Crowd Media hits commercial milestone after licencing conversational AI platform to Forever Holdings

Crowd Media (ASX: CM8) has executed a maiden agreement giving an entity commercial access to its artificial intelligence (AI) conversational platform, with investee Forever Holdings the first company to licence the technology.

Under the deal announced today, Forever Holdings has a 12-month software as a service contract to access Crowd’s platform, which will then be extended for a further five months.

In consideration for the technology, Forever Holdings will pay $215,000 for the initial 12 months, with a further $90,000 payable for the five additional months.

Crowd chairman Steven Schapera said the agreement was the first licence the company had granted for its conversational AI platform and represented a “significant milestone” for the company as it progresses commercialisation of its technology.

Conversational AI platform

Crowd’s conversational AI platform is the result of 10 years’ experience and technology development in the space.

According to Crowd, the technology is unique in that it can seamlessly combine answers from both AI and real humans.

“In the past 12 months more than 65% of all questions put to Crowd’s platform were answered by AI,” the company noted.

Human interaction was involved in the remaining 35% with these answers joining the database to “rapidly build efficiency”.

To-date more than 180 million questions have been processed by the platform.

Benefit to Forever Holdings

Crowd describes Forever Holdings as a “leading-edge voice-and-visual interactive digital media company”.

Forever Holdings’ technology has been designed to enable around-the-clock one-to-one digital encounters between an influencer and a follower.

This technology is underpinned by machine learning and natural language processing.

Crowd says the technology could potentially be integrated into its conversational platform.

Commenting on the licencing agreement, Forever Holdings chief executive officer Sarah Coward said the company was “particularly interested” in the integration of Crowd’s near-real time human element to its existing approach.

Deloitte forecast

In Deloitte Digital’s recent Conversational AI report, it predicts the market for this technology will rocket from $6 billion in 2019 to $22.6 billion by 2024.

Conversational AI technology has been developed to boost customer acquisition rates, reduce churn, and increase revenue per customer.

It also helps to reduce cost-to-serve and improve employee satisfaction by doing basic routine tasks and providing support.