Use AI to launch a website with B12

Amie: [00:00:00] Hello. Welcome. We have Adam and Aditya, with us today from B12. And we are going to learn about their platform and how we can use their tool to build websites with AI. I'm excited to jump into this. Adam do you wanna share a little bit about the company your role, and then we can jump into the demo? 

Adam: That sounds great. And there's just to help with some visuals given the names are switching up a little bit. I can, do a quick share here.

Can folks see the screen with a's name on it? 

Amie: Yes. 

Adam: Alright, perfect. So yeah. Thank you Amie. So my name's Adam. I'm the co-founder and CTO of B12. You'll see that this, these slides were created by Adya. He's a senior researcher, research engineer at B12, and he's tech led. A bunch of the work that you're going to be seeing here.

He's unfortunately lost his voice. And I get the pleasure of presenting his work, but it's his work that that I'm presenting. And to help [00:01:00] motivate this a little bit we've probably all tried to make a website in some way or another, and it can be relatively overwhelming. You.

It's like any creative project that you're working through. You have to find the right layout. The layout's usually tied to some kind of style that you do or don't like. You you have to find colors that speak to your brand. The images might look good, but they might not work with the colors that you're looking for.

And we haven't even gotten started about all of the different content that you have to generate and the writer's block that you inevitably face, and the overthinking. And in general, it'd be nice if someone could just draft it for you and then you could edit it from there. And luckily it doesn't actually have to be this hard.

We've all seen the power of the latest in large language models and image generation models from B twelve's perspective. They've completely reshaped how quickly you can build and personalize [00:02:00] a website. And these technologies can handle a lot of the heavy lifting that used to require design or copywriting expertise which is also expertise that's still very useful in the later stages of a project.

So before we dive in, obviously B12 is very interested in this topic. B12 is a leading AI website builder. You can see in the screenshot on the bottom right here we've got a website generator, GPT, that is in the chat, GPT marketplace that's been used over 2 million times, almost 3 million at this point.

To and that's just one way of starting the conversation about a website that you want to create. You can also just go to our website@b12.io and you can see there's basically one question we ask you, which is describe the project that you're working on. Describe the business or website that you're working on.

And with that in 60 seconds, as you'll see in a demo here you'll get a ready made end to end. You can click publish if you want to [00:03:00] website. And from there we don't actually believe that just that initial reveal, that initial thing that you see is the only thing that you need to worry about. Your business is going to grow, your project is going to grow, and we wanna make sure that our platform grows with you.

And I'll show you a bunch of different ways that with help from ai, you can continue to update and edit your site. And you can also just have a living, breathing experience From there, there's things like scheduling payments. You can email market to your base. You can send contracts and a number of other things.

And we'll get to see a bunch of that in a demo. The other thing that I'll emphasize here is what you're going to see is a really great starting point that you can get up and running in under an hour. You'll see us getting up and running in under an hour. We also have experts if you're interested in them.

We started the company in 2015 and our mission is to help people do meaningful work. And so initially the automation tooling that [00:04:00] existed wasn't powerful enough to just put in front of a, of one of our customers. We're building tools for. Expert designers and copywriters to supercharge their work.

And and the latest generation of AI models has been really transformational for the experience because they have gotten good enough to put in front of consumers. And so just to give you a sense of it, as late as 20 23, 90 5% of the customers that came to B12. I saw what kind of website we generated for them automatically.

And that's great. Now I'd like to work with an expert, copywriter or designer to take it to the finish line. Today when people sign up for B12, 95% of them will look at the draft and say, okay, I can click a few buttons, edit it, and get it launched. And so it's like the latest generation of these models has fundamentally changed the experience for our customers and for B12 as well.

So enough talking about it. Let's actually show [00:05:00] you what it looks like. The and at any point, if folks have questions, feel free to, to jump in, happy to to show you or explain anything or clarify anything. We said basically we need a one piece of information about your business, and that's who you are.

It's the one thing we can't know about you. And let's say that we're setting things up for this business called Sparkling Spaces Cleaning. We wanna give it a description. And so this is a local cleaning service in Sunnyvale California. We offer. Like weekly and one time cleaning. And you can say some things that you want on the website, but it's not so strict that you have to get everything right here.

