Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: John Price, CEO of Vast (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a couple of questions. Tell me how you go to market. You mentioned, in passing, that your customers have dealer networks. Explain to me what is the usage model of your product and who’s buying, who’s using, and how.

John Price: Given that it’s a stack, we have users at every layer of our stack. I have customers that just take my aggregated, clean, normalized data and use it. Capital One uses it for their lending process.

Sramana Mitra: For the loan approval process.

John Price: Absolutely. There’re all kinds of great applications for clean, normalized, and accurate data in automotive sector in the financial services. I have a website for consumers. You go to CarStory.com. I have the CarStory mobile app which is a full-stack implementation of everything that I’ve described. Then, I power third-party sites where many layers of my stack are just on their site. Then, we have 7,000 dealers today that have the CarStory market report on every vehicle that they sell.

Think of that as an AI-based window sticker. We’re seeing about a 30% lift in conversion from a consumer that lands on the CarStory market report. It has a tremendous impact on our dealers. The CarStory report is a free product. We provide it either directly to the dealers or we provide it via their website provider. That has been extremely well-embraced. We have SaaS-type of arrangements on our data and analytics. We have some other revenue share arrangements.

Sramana Mitra: Is the data that you’re providing to the dealers ad-supported? Is that a revenue-generating product?

John Price: No, it is not ad-supported. It is free. We provide it and maintain it. It’s maintained in real-time as their inventory changes. All the analytics will reflect the value that that automobile presents to their potential customers in that market at that time.

Sramana Mitra: What is the bulk of the business for you?

John Price: We have many customers who we’re in SaaS relationships with. We have many customers where we’re doing revenue shares on the conversion of traffic or sale of the car.

Sramana Mitra: The banks are using the SaaS business model?

John Price: SaaS applies to banks, insurance customers, as well as third-party websites. We have a set of dealer products that we’re going to be deploying in Q4 this year. They will be for sale type of products that will continue to add value to the CarStory report that they’re already getting.

Sramana Mitra: There’s a huge Big Data angle to it because you’re drawing in so much data from so many different sources. Give me an example of the kinds of things that you can do with that data that pertain to AI.

John Price: One of the things that we’re doing and that we’re super excited about is what we can do with images. The number of images that we’ve collected is over about 1.5 billion. We have 1.5 billion cars for sale. We do a lot to those images. We can determine the orientation of the car. Then we did a bunch of machine learning about which images are driving the highest conversion. Prior to us running these studies, the industry standard will be to put up all the images, which is around 40. You literally sort them from left to right.

What we found is that nine images is the optimal amount of images and we can tell you exactly what image and in exactly what order should it be in. We not only do that, we can also tell you the orientation of the car which increases conversion. All of this benefits our dealers because they’re going to sell more cars if they get higher conversions.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: John Price, CEO of Vast
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