
01:07Yes, yes.
01:07I'm guessing you saw the Citrini research report that came out a couple of days ago and had a huge
01:12impact on the market, even more than the author of the report thought.
01:15But essentially, he's painted quite a dystopian view of what's going to happen to white-collar jobs and also to
01:22enterprise software businesses.
01:25How do you think this is all going to play out?
01:29And specifically, how might it affect a business like yours?
01:32So I think, you know, we've been saying this will happen for over five years now, and we've been at
01:39the front line iterating very quickly to see how things change.
01:42There's a few things in the reports that we really agree with, and we think that it actually underestimates the
01:47structural change that we're going to experience as a species.
01:51One is kind of, you know, we're surprised at how good our AI is getting, so it's either, you know,
01:58two outcomes.
01:59Either AI is getting very good, or knowledge work was never that hard to begin with.
02:03And we think that the bastion of jobs will essentially be regulation, where we can automate almost everything in enterprises,
02:17except the laws are still focused on liability assumption by humans.
02:21Interesting.
02:22So to have a human, we call it the cost of oversight and supervised automation.
02:26Would you put yourself in the AI disruptor camp, or in the other camp, which could be a business that's
02:35liable to disruption from all of these new model releases by Anthropic and Google?
02:41I think we're on the disruptor camp.
02:44We see ourselves as trying to help enterprises rewire quickly, because every enterprise must rewire to survive.
02:51The pricing power you'll have, if you do, is incredible.
02:56Yeah, so you don't see a point where we get to, where AI needs to product commoditization.
03:02There'll still be differentiation within the different offerings that are available.
03:06I think, so we're LLM agnostic, and I think we'll benefit a partner, Anthropic as a partner, OpenAI as a
03:12partner.
03:13But we think it's actually the localization of the processes for every country and every jurisdiction, where how do you
03:20figure out which human has to sign off on the AI recommendation?
03:24And that's a ground game.
03:25Okay, interesting.
03:26Let's talk about the company.
03:27I know that you actually founded it in the U.S.
03:30You incorporated it in London, but obviously you're based in the UAE now.
03:34You have significant backing from these various sovereign wealth fund entities within the UAE.
03:40How is that instrumental to your business?
03:42So, we believe the UAE will play an outsized role to our kind of AI future.
03:48We've seen the UAE really walking the walk, and we think that reasonable regulation is a huge part of the
03:57future.
03:57Yeah.
03:58And, you know, we see it as kind of the demand of knowledge work, and white-collar work is the
04:03West, but the supply of white-collar work and knowledge work is the East, and the UAE is in the
04:08middle.
04:08Yeah.
04:08And we call it the skill routes.
04:10You successfully just completed a pre-Series B funding round.
04:15I know the financials have not been disclosed, but perhaps you can give us a better idea on what the
04:21expansion plans, growth plans are from this point onwards.
04:25Yeah, so we're over 350 employees right now.
04:30We aim to end the year with over 1,000, and we're exporting AI from the UAE all around the
04:36world with the U.S.
04:38So, I think we aim to be the fastest and most effective way for any enterprise that feels the pressure
04:46from that report to help them rewire very quickly.
04:48Okay.
04:49I'm going to put you on the spot here.
04:51Your Series A valuation had you at around $300 million.
04:55Do you have a target valuation in mind?
04:58Yes.
04:59Can you tell us?
05:00We already have a few term sheets that are well above that.
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