We'll show you how you can iterate from there. Oh, and one time cleaning. Maybe you wanna add a blog? So want a blog to share? Like. Tips for cleaning and maybe you have some sense of what you want it to look like, but you're not totally sure. So maybe we want to have [00:06:00] a website with an elegant look and blue accents.

So it's, it's like some description of something that you've seen that you want, but you don't have to get it perfect on the first shot. And so from there, you click go and with just this information alone. In a few seconds, you're basically going to be presented with a ready-made website.

And there's a few things that are going on in the background. So we've asked a large language model what pages should go on a site that is for a cleaning service. And so things like about the business the services that they offer, they've explicitly requested a blog. And our algorithms have added that.

They've told us that they want blue accents and an elegant website. And so the style you see here reflects that. There's imagery that has to be selected for the site. And so we're looking for things that obviously speak of cleanliness here. Every piece of copy on the site is custom generated for this specific [00:07:00] business with this specific description.

And so we know their location, we know the kinds of services that they offer. And speaking of services, those are available here. They explicitly told us the services. You'll see a few demos in a few moments where they might not tell us what their services are, but we can surmise them still, and of course, images that pair really nicely with the copy that was generated here.

You need a contact section and there's a few other things like functionality that you're gonna wanna have that makes sense for this business. It might not make sense for other businesses, so we'll only include the relevant stuff here. So you wanna schedule appointments and so there's a scheduling form available on the site.

And when you have a new client as a cleaning service, there's gonna be intake questions and. We really do generate every piece of content bespoke for the type of business that's described itself. And so what kind of cleaning services you require. What areas of your home require cleaning the size of your home?

These are questions that you can tell are [00:08:00] for this business, and if we were creating an intake form for a different type of business, you'd see a different set of questions here. So that kind of takes you end to end and in 60 seconds you've given us a few sentences and gotten a really an end-to-end, ready to launch website.

The, there's there's just because, there's lots of different folks that might be looking at this demo, you might not be launching a cleaning service. And so I just wanna give you a sense of some of the diversity that you can get just based on that initial description that you give us.

And so here's a business that's a consulting firm. They offer search engine optimization, social media management, PPC services. They want scheduling as well. They want a blog, but they also want how it works a team page. And they're looking for a theme with gold accents. And so we can click through to that launch website and the gold pops out right away.

The specific pages that they requested show up here as well. And the, they told us about [00:09:00] their specific services, so of course they're going to show up here with imagery that is tastefully picked and generated for them. They wanna introduce their team and and some other details about the business that we add as well, like how it works.

There's, maybe you're just starting your process and you know what your brand will look like. You know that you're starting a dog grooming business, but you're not exactly sure how to talk about your services. That's okay. There's other dog grooming services in the world and a large language model can figure it out for you.

And so you've got a nice, that nice pastel theme that you requested. Cute pictures of dogs because you have to have them in this case a description that makes sense for your business. And here's an example where someone didn't tell us what their services are, but they have a great starting point now for what they need, even if they weren't sure, initially.

And then finally an example of a totally different type of business. Maybe you're starting a pastries and bread bakery. And so here, this is [00:10:00] the kind of business that is going to care a lot about imagery. And so they tell us about that. They want close-up photos that capture the pastries themselves.

They want wide shots. They're talking about how they wanna. Convey a warm, inviting atmosphere and they have a sense that they wanna have a cozy pastel pink theme. And so when you click through to here you can see sweet treats bakery. The color scheme makes sense. Here's a wider shot of some of their offerings that's got like a nice warm hue to it.

The individual shots or closeups of different offerings that they can have. Obviously if they end up getting professional photography, they can replace it. But they have a really nice starting point to, to go from. And of course as I mentioned before, it doesn't make sense to do scheduling or client intake for a bakery.

And so that kind of stuff isn't going to get added to the bottom of the site. I. So that kind of gets you through the diversity of different kinds of projects that you might be working through and what you can get just by [00:11:00] telling us about your business the, at the end of the day, that's, that makes for a great demo and you see a lot of demos of these kinds of tools that you can describe something and get a lot for it.

You can get that with B12, but we have our overall, our product philosophy is that while AI should give you a great initial scaffold, you shouldn't be left alone after the initial reveal. We want the AI to keep being there with you as you go through other parts of the experience. And so let me.

