Typeface revs up gen AI content race with multimodal announcements

As the race to provide enterprises with the latest generative AI content creation tools heats up, today Typeface publicly launched its multimodal AI content hub for the enterprise.

In a fiercely competitive landscape that includes startups like Jasper and Writer as well as Big Tech options from Google and Microsoft, the new AI content hub makes a range of text, image, audio, video capabilities generally available to brands and allows organizations to leverage AI models from OpenAI, Microsoft, Google Cloud, and other open-source platforms.

The announcement comes just a couple of weeks after the San Francisco-based Typeface, which emerged from stealth a year ago and has raised $165 million in funding, announced a Microsoft integration to embed the startup’s generative AI technology into the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights platform. And last summer Typeface partnered with Salesforce to help build customized content within the Salesforce marketing cloud. 

Multimodal helps Typeface stand out from the AI content crowd, says CEO

Abhay Parasnis, founder and CEO at Typeface, told VentureBeat in an interview that most of its startup competitors focus on one modality, such as text. “We focus on a marketer or salesperson that don’t want to go to different tools, one for text, one for image, one for video,” he said. “A multimodal hub that brings all the modalities of content you care about in one solution is our first biggest differentiator.”

In addition, he said, Big Tech platforms like ChatGPT are trained on global data but don’t understand each company’s specific products, customers, audience, or brand voice — Parasnis emphasized that Typeface is built on those platforms — but Typeface is trained on each customer’s data, content and customer behavior.

Finally, he maintained that Typeface stands out because of its safety and security offerings. “Anything you bring in is owned by that company and doesn’t leak back into the big platforms,” he said. “As enterprises start adopting these things, it’s not enough to just have innovative features — you also need governance and safety and copyright control, and to make sure content was trained on authentic sources you care about.”

2024 will be about ROI on gen AI

Parasnis pointed out that enterprises are currently shifting from an experimentation phase of gen AI to a more serious effort to get to ROI.

“The two broad themes we are hearing to your question from customers is one, efficiency,” he said, explaining that marketers are being asked to more with a less money and headcount. But now enterprises are also working to use gen AI content to drive top-line revenue growth.

“In just a year, we are seeing some massive companies already rolling out these tools and seeing some real material business results,” he said.