KEN RUCK

Solving a 30-year-old case with 23,500 documents is a feat that stretched-thin investigators no longer have to tackle alone. With our recently launched AI-powered tool, Veritone Assess, the COLD CASE FOUNDATION is transforming decades of complex, unstructured case files into actionable leads in minutes rather than months. “It allows us to explore this case from any angle possible because we have the time to do so now. We wouldn’t have that luxury if we had to review every single document,” said Butch Rabiega, AI Program Director at the Cold Case Foundation and a former FBI analyst. By helping automate the most time-consuming aspects of evidence review and compliance checking, Veritone is enabling operational efficiency, transparency, and accountability in government investigations and audits. More on Veritone Assess here: https://lnkd.in/gS_rrWbC

My updated framework, which will probably change in two weeks. This has nothing to do with a winner or loser scoreboard. The real structural advantage in AI is playing out across two layers. And the companies that understand both are building moats most people haven't priced in yet. Layer 1: The Interface Owners Google Workspace. Slack. Salesforce. iOS. ServiceNow. These platforms own the surface — and they control what gets seen, embedded, and converted at the exact moment a user needs it. On the enterprise side, nobody is ripping out their ERP to start fresh. The switching cost is existential. Years of data, workflows, and integrations baked into systems the business cannot operate without. So AI doesn't arrive as a replacement. It arrives through the seams — headlessly, into infrastructure that was already non-negotiable. On the consumer side, it's more personal but equally sticky. Your files are in Drive. Your muscle memory is in Sheets. Gemini is already in your inbox, your calendar, your photos. You're not evaluating AI in the abstract anymore. You're evaluating whether the AI version of your tools is worth paying for. That's the freemium conversion nobody talks about. Layer 2: The Headless Tools These tools have no interface of their own — and that's by design. They don't want a surface. They want to become infrastructure underneath the surfaces people already use. Wispr Flow is your voice and keyboard, running invisibly across every app on your device. No new tab. No context switch. Omnipresent by distribution. Anthropic Claude in Slack is the same playbook. Slack owns the interface. Claude lives underneath it, especially with Tags. The @mention is the entire UX — inside a workflow people are already in for eight hours a day. But the less obvious ones are worth watching e.g. CopilotKit — building the protocol layer for agents to live inside applications as dynamic, context-aware infrastructure. Most people haven't heard of it. Glean — enterprise search infrastructure. The connective tissue between scattered company knowledge and the people who need it, embedded into tools teams already use. The through-line: Headless tools need platforms for distribution. But the best headless tools make platforms stickier — which reinforces the platform's position. It's symbiotic until one side decides to vertically integrate. Enterprise AI wins by eliminating the rebuild conversation. Consumer AI wins by making the switch cost feel personal. Either way, every new integration compounds the moat. Gartner projects 40% of enterprise applications will embed task-specific AI agents by end of 2026. Up from less than 5% last year. That's not a product trend. That's infrastructure becoming invisible. The best AI distribution strategy was never go-to-market. It was get embedded before anyone thought to ask permission

It's pretty obvious to everyone that everything in AI is converging. Companies I couldn't have imagined competing with each other are today. The application layer is collapsing into infrastructure, infrastructure companies are moving up into workflows, and almost every startup is rebranding itself as some version of a transformation company. The words change every few months: context graph, system of action, organizational world model. A new category gets named, every website absorbs it, and within weeks the market is filled with companies claiming to be the inevitable platform for how work will change. The harder thing to copy is the institution underneath: the way a company attracts exceptional people, organizes their ambition, concentrates judgment, distributes authority, and turns work into a compounding system no other company can reproduce. ….The best companies in the world do not only compete on category, market, or compensation. They compete on identity. Jaya Gupta’s words summarizes the market and how many feel well.

Hope you all had a great Cannes or VidCon. And if you did both, you are a hero. Answers to all the questions I’ve been getting for the last three months about FOX Creator Studios, here in one place. https://lnkd.in/gFWig4Jg

Building an infrastructure business is hard, and for a slightly counterintuitive reason: when someone asks "so what do you actually do?", there are a dozen right answers. Stripe is infrastructure for payments. Twilio is infrastructure for messaging. The power of a platform is that it shows up across a hundred different workflows, which is also exactly what makes it tough to capture in one clean sentence. ScorePlay is the media infrastructure behind 300+ sports organizations and broadcasters. So how do you get people to actually understand what that means? You talk about it relentlessly, in as many rooms as you can, until the picture comes into focus. Last week was a good run at exactly that. I did three panels across New York and closed it out at the AWS conference for "Closer to the Game: How AWS Powers the Future of Football," an event AWS ran with the Bundesliga. I was on the "Content Understanding in Sports" panel, digging into how clubs, leagues and broadcasters manage the flood of content modern sport produces every single day. Two podcasts also dropped this week: - One in French with Sébastien Couasnon on tech 45', getting into how every federation, team and player has basically become its own media company. Thanks Sébastien for having me on, it was a really fun conversation! - One with Katie Nowak on @Beyond the Raise, where we went deeper on the venture side: how an operational sports content problem turns into a real infrastructure company. I have always been a big fan of Katie so really honoured by the invite and the sharp questions! Links to all of it in the comments.

 I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Veritone Assess, our latest AI-powered solution designed to empower public sector professionals. Assess allows agencies to uncover hidden discrepancies, policy violations, evidentiary gaps, and investigative leads across vast volumes of complex, multimodal data. Data overload is a critical bottleneck for government agencies, and Assess provides a much-needed breakthrough. By automating complex dataset analysis and ensuring compliance, we help agencies mitigate risk, accelerate workflows, and allow investigators to focus on what matters most: public safety. Learn more about the launch of Veritone Assess: https://lnkd.in/gMDYVgfS #veri #publicsafety #genai

Is anyone not going to Cannes? Corporate expenses might have given Nice double digit travel growth for the month.

On Tuesday, July 7 at noon PT, Veritone will be hosting our virtual Innovation Showcase! Please register here: https://lnkd.in/gzMz-N6J I’m particularly looking forward to sharing Veritone’s latest technology and solution developments, as the conversation around AI has fundamentally shifted over the last couple of years. Historically, the industry’s focus has been almost entirely on raw computing power and the models themselves. But as public internet data scraping reaches its limit, the real bottleneck is high-quality, proprietary data. Most of the world's most valuable information is still trapped in unstructured formats—decades of video, audio, and documents. At Veritone, we founded our company on a simple observation: organizations have had no practical way to understand, organize, or extract value from this information at scale. Our mission from day one has been to find the "truth in the signal" and turn that unstructured data into a competitive moat. We’ll share a firsthand look at how we are building the infrastructure, applications, and data ecosystem to power this new data economy. We will walk through real-world solutions—from helping sports brands monetize archives to enabling public safety agencies to securely analyze evidence. Whether you’re a customer, partner, or investor, I hope you’ll join us to see what we’ve been building. #veri #veritone #ai #genai #data

Thoughtful panel last week with TwelveLabs ScorePlay BRAHMA AI @ Closer to the Game: How Amazon Web Services (AWS) Powers the Future of Football. Thank you Victorien Tixier Patricio Cummins Carin Forman Jesse White cc Veritone