Go back to that that website for sparkling Spaces, cleaning and show you how you can make updates from here. So if I go back to the homepage of this website, maybe I, overall this is a nice theme, but I wanna see something different here. And I'm not quite sure what I want, but I just wanna see something different.

And so I can click a button, like regenerate content and all of the copy and all the [00:12:00] imagery will just show up with a brand new version of it. And there's cases where you'll know it when you see it, and you just wanna be able to click a button and just page through and see different op offerings here.

There's also cases where you know what you want, but it's not like you can go out and just get a professional shot yourself. And so you can describe what you want instead. You can say, I want an image of the sun shining through. Shining through a freshly washed window. And so let's see if it can do that for us.

And, lo and behold, we can describe what we want and have the algorithms generated for us as well. And there's this nice thing where if you want to if you see the initial reveal and you want something completely different, now that you've seen what your description can do, you can go and say, Hey, I don't want a mo an elegant look.

I want a modern look and just regenerate your entire website. But realistically. The common case for you is [00:13:00] that you've got a website and now you want it to grow with you, and now you wanna make modifications to it. And you can do that. And at every step of the way, there'll be an AI assist box that can, that you can describe and have something get done for you.

So that's the like product philosophy that we have throughout the experience. The other thing that's going to happen is, let's say you love your website and you launch it and you're really happy. As your business grows, you're gonna have new needs. And so maybe people are constantly asking you various questions that you'd like to answer.

And so you wanna add a frequently asked questions page. So wanna add an FAQ page here. That all of that AI generation doesn't just happen on the reveal. It also happens with this new page that you're adding. And here we are. It takes a few seconds in order to generate all the text and all the imagery.

But here you have now a ready made start for frequently asked questions. And importantly, there's questions here that make sense for the type of business that you're starting. [00:14:00] As your business is growing and you learn that there's a really common question I'm imagining, you're like, so you're a cleaning service.

Maybe you wanna know about rescheduling or something like that. How do I re. Schedule and appointment. Of course you're gonna have your own process for this, but it's really nice to have a starting point and so the algorithm's going to, basically give you a nice starting point for copy for how to reschedule an appointment so that kind of walks you through how to add new content.

It applies to long form content as well. So one of the common things that our customers run into is that they wanna provide a living, breathing experience. They wanna grow their content base online. And a lot of people do that through blogging. And one of the things that gets generated for you if you ask for a blog is these long form draft of blog posts that you can then modify, make your own, and launch.

And sim just like you saw me adding an FAQ [00:15:00] section, you can add a new blog post just the same way. So that, that is the end-to-end website part of the story. There's another part to our product philosophy that we have, which is that everything we place on your website should work.

You see a lot of demos these days of you describe something and you get a website. But then when you start clicking on the various pieces of functionality, you click on intake or you click on scheduling. And you click submit. That's expecting there to be some custom backend there that can handle that scheduling request.

And often that doesn't come with the initial reveal with B12, we believe that anything that we place on your website should be working from day zero. And so you don't have to know how to set up stripe to get payments working. You don't have to know how to set up calendar syncing in order to get scheduling working.

It just works. And so just to show you what some of that looks like. On our backend if [00:16:00] you're interested in something like scheduling, there's a scheduling form on your website. And by default you're available, in your time zone, the traditional hours of the day. But you can do things like connecting your calendar and you can sync your Google calendar or whatever calendaring tool you use.

And now your availability is gonna be dictated by the calendar that you connect to it. The tool is ready, set up so that it'll send reminders to anyone who signs up for an appointment with you. And so basically end to end, there's a scheduling system in there that works with something like intake forms.

It wasn't just some like generic intake form that, that we created, but the questions there made sense for the kind of offerings that you had. If you happen to want to, edit the, sorry, if you happen to wanna edit the form you can add fields to it. You can have an AI suggest fields to add to it, or you can just add specific fields to the form.

But [00:17:00] you're already off to a great start with the starting points that we provided you with with something like getting paid for your services. It's obviously very important as well. In a single click you can connect payment without having to worry about things like setting up stripe. We set up stripe on the backend for you.

