Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Right to the Source. I'm Robin Harrison, and I'm here, as ever, with the managing director of H2 Gambling Capital, the Donnie Wahlberg of data, Mr. Ed Birkin. Ed, how are you today?
[00:00:20] Speaker B: I'm good, thanks, Robin. I thought we'd agree to change the intro to the least popular, least downloaded, least listened to, least prepared podcast run by Clarion Gaming.
Yeah, I mean, there are AI gaming sector.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: There are less popular podcasts than us. I mean, we're an indie podcast. That's what we said last time. We're indie. We're lo fi. You know, it's. It's the DIY scene.
[00:00:45] Speaker C: You guys say I throw. Throw AI words around. Lo fi. Indie. Seems like we're also playing that. That game of specialized words.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: Exactly. We're buzzword Bingo. And that is an excellent introduction to our very first guest in this podcast. The other week, we talked about bringing in someone to talk about Africa. And so, as promised, we have someone to talk about AI. We get this, we get the first letter right. But we are delighted to introduce Mark Flores Martin of Xgenia AI to right to the source. Mark, it's great to have you with us.
[00:01:21] Speaker C: Thanks, Robin and Ed for having me on this podcast. It's a pleasure especially to be the first guest. Well, I hope I will live up to the expectations and that you guys have set up. So let's kick it off.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Excellent. I mean, we have very low expectations because if you've seen the podcast before, we are wholly unprepared. Ed generally ends up ranting about something and then it all just comes together in the edit and a.
[00:01:50] Speaker C: Do you guys want me to give in? Give an intro to Xgeni or how do you want to go with it Most, actually, would you like me to.
[00:01:58] Speaker B: I mean, I would suggest a good host like Robin would be able to give an intro, but given he's probably done no preparation and doesn't even really understand your business, then it's probably better if you give the intro, Mark, unless you want to make Robin squirm a little bit.
[00:02:10] Speaker C: So, yeah, so to give a bit of an intro about Xgenia, we. We are a buzzword company. We use the word AI a lot around here. Focused on our first product was the slot machine generator. Right. So we built a lot of tools to help people prototype and build initial slot machines, mainly on the artwork mathematics side and once advanced over there, brought to market and it's been quite well received on the market. That was the prototyping Stages and now as a company we realize that actually the real thirst has been more on the tools side that we actually built to build our tools. So we took a little bit of a U turn and looked at the infrastructure we were building to create AIs and we decided that would be a great idea to bring to market actually the ability of the abyss to actually build their own artificial intelligence, build their own technology using artificial intelligence out there, train and make it really, really simple for them to build AI technology, whether it is for internal tools, for games, for apps. And that is our next sort of tool. We're bringing out AIs, we call it AI is building AIs. So buzzword and buzzword, as we like to do. And this tool allows you to basically prompt anything and it will start to build a very simple no code, visible code, but you'll be able to sort of see like view request for a podcast, you know, give me research on this company and build a great intro. Then it would sort of of go through and sort of dig that, that in and build the whole technology roadmap for you. And you'd be able to always have that before every meeting, sends out emails, questions. So it's a technology that can really help to accelerate and simplify AI. Because I think lots of companies out there are, are not sure what to do with the technology that is available. And it's quite powerful technology available. But as I like to say, we've just discovered fire and we're still learning how to with it. Right? And that's the stage we're at.
[00:04:07] Speaker B: Well, look, first of all, I do not think that AI should be used to try and replace the intro to our podcast. I mean, Robin nailed it on his third attempt of saying, hi guys, I don't think we need AI to be able to do that.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: The stuff that I have to put up with every week. But getting back to the subject at hand, rather than aids a unfocused random abuse, it's interesting what you're saying, kind of building these underlying tools, you know. So I suppose, I suppose kind of the thing that jumps out to me from that is what does this mean for the future of B2B providers? Because essentially, if you're providing this solution that essentially gives people, you know, potentially the means to have this vertically integrated kind of a, you know, kind of AI generated, you know, solutions stack like, is that fair to say? Because essentially you're giving the, I suppose, you know, the kind of be the operators, you know, the means to build out, you know, what they need rather than outsourcing to third party kind of specialists.
