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Daily news and analysis about the food tech revolution

Pylon AI

Podcast: The Future of (Food) Media Is Conversational & AI Driven

If you’re looking for someone who can build a media company with the future in mind, you could do a lot worse that Shelby Bonnie.

Bonnie first showed his ability to build forward leaning media properties with CNET, a company he cofounded that helped set the template for tech media for much of the past couple decades. For his next act, Bonnie cofounded Whiskey Media, a company that tapped into the power of passionate communities with brands like Tested, Screened and Giant Bomb just as social media platforms like Facebook were beginning to change the media landscape.

And Bonnie’s latest bet? A company called Pylon, which is leveraging AI-powered voice assistants and chatbots to create media properties that power content delivery in vertical interest areas such as food and cooking.

I caught up with Shelby to talk about those early days, how he sees media evolving over the next decade and how he thinks Pylon can help shape that new future.

If you are an appliance maker, food brand or any company that touches the consumer, you’ll want to listen to this podcast to get an understanding of the future of consumer media.

You can listen to the podcast below, download it here or subscribe to the Smart Kitchen Show on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

The Recipe Isn’t Dead. In Fact, It’s Becoming The Center of Action In The Digital Kitchen

At last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, celebrity chef Tyler Florence said: “the recipe is dead.”

Needless to say, it’s a bold statement. There’s no doubt that Florence is right to suggest that things are changing quickly in the age of Tasty cooking videos and that the time-worn practice of looking up recipes in cookbooks is something people are doing less every day.

But if today’s news about another Amazon integration with a popular online recipe site is any indication, I’d suggest the recipe is far from dead. In fact, it looks more and more like the recipe is becoming the center of action in the digital-powered kitchen.

And it’s not just Amazon that likes the idea of shoppable recipes. Companies like Northfork have integrated with the some of Europe’s biggest grocers to enable recipe-driven shopping, while big players like Google are building guided cooking recipe capabilities into their virtual assistant platforms.

Then there are AI-centric startups looking to take the recipe and add extra intelligence to it to make things more personalized and interactive. Companies like Wellio, Chefling and Pylon.AI are doing interesting work here.

Then there’s the recipe itself becoming fused with connected cooking hardware. Everyone from one of the world’s largest cookware companies in Hestan to the world’s biggest appliance maker in Whirlpool to cookbook disruptor Tasty are creating recipe-guided hardware.

And finally, if technology-driven integrations and one columnist’s opinion aren’t enough to convince you, there’s always old-school chefs like Christopher Kimball (check out our podcast!) who think the recipe has a long life ahead of it.

So no, the recipe is not so much dead as evolving. Instead, as our recipes become digitized and more connected, they’re becoming the center of action in the connected kitchen.

As Jon Jenkins suggested at last month’s Smart Kitchen Summit, software isn’t only eating the world, but we are eating software. That software includes whatever the recipe is becoming which, in short, is probably just better, more evolved version of the recipe.

CNET Founder’s Next Act Is AI Powered Publishing. His First Product? A Kitchen Assistant.

Update 7/7/17: The company contacted us upon publication of this post to emphasize the Tasted app/skill is still in development and not ready for consumer use. 

The cofounder of one of the Internet’s longest standing and most storied tech media brands – CNET – is onto his next act: creating a diversified media brand for the artificial intelligence age.

Shelby Bonnie, who cofounded CNET back in 1993 and later became its chairman and CEO, is the CEO of a new publishing startup called Pylon AI, a company which describes itself as a “conversational engagement platform company.”

What does that mean? From the looks of it, Pylon aims to create diversified lifestyle content that is delivered to consumers through AI centric conversation platforms such as Alexa or Google Home or bots such as Facebook Messenger or Slack.

In a way, the company that Bonnie and other CNET alumni Mike Tatum and Cliff Lyon are creating is reminiscent of Bonnie’s last company, Whiskey Media. Only this time, instead of a collection of different web-based lifestyle media brands, Pylon AI is using a combination of apps and AI platforms like Alexa and Cortana as the content publishing system.

One of Whiskey Media’s most popular brands was tech lifestyle-focused Tested, so now it’s not all that surprising that Pylon AI’s first consumer lifestyle brand is called – you guessed it –Tasted. As the name suggests, Tasted is all about food and comes in the form of voice-assistant apps such as the Tasted Alexa skill, a companion web or iOS app.

What’s intriguing for the smart kitchen crowd is Tasted is essentially a guided cooking system, using a combination of voice assistant, web apps and mobile apps like its newly launched iOS app to help guide the consumer through the creation of a meal.

Tasted uses Alexa and visual guidance to help users to cook

Another interesting aspect of Tasted is it employs the talents of well-known cooking personalities such as Catherine McCord, the creator of Weelicious, and Regan Cafiso, a former editor for Food Network and Martha Stewart. This idea of using popular cooking personalities is a standard playbook option to create buzz for a new platform, but what’s more intriguing is Tasted is another example of the nascent trend of established cooking talents such as Heston Blumenthal and Beth Moncel are embracing AI-centric cooking platforms to reach consumers.

A Pylon AI spokesperson told me that they are still operating in stealth mode, so the company isn’t talking about their forward-looking strategy, but my guess is that we’ll soon see other brands like Tasted in other lifestyle verticals.

For Bonnie, Pylon represents an intriguing new direction for a long-time media innovator. After creating one of the world’s most iconic tech media brands in CNET and a diversified web media brand in Whiskey, he is now looking to AI-powered conversation assistants like Alexa and Facebook Messenger as the next frontier to reach consumers.

Want to understand how AI will impact cooking and the food ecosystem? Come to the Smart Kitchen Summit. Use the discount code SPOON to get 25% off of tickets.