And so if one of the actions you want people to be able to take is to pay for a service, then you can just check off that you want people to be able to pay. And now if I click on one of these services, it's gonna have a pay now button that someone can pay for. And so that kind of shows the product philosophy of AI being with you every step of the way.

And then anything that the AI is generating for you works for you on day zero of of getting started. I think it's a pretty decent website. We can make changes to it if we're interested. But if you want to then go publish you click the publish button by default, you get a subdomain at B12 that you can click publish on.

If you want to connect a [00:18:00] domain to it, you can try out one of our paid plans for a dollar a month trial. The the publishing process initially we're doing a bunch of optimization for things like search engine optimization as well as paid speed. So the first time you publish your website, it takes something like 15 to 20 seconds.

Subsequently, when you go to publish your website, it'll take something closer to single low single digit seconds. But as, as soon as the website loads, all that functionality that I told you about is basically going to be ready, made and set up for you. The website itself is hosted on basically through a bunch of tooling that we have on Amazon Web Services.

And while no one likes to think about it, if B12 were to go down which it does not do very frequently at all, your website would still be up. And so we've insulated the infrastructure. So that the, there's a really simple serving layer for our customer's websites that's relatively independent from the rest of b twelve's [00:19:00] infrastructure.

But you can see here in way under an hour, we've clicked publish on a website that's got a bunch of the stuff we were looking for, some of which we described, and some of which the algorithm and zero shots did a great job. The be. Before we jump into q and a, I just want to talk about some things that you should know and some just broader limitations of some of this AI tooling.

Just gimme one moment to get a drink. So it's. One of the trends that we've noticed at B12 is that with generative ai, it is really easy to use this stuff. You can see it's, it takes a while to get it all connected to the product experience, but it's also relatively easy to over promise on what the technology can do.

And at B12, we believe just as part of our mission, that it's really important, communicate AI's limitations and AI's benefits. The benefits are pretty clear, as you can see here. It's takes tens of minutes to get [00:20:00] your web presence up and running, end to end. But there, there are a number of things that you should just think through as you use tools like B12 or any others that use generative ai.

At the end of the day, this website is speaking to your brand and large language models will do a number of things. They might hallucinate information. There's information that you haven't told them about, and so they have to fill in the blanks here. It's not even a hallucination in that case. They, these language models are trained on the whole web and there's really nice parts of the web and there's really crummy parts of the web.

And so whatever biases or versions of correctness or even notions of plagiarism will come up because there's content that. They're trained on, and these are essentially really fancy auto completers. And so you should proofread everything that these things do. We're really proud of where we've gotten with these models.

They save a ton of time, but at the end of the day, you have to look at the thing and say, Hey, does this represent my [00:21:00] brand? Is this how I want to speak to the world? And just make sure that you own it and that it's your own. One of the things that we've done to try to be transparent is we've released a a little handbook called How We ai, and it's got basically an analysis of how we communicate the benefits and limitations of AI internally and to others.

And then some evaluations of our models, where they work well, where they have biases and examples of the types of limitations that exist in them. Just to make it really concrete for our customers, what kinds of issues might arise and what they should be looking out for as they evaluate these things.

And with that, I'm really excited to take your questions. Thank you so much for listening. Huge thank you to Amie for inviting us into dya for putting all of this together. Just some takeaways here are, I hope you're able to see just for the minimal amount of input, how you're able to get a launch ready site in 60 seconds.

The more [00:22:00] detail you provide, the more. Personalized of an experience it's going to be, but that shouldn't stop you from getting started. You can always really easily make modifications, start small and grow from there. The AI is at this point, can handle everything from the structure to the copy, to the images, to the style of your site.

And it's, when you think about your web presence, don't just think about the informational site there, but also think about the full end-to-end experience that you're going to have. B12, you have your website, but you also have functionality ready made from day zero for things like scheduling and intake payments, email marketing, the whole lot more.

And of course. We have experts when you need them as well in case you want to be focused on your clients and you want experts to focus on your presence from there. So thank you very much and excited to discuss any questions people have. 

Amie: Thank you. That was great. One question I have is around the versioning.

Let's say you create a website with copy [00:23:00] and there's a picture that you're, you wanna improve on and then the next generation is worse. Is there a way to go back the previous version? 