[00:05:10] Speaker C: Yeah, so I feel like you're putting me on the gambling guillotine here because you know, we're not here to put out all those SaaS companies out of business for sure. But the reality is that the next generation of companies is coming who are going to be leading the igaming scene. And these companies are now being crafted in side of for example at ISIS pitches, pitch events. Right. These are lots of good companies that, that might seem like they have weird ideas, but they're going to be strong for us with our technology. It is for example, it is to understand that a company cannot send data out, right. So of their own company that data is going to be the gold of tomorrow. So anything if you don't collect it, if you don't build it, then you're going to be paying for it, buying it from your competitor tomorrow. Right. So for us these tools are there one for startups to build companies on. So this is an infrastructure that startups can really hyper build great tools, great apps, great programs on so they without the usual costs that would would be required. But for larger companies who would like to you know, put build more custom software on their side, more custom AIs more and have less dependency, that is something that would be very powerful them use. Now companies out there, we, we have like in this platform we have like a marketplace, we have connectivity, a solution. It's quite a big, big piece of software that we're releasing. I think it's never been seen before and this at this level in the iGaming industry and lots of companies will be able to jump in onto the marketplace and connect and provide services which are I guess more tangible to the, to the igaming industry. So for with our tool you could go ahead and you can build you your own chatbot which, which reads into your data of your company and it's living locally because our application is completely local. It not nothing comes to us. No data, no AI information, nothing comes to us. So you can build that chatbot in like four or five days, right. And, and then you have your own full fledged AI chatbot tool. Right. But other companies can connect with that.
[00:07:12] Speaker B: Do you need to be able to code to do that?
[00:07:15] Speaker C: No, it's all node based. So you go to the AI and you write what you want and it builds so starts building up first it builds up like a diagram which shows you the stories, the user stories the task is going to do. The UIS is going to build and Then it starts. Once you sort of you and the AIs have agreed on a way forward, then you can set it off to start building up your solution, no matter how complex it is. And what it builds is basically look like more like Lego blocks which you connect with strings. And that gives you the data flow or the connection flow, whether it's an UI or anything else. So of provides you with that flow even if you are not a programmer. You can build quite powerful, quite secure applications and we want it to be used by anyone in the company. So if someone needs a workflow to automate some emails he's receiving or some invoicing, you know, like ocr, read the invoice file, it put in the data and double check it, you can build that tool and deploy it inside of your company. And so it needs to be usable by anyone from game developers to app designers. And it all lives in one big flow. So it's quite a, quite a large application. So this is why we call it building AIs because you ask the AI to build you the AIs of your dream, basically. And it either does that by custom, using custom training methodologies or if it requires it most of the time, 90%. You never need that, right? Companies simply don't need that. There's enough data inside of the models of AIs today that you just don't need custom data training. And you just go out, right? So you just push that tool either internally or externally, depending on what you need, deploy it to wherever you want, it's fully yours, right? Whatever you build on the tool is owned by you, Right. And at the end, yes, it does export code, but doesn't mean you need to look at the code, you know.
[00:09:02] Speaker A: Okay, and talk us where you kind of came into this sector because doing research before the call C. Ed I do actually do some, I noticed that your background know covers a lot of different sectors. I mean like AI feels like a thread that's running through it, but you know, it's like it doesn't feel like you're one of these, you know, kind of gaming guys that was previously a blockchain guy, that was previously a social casino guy, yada yada yada, you know, so talk us through, you know, how you've kind of come into, you know, kind of developing this specifically for gaming. What was the kind of, like, what was the attraction of this industry and the kind of market signal that's brought you, you know, to kind of like go all in on next gen here?
[00:09:42] Speaker C: It's a Great question. And my journey, I think started mostly as a ethical hacker. So I used to work quite a lot for US companies doing various ethical hacking. Right. For them, helping them secure their systems and coming up with ways to break their systems. Right. And that gave me a very good mindset of, of looking at software in a different way. Right. I obviously am multi, so I was in the gambling industry. My first startup, so to speak, was we had built a VR casino that you could walk to. This was on 13 years ago, so you can imagine the level of quality the VR was at at that time. We built a full Robin.
