Vikram Chalana Podcast Transcript
Vikram Chalana joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Vikram Chalana. Vikram Chalana, a visionary entrepreneur and trailblazer in the world of AI driven content creation. As the CEO of Pictory.AI, Vikram leads a team dedicated to revolutionizing the way we generate video and social content.
With Pictory’s groundbreaking AI technology, long form content, such as blogs and webinars, undergoes a miraculous transformation into a month’s worth of engaging visual and social media content, all accomplished in a matter of minutes. Vikram’s journey is marked by an unwavering passion for creating transformative technologies.
His foray into deep tech landscape began as a research scientist at Insightful Corporation, where he honed his skills and developed a deep understanding of the industry’s intricacies. However, it was in 2003 that Vikram embarked on his entrepreneurial odyssey, co-founding Winshuttle. This enterprise software company quickly gained prominence for its innovative application data management solutions, specifically designed to revolutionize SAP based businesses.
Well, good afternoon, Vikram. And welcome to the show!
Vikram Chalana: Hey, thank you, Brian. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. It’s my pleasure to host you on an amazing podcast, but obviously hear an amazing story from an amazing person like yourself hailing out of the great state of Washington and in Seattle. There we again, traversing the globe today.
So, appreciate the time. And we’re going to jump right into the questions here. You’ve had a fascinating career from being a research scientist to becoming the CEO of Pictory.AI. What inspired you to pivot from enterprise software solutions at Winshuttle to founding Pictory.AI, a company focused on AI driven content creation?
Vikram Chalana: Yeah, so I’ve been working on for a really long time. I would say almost 30 years and I’ve seen it apply in so many different domains. So, I had a sense of it, that what the capabilities are of the different tools out there. As I was building my last startup wind shuttle, we had grown from two of us in the garage to about 350 people.
And one of the things I realized was in the team of 350 people, we had one person who was capable of doing videos. And over time, as you have noticed, as I’ve noticed, as many of you, your audience have noticed, the content has shifted. People want more multimedia content. Text doesn’t cut it anymore.
It’s podcasts. It’s videos. More engaging forms of content, but so many of us are not able to create videos. We were stuck with the office tool set and the office doesn’t allow you to create videos or edit videos. So, the vision was, can we make video editing so easy that any businessperson can create videos, edit videos because this is where thought leadership is moving.
This is where communication is moving is about, about video. So that’s kind of, that was the inspiration for us to, to create Pictory. It’s how do we make videos easy? And how do we use AI in the process to make videos easy and our inspiration relief was Canva. So, we saw what Canva was doing around design and, and kind of disrupting Photoshop and making it really easy for anyone to become a designer.
And we wanted to kind of build the Canva for video, but with a lot of AI in the mix.
Brian Thomas: I love that. And it’s funny how AI has just exploded this last year, year and a half or so with the release of chat GPT, obviously. But what I really liked about your story there, Vikram, is the fact that you’ve been working in this AI space for 30 years.
A lot of people don’t know. They thought, well, this is just something that came out the last few years. No, we all know that there’s been work on it for decades on it, and I appreciate you being one of those pioneers in that space. So, And Vikram, the next question for you with Pictory’s groundbreaking, groundbreaking technology, you’re transforming long form content into engaging visual and social media content.
Can you share the vision that drives Pictory.AI and how you foresee it changing content creation dynamics?
Vikram Chalana: Yes. So, As I mentioned, like, you know, the, the vision was something like Canva for video, but I think there was one There’s one gap in in most of these tools that are out there today. We talked about Lumen 5 as well.
Usually, you have to start with something. Blank, the blank slate is actually the absolute issue there. So, one of the things that we realized early on, because we come from, like, I was coming from this thought leadership background and product marketing and product management, and there’s always content that we have, whether it’s written form content in the form of blogs or white papers or specs or whatever.
Or video content in the form of webinars and podcast recordings and so on. And there’s always content and can we repurpose that content to something that is more engaging than something that that the modern audience will consume. So that’s kind of been our vision to some degree. It’s not just about making video process easy, but actually repurposing content into.
Into the video format and I think that the dynamics of content creation are going to change by that and just like so many other revolutions we’ve seen where the consumer leaves the revolution and then businesses follow, we will see a very similar thing around video. Like we see consumers leading this whole video creation revolution with TikTok and Instagram and the like, and businesses are kind of, they’re either advertisers on that platform, but they’re not, they’re not completely into the content creation dynamics.
But, again, businesses to me are sitting are like, they’re sitting on so much content already. So, can we, can we help them turn that content they’re already sitting on into short form, TikTok like videos or whatever platform makes sense for your business? But that’s kind of the vision and that’s what that’s what I see changing over the next the next few years.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that and you’re right. As you know, the attention span of humans, especially the younger generation, is literally seconds and to take something that’s meaningful. That might be longer content to convert it to something. That’s more I’d say, I’d say palatable in that time frame is the way to go.
And I appreciate you sharing your vision on that. So, the next question I have for you is. AI and content creation presents both opportunities and challenges. What have been some of the most significant hurdles in developing and refining victories AI technology? And how have you addressed them?
Vikram Chalana: Yeah, that’s a great question.
I can I talk about opportunities first before I talk about challenges? Cause I’m an optimist by nature and I feel AI presents so many interesting opportunities and I’m constantly. On the lookout for how this can improve the game even more. But for example, for us, the opportunities that the AI has presented, we talked about chat.
