Air launches 50 AI models, canvas editor, and usage-based pricing in biggest product release ever

to keep their apps working. And let's kick off our Lambda Lightning round. And we are going to be bringing in We nailed it. We nailed it. The cloud is active. We are now in the Lambda Lightning round. Let's bring in Shane from Air. Shane, how you doing?

How are you doing, guys? Thanks so much for having me.

Of course. Of course. Great to great to see you. Uh give us an update on what's going on in your world. We um just released a new ad campaign yesterday in the New York Times um and have our our biggest product release we've ever pulled together here launching tomorrow.

Amazing. Give us the pitch. What's the tagline

for the ad?

For the ad.

The tagline for the ad is uh is AI will never smoke a cigarette with you. Um and

as someone who as someone who started a a company that directly competes with cigarettes, I have to boo. But as someone who loves a good ad, I have to cheer.

I you know, I want to be clear. I'm not endorsing smoking in any way, shape, or form. I think um

you know, look, I I feel like I feel like this is a this is a this is a Goodwill Hunting crowd, isn't it? I feel like you guys watch Jordy definitely has seen Goodwill Hunting.

No, he's never seen a movie in his life. He's only seen Borat.

It's the only movie he's ever seen. I think uh the the inspiration for the campaign came from uh a scene between Matt Damon, who's this

cocky, overconfident uh sort of orphan, and his therapist, Robin Williams.

Yeah.

And uh they're sitting on a park bench and Matt Damon is just going off. He's doing his thing, you know, preaching the gospel of where the world is going. And Robin Williams looks at him and he says, "Look, if I asked you about art, you would give me every history of every artist. You would talk to me about Michelangelo, but you have no idea of what it smells like below the Systeine Chapel.

And if I asked you about love, you would probably send me a sonnet,

but you have no idea what it feels like to be desperately vulnerable in front of someone else." Mhm.

And then he looks at Matt Damon and he says, "Look, if I needed to learn what what it was like to be an orphan, do you think I would just read Oliver Twist?" And I think I think the reality is today that there's so many of these generative AI companies right now emerging through YC or starting to raise money and they're projecting what's going to happen with creative work. Uh and and let me be clear. I believe everything from nano to banana and seed dancing these models are so powerful in what they can do today. But the reality is that creative work is deeply illogical. It it is two things. It is both extremely subjective.

Yeah.

And it starves for perfection all at the same time.

And so, you know, the belief that we have at Air fundamentally is that AI will never replace creative work. And we're saying this as a technology company that's on the precipice, you know, of launching its most AIcentric feature set ever tomorrow.

So, I mean, I completely agree with you like AI is a tool. I've loved using creative tools from the first version of Photoshop that I probably downloaded illegally all the way to After Effects and Cinema 4D, Houdini, and now Generative AI tools. And I feel like there's it every time there's a new tool, you just increase the amount of uh amount of art, the amount of creativity, and things we usually get the good ending. It feels like it. It feels like we're not, oh yeah, like we wish we could go back to the time before Photoshop, get rid of Figma, like no, no one wants to move backwards. Everyone's happy with the tools. Everyone's adapted, but it feels like there's still a lot of anxiety. like how how what do you think it takes to get people into the mindset of hey as an artist your job's just going to get more interesting more creative be able to do so much more and yes that will mean putting food on your plate and earning recognition for your work and being uh all the things that you why you do what you do will still be there in a decade two decades a century

yeah well I I think the first thing John is that as as an industry within the tech industry or as technologist ologist, we can't keep pontificating, you know, a narrative about like about this reality that like creative work is the CMO killer. If I see one more billboard on the 101 about the CMO killer, I'm going to lose,

you're going to become a a killer yourself.

I'm going to lose my mind. And and I think that, you know, you in what way, shape, or form is it a good idea

to tell your customer that they're irrelevant?

Yeah. Um and and and you know look the fundamental belief that we have here at air is that the work is changing. It's going to be less humans and more machines. That's a that's an acknowledgement that I will be the first to admit.

But we have to stop imagining that these machines this this AGI concept we have for the future will get to a state where everything is automated and you don't need anybody in the loop. And instead, if we built both products and brands in this industry that meet humans where they are and start to actually attack jobs to be done with automation,

then great. You know, at Air, we talk about giving creatives space to breathe,

space to actually work on the stuff that they think matters and to deploy technology into areas of their work that they think should be automated.

Yeah.

What's the launch tomorrow? What's the exact product? Tell us. act. All right. So, five things. I'm going to be plain vanilla here. Five things.

One is uh access to 50 models inside of our product. Everything from nano bananas to seed dance. You can now access that directly on air.

Two, you can access those models through a canvas editor. So, you can grab your assets which are already on air. You can create variants of ad units. You can change out the text in something. You can take an image and turn it into a gift for a quick video. Whatever you need. Three is agents who can go out and make those edits for you should you want to you know communicate with a machine instead of doing it yourself.

Four is a context layer. This is the sort of biggest differentiator for us. We you know today organizations store and manage all of their assets inside of our product where their memory and so we're taking that memory and allowing your creative team to deploy that. Um, deploying the context means that the agents can start saying no to edits or that when an agent makes an edit, it can do something that's actually on brand and uses your font or your styling or your photography style. So, this context layer is where creatives can actually add instructions so that noncreatives can create and compound assets from what they already have. And then the fifth one is what every organization, you know, like us is going through right now, which is we're transforming pricing, going fully to usage based pricing across our product. Uh, so all of that hits tomorrow.

What about search? I feel like there's uh, you know, I've watched my iPhone camera roll push the search bar bigger and bigger. They really want me to search. Uh, and it's okay. But if I if I know that there's a I I screen recorded a video and it has Arnold Schwarzenegger in it, but he's not in the still frame, he's not in the thumbnail, he's deeper in there, and I search Arnold, it's probably not going to go inside the video. understand the context and I feel like uh air has all this like tagging infrastructure. There's an opportunity for just the best in-class search. You see people complaining about Gmail search. Same same thing is true for for Google Drive. At one point I had every file name for every video in Google Drive was just like 75 keywords all the way out. So I could actually search through videos.

Is AI accelerating you there?

It's a great it's a good question. Um, you know, we my my co-founder Tyler and I have been building this business for eight years and we've been very thoughtful. You know, our our approach is to try to build a system of record for creative work. So, a Salesforce or GitHub specifically for visual data.

Um, you know, our AI journey began to your point with search natural language search and the enrichment of assets. And from our perspective, the models got to a point over the last 2 years, products like BDA as an example from AWS where you can do a lot of really powerful things. Facial recognition, scene detection for videos, custom object detection, and then you can power that through really elegant natural language search experience. That functionality exists in the product today.

Um, and we've been leaning into that work for the last two years. The shift for us into generative editing and variant creation really began in October as these models started to progress in the quality of the output

and we realized that the quality of the output was going to be decided by the quality of the context around it. Sure.

Um so you know starting tomorrow on air we'll marry both of those things both the amazing worldclass search experience you can now have enabled by AI and the variant creation that can stem from it. So that you know a year from now if you want to look up Martin Skrey Rage Bait you know on TPN you'll find

you can you can go and find that.

I'm glad we had you in the audience. Well thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the launch and absolutely beautiful. Uh we'll talk to you soon launch.

Goodbye.

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