[00:10:21] Speaker B: You know that if you'd done your research properly, if you'd have researched properly, you'd have known the, the background in gaming.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: Do you see what I have to put up with, Mark? You see what I have to boot up with every week?
[00:10:31] Speaker C: Did ChatGPT tell you this detail, Robin? I'm going to have to side with Ed on this one. No, I'm joking.
[00:10:37] Speaker A: It was, it was earlier on in your career, you know, you've.
[00:10:41] Speaker C: I don't know if that information is readily available online, so it could be. Robin did his research, but it's been scrubbed because it was 13 years ago, so it could, could be that as well.
[00:10:50] Speaker B: Or it's just the high level fluff journalism that Robin does rather than the kind of deep dive analysis that you'd expect someone at a consultancy to do. But anyway, sorry you were rudely interested. Please carry on, Mark.
[00:11:01] Speaker C: I love how he likes it easy, but I mean, that's in a way brotherly love, you know, giving you those vibes in a way.
So, yeah, I was in the gambling industry and we did a lot on the slot side, roulette, various games, we built various games. Also our flagship was VR. It worked really, really well. But it was so early that the headsets were way, way behind and people just get motion sickness in using them. It's not like today where you can spend hours in them. No, no, you could spend seconds because it would give you such bad motion sickness that you just couldn't stay in the game. But it was really a big thing for us. And then after that I sort of took a, a strange turn, moved into the telephony industry and the real estate industry with mortgage, digitalization of mortgages and this type of things sort of came as a random opportunity which I jumped into. You know, I always like owning real estate and getting in real estate, so I just thought it was a good complementary company to have. And as we sort of went into this Whole sort of technology, AI, using AI a lot and deep diving. In the early days of artificial intelligence, right. We sort of, we started building up a company trying to see what we're going to do. And we sort of took a U turn back to see what was going on in igaming and looking at the latest in innovations in igaming and we felt like it was very weak in innovation. So we felt like this would be a really good to test and push new technologies, especially AI technologies, and bring that to the industry. Right. To give people the ability to really understand what you can do with this technology that's out there. And so that's sort of how it happened. We were always in gambling when igaming, I guess, and always interested in building there. And it just seemed like a golden time to come back in, right. The age of, the age of the lack of innovation in the industry or perceived lack by us at least sort of brought us back in, in an excited way. And we're quite happy with the decision we made because, you know, people are so much fun in the igaming industry. I mean, the events are top notch, right? It's crazy wild. So that's, I guess, how we came back in.
[00:13:15] Speaker B: This is going much, much better than I was ever expecting. So I'll ask a question just to bring the level down a bit.
So one of the things that pisses me off a lot is when people talk about, oh, I've got this AI solution. And I go, okay, well tell me about it. And I know very little about AI, but effectively it's just an algorithm. I'm like, so what you're effectively telling me is you've built an algorithm which you know, has been around since 300 BC, the first algorithm, or in the gaming space since the late 90s, like, that's not AI, so stop putting that word on your website to try and sell a product. If your product's good, I'll buy it. Whether it's AI or not. I assume you're going to say yours definitely is AI, but do you find that as well that everyone just talks about AI because it's this buzzword and a load of the stuff they're doing just isn't AI.
