Notch launches ACE: infrastructure that makes websites convert for both humans and AI agents as bot traffic surpasses human traffic

Speaker 2: Again soon.

Speaker 1: We gotta do this again soon. This is a really great conversation. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day. And let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And without further ado Speaking of agents. Our final guest of the show, Amda Greshka from Notch. He's co founder and CEO, Anda.

Speaker 2: What's going on?

Speaker 1: Welcome to the show. How are you doing? Great to see you.

Speaker 15: Hey, guys. I'm good. Good to see you too, Jordy. Good to meet you, John.

Speaker 1: Good to meet you.

Speaker 2: It's an honor to have you on the show on a big day. Thank

Speaker 1: the news. But for first, introduce yourself for everyone. Introduce the company a little bit.

Speaker 15: Yeah. Thank you. Hey, guys. My name is Anda. I'm the cofounder and CEO of Notch. Notch has been the leading digital intelligence and optimization platform for Fortune 500 brands for the past six years or so. And our news today coming live to you from the Guggenheim, actually

Speaker 1: The Guggenheim.

Speaker 15: Where we've taken over the Guggenheim for the day is that we just announced ACE, which is infrastructure that makes websites convert both humans and agents.

Speaker 1: Okay. So what what is the what what was the first big client that you brought on board, the first big logo? What did you actually try and move the needle for them? How much of that is focused on ecommerce conversion versus brand building, broadly marketing? Like, how where's the surface area of the impact of the product?

Speaker 15: So when we started going to market, we actually moved from Silicon Valley to New York, with my cofounder, and some of our first clients were the biggest banks. They still are. If you can think of the biggest bank in the in the world, they're our client. Our surface area of your impact look. We we track our audiences journey through digital experiences, and we help brands understand what's resonating with these audiences, what's not, and how they can ultimately gain more customers by making better content and better digital experiences.

Speaker 2: With with Ace, this feels like a product that people have realized that they need really acutely over the last year. We had Matthew Prince on. I believe it was maybe the middle of last week and he had recently shared that there's more web traffic from agents now than humans. That flip came even faster than he was expecting. And so now there's a bunch of Fortune 500s that you guys are working with that are kind of waking up to this, realizing that they need a solution. But I guess talk about kind of the origin of the new product.

Speaker 15: What we saw across the biggest Web sites in the world, which we measure with Notch, what we saw was the same thing. There were more agents starting to come to Web sites than humans. And about a year ago, every single CMO became obsessed with GEO or AEO, which is how do I make my Web site readable to agents. But, ultimately, LLMs cannot be gamified. And the tricks of GEO, which is publish another 100 blog posts and 10 other product FAQ pages and whatever, it ended up really destroying the human experience. So in the last six months, we've actually seen crazy high immediate bounce rates. Like, human beings that actually arrive to websites are getting a horrible experience because they're presented with this agent ready, agent first content. So Ace, the origin story was really how do we build a system that can personalize for each of these audiences without taking away from the experience of the other?

Speaker 2: And that's making the agent side invisible to humans and and vice versa? Like, how how does it actually work?

Speaker 15: Yeah. So let me tell you how it works. So ACE is first of all, we have to ingest all of a brand's knowledge from currently, it's sitting in silos. The web site is just one area where that knowledge exists. We ingest that knowledge alongside brand guidelines, governance, etcetera. That knowledge gets vectorized and atomized, and then it gets semantically tagged. This step is really important because what you want is to enable both the humans and the agents to retrieve this information through natural language. Then we start to reassemble the information based on implicit inputs. Like, these are kind of the data signals that we've been capturing through Notch for the past six years, And that reassembly enables for a really personalized human experience as well as a person agent experience. So, for example, I'm a mom. I've been looking for an electric car that doesn't look like a mom van, and I've been doing my research in LLMs. And I know nothing about cars, unlike my husband. And so I type in electric car that doesn't look like Mom Van, and it's telling me to go to, you know, gm.com, rivin.com, etcetera. When I get to that website, which I will still go on because I want to validate the information, I wanna see, like, is this brand the brand that represents me, what I get is really static, really generic, essentially a dumb website that doesn't actually speak to me. And so it's a very jarring difference. And LLMs have really conditioned us to expect conversational experiences and the ability to really command these experiences through semantic intent. So what we've built with ACE is the ability to give GM the, capacity to allow people to just copy paste their research from an LLM, put it on the site, or just simply say, I'm here to, you know, find an electric car that doesn't look like a mom van. And then the site reassembles with dynamic atoms in response to what you just said. So the whole website comes to the to the homepage. There's no more pages. It's really just dynamic reassembly based on your semantic input. When an agent shows up, the same thing happens. It's the same knowledge base. It's just visualized differently. It's a different modality. It's really just code.

Speaker 2: Very cool. Yeah. There's so many people talking about like generative software, software that's created on the fly. But forgetting that like websites in their current form mostly have just been like effectively digital catalogs Mhmm. That are kind of there's just one one version of it. But that's very cool. I wonder Yeah. The the idea of like, you know, it it And that's that's like I've In some ways, I've like stopped going to a lot of websites because I know it's easier to get the information that I really want. But the thing is like then the brand is losing like full control over how they're being displayed. Maybe they wanna be showing like images at different points that and and obviously, the the the chat app or whatever consumer's using is, you know, they don't have any control over kind of that whole service area, which is rough.

