Without live web data, your AI agent is basically useless | Jennifer Burns, Bright Data

Cristian (0:07)

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to TNW. My name is Cristian. Today, our guest is Jennifer from Bright Data. I will let you present yourself first.

Jennifer Burns (0:15)

Well, thank you for having me. Yes, my name is Jennifer Burns. I'm the Senior Director of Peer and Communications at Bright Data. And I've been there for several years leading through some of the things that we're going to discuss today.

Cristian (0:26)

Awesome. For anybody that doesn't know about Selfiet or about Bright Data, can you give us an overview about that?

Jennifer Burns (0:33)

Sure. So we are the number one web data infrastructure company. And we say we're number one by every measurement possible. We have 50,000 customers. We serve 14 of the top 20 LLMs.

We do 100 million agent interactions every day. We have the most employees, the most AR, the highest AR. So, like I said, by every measure possible.

Cristian (0:55)

That's amazing. How is it to be in that position?

Jennifer Burns (0:58)

Well, being number one is always great. So, we're always, you know, holding that position comes, withholding that position comes a lot of responsibility. So, we're setting the bar. We continue to raise the bar, and we hope that the industry follows whenever we make an adjustment, or that we have come out with some steps that we feel are absolutely necessary, that everybody is on the responsible and ethical path, and that we are all working towards protecting the Internet and users.

Cristian (1:30)

Awesome. Tell us more about Bright Data, how it actually helps customers, what are the use cases, why should people use the product, and also how it's changed in the last couple of years.

Jennifer Burns (1:41)

I'll start with how it's changed over the last couple of years, because that really tells who we are today. So we've been around for 14 years now.

We started with the foundation of what we do today, which is infrastructure, data infrastructure for AI. All of that technology that we had worked on has led us to where we are. So if you think of the web in terms of what it was 25 years ago, Google or whatever search engine you used, and what it is today with answer engines, we are that connection layer that is taking the data from the old web and connecting it to the new web, or providing context to your agents so that when you ask it to execute something on your behalf, it's able to do it with what's actually relevant today as far as what's happened, what's prices are happening, how companies have changed something, anything that you need to know that's in the now.

Cristian (2:36)

But this was not the case before agents and AI really started to make a sense on the market, right? Before OpenAI launched and the charge GPT. So it also changed the product in the last couple of years, right?

Jennifer Burns (2:48)

The product is still very similar, but it's evolving. So market intelligence is really where we were a major player in before and AI has taken over since then.

Cristian (2:58)

And agents use the platforms quite a lot, right? Yes, absolutely. Awesome. I know you had some lawsuits with X and Meta, and then you sued back X if I'm not mistaken. And it was a debate about public data and private data. So I want to touch base on that, to see your perspective on that. At our past conference, we also had a debate with your CMO, Yanai, and someone from CloudFedder, where they debated public data versus private data. And I want to hear your point on that.

Jennifer Burns (3:29)

Absolutely. So our stance is very clear. Public data is anything that is not behind a login. So if you make it accessible to any person, it should also be accessible to AI.

You really can't pick and choose who is going to be able to view that data and at what scale. So if you don't want it to be public, you simply put it behind a login and then it no longer is public. So it's no longer openly accessible.

Cristian (3:59)

What do you think about publisher that their argument is that they invest a lot of money, they invest a lot of resources into creating this data and then agents come and they scrape all of the data and they, yeah.

Jennifer Burns (4:14)

So the answer is still the same. It's, you know, there's a solution to this. If you're a publisher and that you're not happy with what's happening with with agents or AI, you put it behind a login and then you can pick and choose who is able to access your information. I think that, you know, it's a real issue and the market still has to work itself out. But that is not for us to decide how that's going to happen.