[00:13:58] Speaker C: I think that a lot of companies are, are wrapping AIs into, into whatever they're building. So if they're building a chatbot, I've. It's AI company advanced and it's just basically wrapped chatgpt in the background. Right. If it's, if it's anything else, it's you know, the AI, the AI is moving so quickly that you have to either be on two sides of the research side or on the wrapper side. And I would say all of the companies I've come across, with the exception of a few, are on the wrapper side, right. They're, they're wrapping, repackaging AIs which are there when you can use quite easy, easily. On our side, we stick to the research side. So we try and deliver what is maybe six months ahead of chat GPT of what they will roll out, right. Or meta all these because these are on the same research side we all are on and we try and bring it in our technology quite early before you see it mainstream. So we're very much all the time trying to research, discover and understand. And it obviously comes at a bit of a cost because, you know, some things are great and some things, some research leads to absolutely nowhere. But I guess that when it comes to a hype thing, it's like, you know, meme coins and multiple blockchains and it was like just millions of them. Most of them are worthless. There are a few really good ones out there, even in the igaming space. I've met a few companies where I can say there are really good ones. Like Stats Drone is definitely one of them where I was quite impressed. You know, at first I'm like ah, another rapper company. But then, you know, you realize they're, they're actually think, thinking in a quite, quite good way. So I like that company personally. There are a few others. But yeah, it's, it's, it's called the Rapping world right now. Take an AI ChatGPT pit 42 times around and present it as a brand new cutting edge product and go to pitch awards and all this stuff. But that's, that's what basically it is first.
[00:15:50] Speaker B: So I get how AI is therefore helping the industry in terms of some of the operators, etc. But do you think it will help? Do you think the consumer will see any benefit like how, how you consume it? Is that going to, is AI going to change that? Or are you still, you know, you have all this AI stuff but you're still going to end the day, go on your phone, go on the sports app or the slots and for the consumer it's going to be exactly the same.
Is that kind of a fair way? And it's all kind of on the back end where the AI is helping or can I transform how the consumer looks at stuff? Because I mean, entane, I think Were a few years ago kind of talking big into VR and all of that went down to fail Esports but as well. But you know that everyone is suddenly gonna be wearing VR headsets and being playing in a casino rather than on the phone. And that hasn't happened. And you talked about VR 13 years ago. Is there gonna be some change in how gambling's consumed because of this or not really.
[00:16:44] Speaker C: I think that brick and mortar with stay pretty much the same. I feel like that this, this.
It's like, you know, when you walk into nowadays if you, you know, there's all these fancy restaurants with robots and this and this, but nothing beats walking into a restaurant that is like traditional, old. Got that in a way, nostalgic feeling, old world, you know, really. And I think that's really becoming popular where people are so deep into technology every day that they're looking for. For old world stuff, old world feeling. So I think brick and mortar is going to be something that simply will be there. It will change slightly, maybe more lights, more colors, cooler machines, you know, But I think the vibe of that will stay the same and it should, and I hope it does. Right.
[00:17:28] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:17:29] Speaker C: For us, when we're building a technology we're building, we definitely call it AI for art. So for us, we're looking at AI from a different viewpoint for consumer where we believe there's going to be a massive sector in the market where it is for creators, like for more handmade with AI, with the help of AI, but more handmade stuff, whether it is slots, whether it is games, whether it is apps, people are going to be looking for, you know, more, you know, not just, you know, shipped out by AI, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is what, you know, we're expecting in two years developers will come to an end. I think that yes, some developers which are, which are shitty at their job will come to an end and thank God for that. But the good ones, you know, will move to more artisanal stuff. So if you say how AI is going to help you, anything that you don't want to be doing today, like researching hotels going, looking at products like, oh, this is a terrible product. Yeah, you should buy this one. You know, that's going to be helping you a lot. Because now people even will have a lot more intuition and intelligence that they simply didn't have before. Whether you're selling them on a deal or, you know, everyone can, can now go, you know, you send them like an offer, they can go and put it into ChatGPT and go, Ah, this is not good. You send them a contract. This is not good. You know, so it's empowered normal people, which normally didn't have resources of legal, of business intelligence, of access to knowledge, to become really empowered and understand things that normally was reserved for maybe the richer sector of people or educated by that. So I see a future where people will be more looking for experiences and letting the AI take care of everything that they normally do on their digital screens to live a more immersed life in the normal world. So I think this is where the world is going rather than everyone in their VRs and lost in life. I think everyone wants more of a push to spending more time with family and realizing that health benefits that comes with breaking away from all the, all the bullshit that technology has also brought us into. Right. Which is being workhorses in a way. This is where I see the hope.
