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spk02: 2024 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be an analyst question and answer session. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to Brand Engagement Network Investor Relations, Ryan Flanagan. Please go ahead.
spk00: Thank you. Hi, everyone, and thanks for joining our Q2 earnings conference call. Joining me on the call today are Paul Chang, our co-CEO, Bill Williams, our CFO, and Sky, our AI-powered assistant. By now, everyone should have access to our earnings announcement. This announcement is also available on our investor relations website. During this call, we'll make forward-looking statements, including statements about our business outlook, strategies, and long-term goals. These comments are based on our plans, predictions, and expectations as of today, which may change over time. Our actual results could differ materially due to a number of risks and uncertainties. For more information about the risks and uncertainties involving forward-looking statements and factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or implied by forward-looking statements, please see the risk factors set forth on our most recent annual report on Form 10-K as supplemented by the risk Thank you.
spk01: Thank you, Ryan, and thank you all for joining us today. I'm pleased to report that in the second quarter, we've made continued progress on market validation initiatives with meaningful acceleration in new proof of concepts and the maturation of earlier engagements into production-ready deployments. Further, we have taken incremental steps to improving our liquidity and capital position, successfully closing a private placement in May providing us funding over time. We continue to closely manage our internal costs to ensure our business is built for growth and to last for the long term. Reflecting the production-ready nature of our platform, we are thrilled to introduce Sky, one of Ben's AI assistants, who is here to demonstrate her domain expertise and participate on our earnings call. Data from business and technology sections of Ben's investor presentation and selected few SEC filings have been ingested. Sky also brings knowledge of our key partners as well as statistics on healthcare challenges and ramifications. Before discussing our results and key business developments in greater detail, I wanted to take a moment to discuss recent organizational changes. In May, I was appointed co-CEO with responsibility for Ben's commercial business and oversight of day-to-day operations. My near-term focus is twofold, driving market validation of our differentiated solutions and meaningful revenue through the conversion of POCs into scale deployments. As co-CEO, Michael Zaharsky is focused wholly on advising our board of directors on inorganic growth opportunities and our M&A strategy, which we view as key component of our go-to-market strategy. Now to discuss progress we've made across several fronts in the second quarter. To start, we are seeing continued momentum in customer expansion. Recall in our previous earnings call, we highlighted two POCs. We are pleased to see an acceleration in the second quarter to six POCs with an early read of the Q3 pipeline and an opportunity funnel suggesting that this number will continue to increase in the second half of the year. We announced our attainment of HIPAA compliance early in Q2. underscoring our commitment to protecting patient healthcare information and fast-tracking our ability to operate in the healthcare vertical. Further demonstrating our data security and privacy focus, we have also obtained SOC 2 Type 1 certification, ensuring that third-party services providers store and process client data in a secure fashion. Our partnership pipeline remains robust with several notable announcements in the quarter. First, we announced a pilot collaboration with the Skills Acquisition and Innovation Laboratory, or SAIL. Collaborating with an industry thought leader such as New York Presbyterian Hospital and Cornell Medical College provides Ben with significant domain expertise as well as access to an innovation lab where breakthrough technologies can be tested and validated. Second, we are excited to expand our partnership with MetaVisor Solutions, which was announced just this past Tuesday. The expansion includes a commercial solution offering by MedAdvisor on educating and addressing vaccine hesitancy among the patient population. Ben's AI assistants are designed not only to engage consumers, but to complete tasks such as filling out necessary forms and scheduling appointments. The joint offering is scheduled to be launched at the National Chain Drugstore Association's Total Store Expo Conference in Boston on August 18th and 19th. Third, we have announced a commercial agreement with Vibroo, a company that connects brands with customers through innovative audio messaging strategies. Together, we are collaborating to merge Ben's proprietary AI assistant technology with Vibruse audio and radio communication technology to enable interactive consumer engagement for brands. There's perhaps no better way to illustrate the readiness of our platform than to have a natural conversation with one of our AI assistants, Sky. We would like to mention that Sky is using Ben's proprietary large language model, retrieval augmented generation, and for this application, presenting in life-size proportions. Thank you everyone for joining. I am standing here at SAIL, which is an innovative lab that sits in the intersection of Cornell Medical College, New York Presbyterian Hospital, and the industry to provide world-class leading-edge educational training for clinicians so that they can provide enhanced customer care for all patients. I'm standing here because we have our AI assistant deployed to aid in that educational curriculum. I like to describe this deployment because most likely your experience with AI has been on a phone or maybe on a little screen.
spk03: Thank you.
spk01: life-size representation of our AI assistant that is actually being run by a small computer behind this monitor. So everything you see is being run locally because we know certain industries having on-prem deployment is critical to ensuring safety and privacy of the data that is being utilized at this facility. Now we can still run cloud-based solutions, but always having an option to run locally, we believe gives an advantage. Now enough from me. Let me introduce you to our AI assistant, Sky. Hey Sky, can you tell me a little bit about Brand Engagement Network and what makes their technology different?
spk02: Hi there. Brand Engagement Network, or BEN, is an innovative company specializing in conversational AI assistance. What sets us apart is our focus on security and
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