Adam: Yes. So there's a few different elements to this. The first is if you're like, let's say that you take a stab at something and you wanna regenerate content here. You, as I said, you know it when you see it, but sometimes as you're saying you know when you don't want this thing and you see it. Yeah. And so at any time for any of the copy that gets generated or the images that got generated, you can either try again or you can reset to the original and go back to the original version.

That's in the moment as you're going through it, you're able to make that decision and see a new one or go back to the original. The other kind of versioning is you're working on something, maybe you're working on it a little too late, maybe you're working on it, it's a little too rushed and you just wanna go back to a previous version.

We have the ability to look through history and see snapshots that [00:24:00] happened before your deploy. Right after we generated your website, it can always add snapshots as well. And every 30 minutes or so, there'll also be snapshots of the site. And so if you ever need to, we're also, we also are taking backups for you constantly.

Amie: Thanks. How do you guys deal with like storage and databases, or do you have like certain types of businesses that you focus on versus like maybe a data heavy website. 

Adam: Yeah, that's a great question and one that we've I'd say as a data person I can say we we've been lucky in being able to just say yes to everything so far.

So it's, that's not naively saying yes to everything but it, the, at the end of the day, the. Types of folks that are using our product are largely small businesses. They have on the order of many thousands, many tens of thousands of contacts that they're working with. And we don't have limitations on what they can store.

At the extreme I won't get into specifics of [00:25:00] customers, but we've had un no communication with us government agencies from outside of the United States that have signed up for a website for their product. They have run all sorts of competitions and stuff like that, and all of a sudden we're getting like many tens of millions of paid views, many hundreds of thousands of form submissions, and we.

Did have to spin up some extra servers, but it all just worked. And I'd say that we handle things at massive scale because we have a lot of customers, not because each of our customers is storing a ton of stuff. Every once in a while, one of them does. That's on us to, to figure out, i, interesting.

I do think if you're looking to start like a SaaS business and have your own database with migrations, right? Yeah. And all of that stuff. I think there are other platforms that are probably even more powerful for the kinds of things that you're doing. We're building a bunch of functionality that is that kind of in still in development to help people custom code sections with help [00:26:00] from large language models.

But at the end of the day the thing works best for the small businesses then and people who are just starting their projects with us. Got it. 

Amie: Yeah. And so on that thread you have it seems like you guys have built out like almost components for like common things that people would need, like the schedule and all that stuff.

Yeah. So is that, are you are you handle handling like the API stuff there or can people bring APIs from other services in? Or how does that all work? 

Adam: That's great question and I'll do three part answer. So the first part is anything that you see here, right? If you're doing e-signatures, if you need a contact manager, if you need email marketing, scheduling payments, like we handle those APIs and you'll never have to think about how to sync your calendar, set up stripe, like these somewhat complicated things that you don't wanna get wrong.

We got you. The from the beautiful thing about the web and the beautiful thing about a website is that it's not a walled garden. And so just naturally there's things that you're gonna wanna do that B12 hasn't custom built [00:27:00] something out for. If you wanna add a section and it's an integration with another tool, then there's just a ton of these integrations that we can support with the click of a button.

And so we're not saying the only thing you can use on B12 is our own tools. You can do it yourself. There's even the ability to add like a custom section with HTML in it. If you wanna take like a co copy and paste a snippet and place it on your site. Then you can rely on someone else's backend for some functionality that you're doing and still have your website with B12.

The third thing I'll say, and this is still very much in development, it doesn't exist today is we do want you to be able to eventually describe some dynamic functionality if you wanna have a mortgage calculator on your website or something like that. The large language models are good enough to do these things where you don't need to store additional state.

You might not need an API request, but it is a dynamic widget that's on your site. We're actively working on supporting that kind of [00:28:00] functionality so that our customers can have more and more dynamic functionality on their sites, even if it's not integrated with a third party. 

Amie: Interesting. And I noticed you have the e-signature capabilities.

I'm, I guess I'm curious, I'll learn more about that. I've gone down the rabbit hole. I've used like almost every tool out there to be around building stuff and it's I'm not a engineer. Although I am learning a lot. Yeah. But I like really didn't quite grasp until recently, just how crazy it is to you have an a p.

