Introduction to Guest

Marc Stevens is the President & CEO of Zorroa, a Gradient Ventures-backed machine learning-startup that has recently launched Boon AI, a machine learning integration platform that is modernizing media management pipelines for the media & entertainment industry. He is a global technology executive with three decades of experience driving technology and business transformations across film, television, and gaming industries. Prior to Boon AI, Marc led the media & entertainment divisions at organizations including Autodesk, Avid, and Microsoft, where he drove M&A initiatives and incubated award-winning solutions like Maya, Flame, & Shotgun

Marc began working in the technology/AI space 20 years ago, later transitioning into consulting. Through his contacts, Marc was hired as a consultant for Zorroa, which was recently transformed into Boon AI. This began his relationship with the company. Zorroa was seed funded by gradient ventures. Marc met with the investors and discussed some ideas on how they could transform tech and business to become more custom development focused with a broader market appeal and scale. Marc’s vision was to get the technology out to more people while keeping the business scalable.

Coming Up with The Idea

Boon AI started out as a raw set of media technologists who came out of the film/visual effects space, with experience working on the largest, most complex, media projects such as: The Lord of the Rings franchise and Avengers movies. When the company was first founded, there was a lot of innovation in the AI machine learning and computer vision space – with many ideas on how to successfully leverage AI ML technology to transform digital media management. This is where the journey began. However, every customer engagement wound up being a custom development effort, which was not scalable in the long run. Marc and the team began to look at this from a different perspective. Was there a way they could start to put things in a form factor? Make the product more accessible? More affordable? This vision is what birthed Boon AI just a few short months ago.

Product Development Journey

Boon AI is the no code, machine learning integration platform for media driven companies. The product solves a couple different problems.

When Boon AI is creating machine learning products for clients, risk is reasonably high – for the results are not necessarily known from the start. Nor is it guaranteed that you will get the results that you want. There is data science behind creating a model that works, but then deploying that model and scaling it in production is another set of technologies. What Boon AI tries to do is package up some of the infrastructure parts, leveraging cloud technologies and off the shelf tools from Microsoft, Amazon, to Google. From there, tools are added to customize at a high level, with a nice visual interface that abstracts having to set up the whole infrastructure to even run one model on one image (which is time consuming within itself).

Within an hour, you are pointing to a bucket of images or videos, and depending on the program you’re trying to solve, you can go in and select the models you want to run. And there’s a nice visual interface to be able to understand and experiment with results. Boon AI tries to give people results that they can start to understand while experimenting with different options, and/or doing AB testing. Once a client knows what works for their use case, Boon AI can lock in that platform, built in a way that is scalable and able to handle large payloads.

A Common Use Case for Media Companies

Boon AI tends to be a bridge for companies to be able to get enriched dynamic data. Some companies like tagging information in an image, for example, so they know which images have a certain logo show up in them, or which images have a certain person they’re looking for. (For example: Robert Downey Jr.in a Lamborghini in NYC).

With Boon AI’s technology, everything will automatically pop up on the frame instantly, think usage rights management and content moderation. Another example is if a retail company wanted to see all images that look like a particular shirt. Boon AI’s product can find images like the shirt.

Customers & Target Market

Boon AI started branching out to companies that were connections in the media space, mostly production companies, (full length features, commercials, etc.). Boon AI is building catalogs for companies, so all their goods are online, making them searchable and accessible.

Boon AI is also working with sports teams. Many sports teams are looking to monetize their assets in different ways – like archived footage for example.

How the Software Works

Boon AI removes all the heavy lifting of setting up the infrastructure, allowing people to focus on the results to enhance their business. There is a subscription fee to join the platform.

Once you sign up for Boon AI, you create an account. Then Boon AI’s user interface walks you through a process of content you want to analyze. Depending upon what you’re interested in, you are presented with different choices of AI machine learning models that could be run for you. From there, you receive a nice visual display where you can start to search and filter from – do some AB testing against different models from different vendors. This whole process takes under an hour.

Challenges Encountered

One of the biggest challenges has been where is Boon AI’s identity as a company? Customers have pulled Boon AI in different directions. Is Boon AI a tool for developers that is in their toolbox, that they use to help get their job done? Or is the company going to provide an end user solution that does everything for PA? Will Boon AI fall somewhere in the middle? From a product market fit point of view, this has been one of the hardest challenges for Boon AI – finding their true identity. Another similar challenge is balancing being clear about what problems the company is solving versus how to solve them.

Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Focus is incredibly important. Have a vision of where you want to get to but have flexibility on how you will get there. Know that business fundamentals can change. Also, be prepared for customers not to be ready for your idea right away. It could be a fantastic idea but could take time for customers to see the company’s true potential.

Advice for Industry Leaders

See if you can create a team of people that might be able to give you more options, or who think about different ideas faster. 90% of AI/ML projects never make it into production. People have been bitten in the past, and worried about going back into the AI space. Think how your tools and technology will allow employees to spend time to add real value in your business.
Your employees should take work from your plate, while you provide tools and capabilities to assist them in being creative and successful. Focus on the creative pieces that work, the pieces that the machines are not going to be good at.

Another piece of advice, and something that Boon AI is focusing on, is to bring the fear of experimenting down. Know it’s not a big investment in risk but allows people to experiment and see where/how the products help their business.

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