[00:19:30] Speaker A: And then zeroing in in the online part of the industry. I mean, how do you see the way that, you know, kind of gambling is served to customers? Because I even down to the fact that there's a lot being talked about now about how ChatGPT is replacing like Google Search, you know, for certain kind of demographics. I mean, the way that people are finding content is obviously changing the way they're being presented with kind of information. You know, like you think back in the, the day and for a lot of people, you know, people still do this. You know, you type something into Google, you click through the results. You know, now that step has been kind of taken away, these clicks are being taken away. So I mean, do you still see this ultimately, you know, kind of pushing people towards gambling websites, gambling apps, or is there going to be, you know, is this kind of like democratization and kind of, I suppose, kind of like curation of the experience is what it really comes down to, is that going to, you know, upend, you know, all these kind of, you know, essentially what the industry has been built around online.
[00:20:34] Speaker C: You mean on the affiliation side? More or.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Well, partially on the affiliation, but also, you know, just thinking into how, you know, kind of like gambling brands present themselves. It's like you think about sports, essentially a very fancy Excel spreadsheet, you know, for casino, just tiles and tiles and tiles of, you know, kind of game options. I mean, do you see, even if it's not necessarily kind of, you know, kind of the way they kind of find a route to it, but it's, you know, it's like, do you see AI is bringing in the level of essentially hyper personalization?
[00:21:10] Speaker C: It's a Good question. There are a couple of, couple of games out there which I think are going to have quite a big impact on. They're not gambling games by any, by anybody. There's like one game where in the AI space, right, you're, you're sort of like a vampire. You play as a vampire and you have to convince the human on the other side to let you in. And they're basically, you're convincing them by talking to them that you're not actually a vampire and letting them in. So this is sort of like an AI use case where you can, that's sort of more personalized ways of communicating with NPC characters, making them more realistic. And that is sort of a big, a big drive there. When it comes to hyper personalization such as of slots, I guess we will see a lot of one person will take our technology the way we've built it, we aren't going to do it, but they will take it towards Telegram or they'll take it towards other technologies to provide more custom, better suited slot machines, mechanics, graphics that are more towards your liking and creation of that. And that is sort of the more TikTok style technology. So I think that yes, hyper personalization is coming, but I don't know how much it's going to have an impact that people are expecting. I think that people are still going to be looking to discover things that they haven't discovered before rather than being fed what they're expected to like. In a way, what I, this is what my personal thoughts are. And on the search affiliation side, it actually brings me to an interesting story. When I was building the, the mortgage company and the real estate company, well, I wanted to be sure that we aren't going to be dead in SEO once AIs come out and we sort of saw that people are going to start asking questions. So what I had done was I looked quite early in where the open AI and everyone were getting their data sources from in terms of data training. And I would go into those data sources and I would hammer those with information about our company, how great it is, you know, posting back and forth. And around two years later that paid off because if you ask Chat gbt, which is the greatest company to go to for a mortgage in Europe, we pop up like duh, this is the, this is the greatest company to go for. And so I'm like, I nailed it. You know, two years where, where you had to understand that AIs are built on training data and the way they think neurologically is on that training Data what they know, what they think is the best or like for you, Robin, people will tell you, oh this, this is the best. You hear it four times, you're going to believe that, that, yeah, it must be the best if everyone's raving about it. So we use that same sort of idea to make sure that we stay up in SEO whereas the searches change. I don't know what affiliation and affiliate websites are going to do because it's going to be a massive change as people are going like, yeah, which is the best gambling website to go on and which is the best games to play. You know, this has the best rtp. It will sort of start thinking towards the consumer side. So I think there will be a direct action from game to AI. And if casinos are acting on that. Now if I was building a casino, I would probably make sure that I have put out enough data out there to know that I have the best slot machines with the best returns for players, etc. Etc. So players are going to be looking for that and AIs are going to logically look for that also better return to player for these games. This is what I think is going.
[00:24:33] Speaker A: And we are coming up on time. But I'm going to give Ed the opportunity to ask one last question, try and make it coherent.