Figuring out how to integrate that into an app and secure it and deploy it. Yeah. Is so crazy. Yeah. It's like a whole new ball game of learning how to do that. So one, I love that you have all of these integrations and components, but I guess from like a security standpoint, I'm curious on the, like e-signatures and how you guys handle that.

Adam: Yeah. So the, there's certain things that we're a small team. We're very much still a startup. There are certain things we trust ourselves with. At the end of the day, our customers data we [00:29:00] have to do right by our customers. Yeah. We have to do the right thing with it.

But I think, but part of that is also knowing your limitations. And so yes, we have payments and invoicing, but no, we don't store anyone's payment information. We have a partnership with Stripe for that. You don't have to set up Stripe yourself. We automatically make the right calls and Strike Connect to connect your to set up a provision and account for you and connect it to B12.

But we don't store any of that sensitive information at B12. Similar approach with e-signatures. We have in, basically we've deep integrated a third party into into B12 to support the actual like contracting functionality, which is open to a bunch of like really important regulatory details in different locales.

We. Aren't experts in that. And we have therefore done what I think is a really nice job of integrating folks that know how to do that and offer service that do that so that our small business customers [00:30:00] don't have to start worrying about provisioning and integration and all of those things, and can still benefit from I think, a great user experience without having to set all that stuff up.

Amie: Oh, okay. That's great because it yeah, setting that up via AI is very hard because the thing, you're ai. What is Docker and why do I need it? And it this, or.

I, that's not the world I wanna live in. I want a site that can like, take care of all that, like the technical stuff there, so that's 

Adam: pretty that's right. And I do, I think that whole world is changing because of ai. So if, we were starting B12 today, there's just a bunch of really amazing things that you can use in order to prototype the work that you're doing, or get a scaffold for a project that you then still have to code review and own and be responsible for.

And there are these wonderful tools that will help manage like all the operational aspects of your backend for you to, to a degree. And I think that's really cool. I. These things, not this [00:31:00] generation and not the next generation of models should a like small business owner have to expose themselves to that stuff.

It's just like a the thing these models don't absolve you of is like understanding how they work on how the technologies work and how to integrate them and how to operationalize them. And, trust a company like B12 or competitor with that kind of stuff. But don't try to do it yourself.

Yeah, 

Amie: because like to your point, it does, if you start trying to use like these robust tools you do like drift away from what you are actually trying to do and all of a sudden you're like becoming an engineer. That's right. And try and learn how it works instead of focusing on I just need a website for my business.

And move on to taking care of the business. That's right. 

Adam: Yeah. It's like you spend as much time with your clients as possible and that's it. 

Amie: Yeah. Yeah. Very cool. Do you, what's do you feel like there's one thing, we've done a few of these workshops with like similar tools, like what is like your secret weapon and your opinion or like your, the thing where you shine the most, do you feel like 

Adam: B12 in particular?

Yeah. Yeah. [00:32:00] It's I think there's, uh. It's, no, this is a packed space. Like you, if you choose to go into the website space, you're not the first company to choose to go into the website space. I think the thing that makes B12 unique is that we're at the forefront of using a bunch of these technologies that make it really easy to get a draft in 60 seconds.

Of your, the start of your project and then the rest of your project. But at the end of the day, our roots are in building these tools for experts. And so there's an expert pool that's available for you if you decide, Hey, my business is taking off and I don't wanna have to worry about every last detail.

Great. With the click of a button, you can have an expert helping you out. That, that's really passionate about doing the design, the copywriting, and all of that. And the third thing we pair that with is it. It takes a long time to build an editing experience for a website. And what you find with a lot of folks that are strong on the AI side of things is they will [00:33:00] generate a heap of code for you that, back to your point, you have to figure out how to deploy and operationalize.

And so we have this really nice thing at the intersection where you can just describe it and get it from an ai. It is generated for our platform, and so it is still point and click editable if that's what you're looking for. And if you decide that working on your web presence is not where you wanna spend the majority of your time and you wanna be working with your clients, there's experts that are available to help you out as well.

Amie: Yeah. I used to be a Squarespace like like expert, whatever, and yeah, I know a long time ago, but I'm looking at this, I'm like, man, this would've made my life so much easier. Building websites for people. Yeah, absolute 

Adam: great. They're a great company and it's a, it is cool to stand on the shoulders of giants for sure.