Speaker 15: Yeah. They really don't. I think the website as we know it to date is definitely dead. I think we have to replace the word too. Like, I'm I'm starting to play with knowledge site because I think what really matters in tomorrow's world, whether or not humans still come to your experience. Right? What matters is that you have that knowledge in a knowledge base that can speak to agents. Right now, what brands are doing is they're just cramming a bunch of crappy content into the same website, and it's not personalized for humans, and it's not personalized for agents. And so the experience, of course, is going to turn people off and people are going to stop going to websites. So we've got to enter a new era where websites are dead and long lived a knowledge site.

Speaker 1: What's the long term Oh,

Speaker 2: yeah. No, my immediate thought is like you want the want like the source of truth Mhmm. And then you want to be able to effectively just prompt the, and be able to get the information that only matters to you. But what were you gonna say, John?

Speaker 1: I was gonna ask about, just the the obviously, you've seen a ton of success in the enterprise. Are you thinking about going down market? How do you think about that? What are the decisions that would lead you to work with smaller companies? Or is there just so much valuable so much value in such a unique problem in the enterprise that that's where the company will be firmly placed for the long term.

Speaker 15: We're gonna go everywhere, John. We have big ambitions. I think this product that we built can serve everyone. And actually, if you go to our website, it's running on ACE now, and we've built it in the past forty eight hours because, you know, we're a startup, so we leave things last minute. If you go to our website and start start prompting it, I'm sure, like, I just said this, and so many people are gonna go try to break it. So, you know, knock yourself out and send us feedback if you manage. But, yeah, I believe that any company needs to have a knowledge base that's accessible, by agents that they can control and maintain in a really structured, governed way. Mhmm. I also believe humans are not going away. Like, every time there's been a new tech trend, whether it's social media or something else, we've always been like, guys, this is it. All we need is a Facebook page. I don't I don't believe in zero click marketing. I believe humans like choice. I believe especially for high purchase high high intent purchases, we really like to do our research. And so I believe websites are going to be around because it's kind of a yes and situation with marketing. It's always LLMs are just another channel ready to optimize for.

Speaker 2: Yeah. I just went to notch.com, as you said, and tried it. And very cool to have the the bar on the bottom. You can just and then and then they basically just creates a section that's just like effectively generating whatever information you want which is like John's talked about this before like ramp, you know, who we work with. Like, it's nice to have access to language models within the application. Right? You don't Sometimes you wanna take it Totally. You know, back to your preferred agent. But having intelligence where you are already makes a lot of sense and I and I wouldn't be surprised if this is like, you know, hopefully you guys capture as much value as possible with this like new paradigm, but I'm sure a lot of other people will will happily follow suit.

Speaker 15: Yeah. Well, Jordy, I think there's actually a great use case for TBPN as well. So if you guys wanna be customers, I'm I'm all ears. Mean, you guys created so much great content and you're truncating it in a really great way, making it accessible

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 15: In a way that enables you guys to, you know, just give people the information they really came there for would be cool too. So Yeah. Let's talk.

Speaker 1: Totally transcript. Let's do it. I love it. Well, thank you so much. So great to finally have you on

Speaker 2: k. The

Speaker 1: Go check it out and get the demo today. Thank you so Thank much coming

Speaker 15: you guys.

Speaker 1: It's all

Speaker 10: good to you.

Speaker 15: Me on. Bye.

Speaker 1: Have a great rest Let of your me tell you about Codex. Codex is a powerful workspace for getting work done with AI agents. Whether you're writing code, analyzing data, creating content, or automating business workflows, Codex helps you move projects forward from start.

Speaker 2: Over on x, Daniel's advocating for banning social media for 60.

Speaker 1: Yes. Yes. The inverse of The UK's project or The UK's initiative to ban social media for under sixteen over sixty five. I think that would ruffle some feathers. That would probably be pushed back on more by the social media companies because the purchasing power from 65 onward is so high. There's so much wealth with the boomer generation. That would actually be very devastating to Facebook and YouTube and TikTok even. The young folks, I think all the social media companies have an incentive to get those users as early as possible, keep them on the platform. But I think more than anything, want a level playing field. So Connor Hayes can duke it out with every other social media, site as soon as someone turns 16, try and acquire them, try and get them on board. But we'll see as that rolls out and where the guardrails are set.

Speaker 2: We'll close out the the show with Sean Frank. Is doubting Meta. Spenders are mad at bugs and model changes. Investors think they're missing AI, like the AR saga all over again. But as a large ish customer who will spend something like a $100,000,000 with them this year, Meta is working and no ad space comes close to their level of scale. Don't doubt the Zuck. It the fact that you can buy that that you could have one SpaceX or two Metas for the same price is pretty unbelievable and certainly not something that most people would have guessed even a year ago.

Speaker 1: Yeah. It is a crazy, crazy situation. At the same time, rockets, they're inspiring. And social media is

Speaker 2: so Totally. I mean, I can see I can see what we got here.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: But it's still surprising.

Speaker 1: But, yeah. Obviously, fantastic business. And, yeah, people are probably need to, you know, reality check with Sean Frank because he's in the trenches. He understands the business better than most. So go pay attention to him. Anyway, thank you for tuning in to TBPN today.

Speaker 2: We'll see you It's been an honor and a privilege.

Speaker 1: Leave us five stars on Apple Podcast and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. We'll see you

Speaker 2: Love you. Tomorrow. Goodbye. Cheers.