[00:24:42] Speaker B: So I was just. Now I've just been distracted by this vampire game, if I'm honest. I mean it's, it's sounds a bit like dating, just trying to convince someone else you're something you're not and it's just dating vampires. Yeah, well not dating vampires, just the whole thing. I mean one thing I was going to ask. Well, not really ask, just my view is we're talking about hyper personalization. I don't even think the industry's just got normal personalization right yet, have they? No, always the next thing. Like they've been talking about personalization for about 20 years and they're yet to do that. So let's just stick hyper on an AI. And I'm dubious about whether it will happen.
I suppose my question is I think some of this could be really interesting for my business. So one, can I get a massive discount? And secondly, if you had to use your, use your area of expertise to say which job is most likely to be taken over by AI first? A fluffy news story writer or an in depth data intelligence analyst who's most at risk?
[00:25:35] Speaker C: I would say the. Okay, so first of all our product is going to be available for free. So the base product for building certain things and games and it's going to be available for free. And then there's the, there's a higher version which is 40 or $50 per month. And then there's this, the big gambling version which comes with all the templates, whether it is CRM and whatever. Go grab it, it's free. There's your discount problem. You're welcome. But on the side of the jobs, that's an interesting one. I always say the first job I expect expect to go with AI is going to be the CEO's job because these tools are super knowledgeable at doing, making the right decisions without emotions for companies. So probably the first jobs to go is going to be top management down. Developers will become more artisanal as it goes along. But anything that touches on, on feeling of human, whether it is painting a plate or doing a podcast, writing an article or anything like that, they're going to be looking heavily for the human side. Think humans look, seek out humans, right? I have a strong belief in this, that, that everyone who's saying AI is going to take over, going to be jobless, everyone's going to be, you know, it's just a ridiculous dream. Come on, we're going to find our place. We're definitely going to stop doing anything that we don't want to do, right? So if we don't want to make our morning coffee desert as an AI and a bot for that, if we know we don't want to use our legs to walk in the morning, there's going to be an AI for that. But it's going to be up to us to decide where, where we want to go. I think that the biggest risk is management and everyone is going to have an equal share opportunity of building companies and it's going to the whole economy of the way things are built, whether it is companies, everything else is going to go more down to like companies of one, two or three people with the rest being done with AI. And those people are going to be artisanal and everyone's going to be working in that way. And I see besides these massive Goliath style AI companies, I think that is where I envision the future. And obviously it's a very bold statement or anything like that. But that's just where I think AI is going into more single man companies, artisanal style ability to do things that massive companies need to tens of thousands of developers to do will now be able to be done by one person in his bedroom living at mama's house without any issues including management and Everything being run for him, that's where we're going.
[00:28:01] Speaker A: Okay, so that's really interesting. So the conclusion is. No, let me. Let me just outline the conclusion here. So the conclusion is that the artisan, personally connected approach, which sounds very like the role of, you know, kind of, you know, content writers, journalists, maybe ones who run kind of podcasts. So they're going to be okay. It's the other guy that's going to be in with a bit of a problem. So that's really interesting, Ed, isn't it?
[00:28:32] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it turns out. So actually, if your performance doesn't get you to a certain level of management, then it turns out your job's safe. So actually, by just not being that good, you've got it sorted. So, yeah, the headline is that Ed's going to be out of a job.
[00:28:45] Speaker A: Yeah, it's all right. We will.
[00:28:47] Speaker B: Can you pay me as a guest on your podcast and I'll become unemployed?
[00:28:49] Speaker A: I don't think the budget can stretch that. I might let you do it as an internship. You can be an unpaid intern. How about that? Yeah, sorry. I got you. I got you.
[00:29:00] Speaker C: You're so kind to each other. I love it.
[00:29:03] Speaker A: Well, on that note, has been absolutely brilliant. Just managed to largely behave himself, which is always an incredible bonus. So thank you very much for joining us and everyone. Thank you. Listening it's been episode seven, I think, of Right to the Source with Robin Harrison, Ed Birkin, soon to be unemployed, and Mark Flores Martin of Excenia. Thanks for listening.
[00:29:27] Speaker C: Thanks, guys for having me. I really appreciate it.
[00:29:29] Speaker B: Great to have you on.