Yeah. Yeah, 

Amie: absolutely. It's just crazy to see how far it's come and just like maybe five years. It's really wild. Yeah, 

Adam: for sure. It's, it, I'd say the. Things are moving so quickly that, that, that story I [00:34:00] was telling at the beginning of, in, in 20 23, 90 5% of our customers were basically looking for B12 to provide experts, and now 95% of customers say, great, looks wonderful.

Let me edit a few things and click publish. That change happened to us in 2024. It's just a huge shock, it is, everything is moving very quickly. It's a really exciting time to be building for these tools responsibly. But it, like year after year I'd say things have been moving faster and faster for us in this space.

And you just have to hang on and keep prioritizing your way through what's next, best thing for the customer. 

Amie: It seems like now with four O image capabilities, things have just left recently with generating images because I think it was literally like six months ago that I was trying to use chat GT to generate images and they were like.

Mostly okay. But there was like a few things where you just those, this look generated by ai, but like now it's like that space has improved overnight, it seems. Yeah. 

Adam: It's improved a ton. Even it [00:35:00] has been iterating on adding custom styles to these images and it's wild to see how things have changed in the past six months since we've released the first version of this.

Yeah, I bet. And you said B twelve's been around since 2015. That's right. So what did you guys start off with doing? Was it, yeah. Was it always this, that's a long time in ai. So 

we were always on helping small businesses with their web presence. When we started the company, we built technology out that came out of a few, so a few of us are from academia.

And so a few of us have done like PhD research. Basically stuff that's the, at the intersection of experts and artificial intelligence. And so we were building web presences for our customers, but we were doing that by building a platform called Orchestra. That's available, orchestra dot, B12 point io.

It's open source. You can still check it out. We still use it to manage all of our expert workflows. But basically the name of the game was can we [00:36:00] take a very expensive agency model of setting up a website and make it a lot more affordable for small businesses? And we managed to do that, by several orders of magnitude.

We made it faster and more affordable to set up a website. But you were still it still took on the order of, many hours to days to weeks to get up and running because there's human beings that are doing just wonderful work for you. And so we were building the tools for those experts.

The big transition for us is one, we, by virtue of building this website builder that you see in front of you we had a few years worth of, moat set up, and the editor is good enough that we could bring customers into it. As soon as these new models came in, we were like, wow, you. You should launch your website and then bring experts on if you wanna do something.

And so this whole like see it in 60 seconds and have it be launch ready is two years old for us basically. And that was the big switch from [00:37:00] saying, Hey, these tools are for experts to having these tools be for directly for our customers to use every day.

Amie: Fascinating. It's so interesting to see these stories of the companies that like circling around like.

AI world and how it's evolved with everything that's been released recently, so very cool. Yeah, 

Adam: absolutely. Yeah. It's, and it's cool. It's a, it's nice to see that any company can think about the most painful thing for their customer and how an LLM or image generation or one of these models can help just get them set up and onboarded a lot more easily, and you've now reinvented your company.

Amie: Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome. Great. I really appreciate the time you guys put into putting this together and all the demos. And this will be, this recording will be available for people to rewatch. And we'll show share like the the website obviously, and any resources, like if you wanna share.

The slideshow you can at a few. But yeah. Sounds, it'll be, I would be great to link to your paper on how you guys, ai I think that's a cool thing that you guys provide for your customers. Oh yeah, sure. Yeah, [00:38:00] for 

Adam: sure. If anyone's interested, it's how we ai V 12. Yeah. But but yeah, for sure we'd love to link folks to that and happy to engage in any discussion on that as well.

Amie: Awesome. Thanks again for your time, and it's fascinating to learn about what B12 is all about. Looking forward to playing around with Yeah. Another tool. They're all so different and I can see the value for all of them yeah. It's fascinating. But yeah. All right. Thank you so much and hopefully we'll have you back again.

If you come out with any updates or features, let us know and. 

Adam: Yeah we'd love to join again, thank you so much for making the time and to everyone who's joined the call live. 

Amie: All right. Thanks everyone. Bye. 

Adam: Thank you. Bye.