GPD came out in the last year or so. And that’s really transformed our business. We grew in one year. We grew seven-fold. We went from like 4, 000 customers to 25, 000 customers in a year. And it’s been It’s, it’s been, we use chat GPT almost like a marketing thing because see one of our core use cases or core features is converting text to video.
And sometimes people like, again, the blank slate problem, like, how do you create a script that you can convert to a video? So, chat GPT fortunately is great at that. You just give it a prompt, it’ll give you a script and, and then you copy that script over into Pictory and you create a video.
So that was. One opportunity that we saw, and we were able to leverage from the marketing perspective we can, we did some campaigns around using chat, GPT and victory together to create your video channels, your YouTube presence and so on. And then over time, we have now integrated chat GPT into our product.
In fact, last Friday, we launched Pictory GPT on the GPT store. So, from within ChatGPT now, you can create videos. You can just ask the ChatGPT interface to create a video about. Podcasting, for example, and it’ll come up with the script and then it will say you want to create a video from the script, and you just press yes and it’s going to create the video.
So, the challenges around AI have been significant, especially the GPT4. And I mean, these are large models, and they are expensive to run and expensive to make calls into API calls into. So, you have to constantly figure out how best to optimize that. So, one, one approach that we’ve used and a lot of, a lot of companies are using today, the design pattern is to not use a GPT4 model or a GPT4 API for all your production workflows.
But use a lower end model, say GPT3, 3. 5, or even one of the open-source models like Lama. And but use, use GPT4 to generate training data. Because it’s awesome and it can, it can create, it can help create training data. So instead of, you know, manually creating training data, you can get GPT’s help to create some training data for you.
And then train using that training data, fine tune a lower end LLM for a specific task. And, and that approach has, has been really good from the cost perspective and also speed perspective. Because Chad, GPT4 can be slow and, and it can be very expensive to make a single call. But calling 3.5 turbo model or an open-source model that you hosted yourself can be much cheaper and much more efficient, much, much faster. And it’s fine tuned for a specific task. So, you can get it to work on your task very quickly. So that’s an example of, like, a challenge that, that we saw around cost and speed.
And how we were able to address it with this modern and hopefully this is a tip for anybody who’s looking to incorporate AI technologies into their product and services.
Brian Thomas: Thank you so much. Vikram. That’s awesome. I appreciate you presenting an example. They’re both in an opportunity and a challenge.
And what I really like is the fact that. You, you went into a little bit of hurdles with LLMs and, and the size and, and the cost to maintain that. And we’ve talked about that here on the podcast. So, I appreciate that. And the fact, just another plug for Pictory.AI, your API with chat GPT is awesome.
So, we’re going to make sure the world knows about that. And then, Vikram, next question and last question of the day, looking forward, how do you see AI evolving in the content creation space and what future developments can we expect from Pictory.AI in harnessing these advancements?
Vikram Chalana: Yeah, I think what we’ll start seeing more and more there’s, there’s good and bad on all the AI advancements as you, as you realize, probably as, as most of the audience realizes the bad sides are, you know, all the fake information that can be created avatars that can be created you know, the deep fakes and all that stuff and but the, the good side of it is video we know is going to be A very common way of creating of communication and the type of content that people will consume.
So that’s not going anywhere. Most people find it really hard to edit videos and create videos. So, we’re solving part of that. But also even with recording videos, right? Most people are Yeah. Afraid to appear in front of the camera or even record their own voice on there. They’re nervous of that.
They’re nervous of seeing themselves in front of the camera. So, some of these AI technologies can really help with that kind of stage fear, if you will. So, as an example, if I’m able to train my voice and clone my voice. So that, you know, I can write any text and it and I can have it sound like me.
That’s a good, that’s, that’s a good start that, that those technologies are already available. Same thing with a few photos, if I can have my face animated and speaking what as I’m speaking. That, that solves another set of problems. And now if you have content like, you know, PowerPoint slides and the like that, that you want to communicate to your audience and, and make it more engaging by putting your own voice and your own avatar or your, your face speaking on the side then you can, you can imagine a world where the death by PowerPoint doesn’t happen anymore because your PowerPoint slides are more engaging. They’re available as synchronously and people can watch as they as this as any at any time in the future. And especially for training type scenarios for. Education, learning and development type scenarios this, this is a very promising offering that I can, can bring to the future is creating these training materials very, very quickly.
And that’s just 1 example, and then we can have all kinds of other things like personalized videos with your own voice and your own face. And so, so, yeah, I think. Content creation space is, is changing, it’s changing rapidly and, and it’s all going to move to personalization and it’s all going to move towards the fact that you don’t have to appear in front of the camera and have shot big setups and, and, and so for, for a lot of business videos, it’s going to, the promise is it’s going to help you make those videos.
Much faster, much quicker, much cheaper.
Brian Thomas: I love that. And we’ve seen that just in the last year with the, you know, again, the proliferation of AI apps and chat GPT. But creativity is going to be off the charts. And obviously that’s a good thing. But again, I appreciate the insights on your platform today and sharing some of the history.
It was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Vikram Chalana: Excellent. Thank you, Brian. It was a pleasure being on the show.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Vikram Chalana Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
