On April 15th, 2021, at 12 PM UTC we joined teh Moonwalker in an AMA (Ask-Me-Anything), led by Blaze. Team members of VAIOT that joined were COO Pawel Andruszkiewicz, Marketing Manager Anthony Blackburn and Blockchain Expert Michał Szachno.
Q&A Teh Moonwalker
Blaze: Welcome Fellas!
Anthony: Happy to be here!
Pawel: Happy to be here!
Blaze: Stoked to have you in here today, really looking forward to what you have to share. Well, I suppose, without further ado, let’s begin!
Q: Let’s start off with an intro. Please tell us about your backgrounds and your roles at VAIOT?
Anthony: Absolutely!
Pawel: Right. Hi everyone! My name is Pawel and I’m the COO at VAIOT. I’m a project manager by training and experience. I’ve worked for companies in Poland and in the UK, managing IT projects and teams in the areas of network infrastructure, app development, compliance, infosec, R&D, etc. I also managed an infosec department for one of the Polish IT companies. I worked for BNP Paribas, Atos, Royal Mail Group, Aviva, and a few more. Tired of corporate life I decided to embark on an exciting journey with VAIOT. At VAIOT I’m responsible for the general management of the project and the company’s operational activity.
Anthony: I’m VAIOT’s marketing manager. My background is originally in Experiential Marketing which involves unique interactions with brands. My goal for VAIOT is to keep our marketing fun, engaging, and interactive. 🥳
Michal: I am happy to be the Co-founder of the company as well as working as a Lead Blockchain Expert. Daily I work on VAIOT products and actively participate in the work of the marketing team.
Q: For those who don’t know, what is VAIOT and what do you do?
Pawel: VAIOT is delivering a portfolio of blockchain-based AI Assistants around its 3 business/product lines, for both consumers and businesses, that are supported with a VAI token economy. With our first AI Sales and Customer Service Assistant being now at beta stage (beta testing round 2 is now live and available for community testing) we already secured our first commercial client — a big retail shop network in Belgium that will implement our Assistant as a Voice Commerce solution. Our ultimate goal is the AI Legal Assistant delivering legal services such as contract analysis and both traditional and blockchain-based contracts using a set of technologies we called Intelligent Contracts.
What is also important is that we are the first-ever regulated crypto project in Malta (VFAA-regulation). We prepared our PoC in cooperation with IBM, we partnered up with Grant Thorton who became our Virtual Financial Assets Agent, DAO Maker, and other companies.
Blaze: Sounds amazing and you have accomplished a substantial amount already. Quite the accolade to be the very first regulated project in Malta too.
Q: Can you break down your use cases for us please, the simpler the better as we have many newbies that have joined of late?
Michal: Sure thing, I’ll try to bring that part closer to you
First one — AI Sales and Customer Service Assistant already has a developed beta version and first client in Belgium! We started building this as part of the PoC project with IBM and the use case we use at this moment is a sale of a car insurance policy through the usage of AI Assistant using Natural User Interface. As we developed a beta version, we were able to start the conversations and already secure the deal for the pilot implementation with SupraBazar that will use our Assistant as a Voice Commerce solution.
The second one is the AI Aggregator and Broker which uses the AI Assistant’s interface to allow for the aggregation of products and services and distributes them to consumers through highly personalized offers and recommendations — this is envisaged both as a B2B solution for broker and aggregator companies to use this as a new distribution channel and as a standalone B2C solution for aggregating crypto-related services.
Q: With the car insurance policy, I assume your AI Assistant finds the best deal and executes the contract based on your criteria?
Michal: Our goal is the AI Legal Assistant focusing on both contract analysis and automatic creation of ready-to-sign, traditional contracts, and their digital equivalent.
The truth is that each of our business lines solves different problems — but we definitely offer a new, innovative way of accessing various services for consumers that can allow us to reduce costs, automate processes, and create a multichannel experience.
Pawel: Wait time can be significant as well, the communication with a lawyer is not easy either.
Michal: It’s worth notice that we have identified insurance and legal sectors to start with. Our thesis is backed with the company Business Plan prepared jointly with our Partner Grant Thornton 💪🏻
Blaze: Congratulations! Grant Thornton is a giant in their industry!
Anthony: To get back to what Pawel said. That’s the best part about our services, they help avoid red tape, hefty costs, and the time consumption associated with traditional legal services, and they will be able to help streamline processes to make Lawyers more efficient.
Q: With contracts for example, how does your AI Assistant package the contract? Would be nice to go through the whole process.
Pawel: First, our AI Assistant is using a legal database gathered through our partner’s network. Second once it is live, one of the first features will be the contract analysis — basically upload and get contract analyzed with risks highlighted, etc. As part two, the Assistant is using the legal database and the user requirements/inputs the Assistant prepares a contract that can be both the printable, traditional version, and digital version and those contracts can but don’t have to back a transaction done through our AI Assistant (example: C2C car sale between two users). This is how the process looks like in short.
Q: What sort of costs are we looking at for a simple legal document that isn’t too complicated?
Pawel: That highly depends on a legal document TBH, jurisdiction, etc. The cost would be calculated based on the user requirements for the legal doc by the AI Assistant itself on a case-by-case basis — but I can assure you that it will be significantly lower than what you would have to pay with a traditional law firm and significantly better than what you can get for free from the Internet. 😉
Q: Why hold VAI, what can I do with it and what makes it valuable?
Michal: That is my thing 😈 happy to say a few words about that! The VAI Token is set to incentivize the users to utilize VAIOT’s solutions due to, e.g., Payback Program fueled by VAIs and is crucial for the proper functioning of the underlying VAIBC technology.
VAI Tokens can be used as:
- Payback Bonus after a purchase is completed by the user in one of VAIOT’s business lines (line 2 and 3), part of the transaction value is denominated to VAI Tokens, bought back from the free market, and delivered to the users’ Payback Bonus Wallet that encourages the user to keep the token and utilize it for further purchases within VAIOT solutions.
- Payment method for goods and services offered via VAIOT solutions.
- Staking rewards- by depositing funds, one can set up a network node and get rewarded with VAI Tokens in return.
- Collateral for the Price-Stabilizing System (VVAS).
- Bonding System- deposit in VAIOT’s bonding system to access certain functionalities or use them on preferential terms.
- Unit of account for transaction fees and Intelligent Contracts execution.
These are the base ones but I surely recommend reading the article on Medium, where we explain everything:
THE VAI TOKEN ECONOMY
An overview of VAIOT’s network incentives and token utility.
vaiotltd.medium.com
Blaze: I have been loving your LP campaign, been in it since day one.
Anthony: 🚀🚀🚀🚀
Q: So, what does the rest of 2021 have in store for you, please paint a picture of your roadmap ahead for us?
Pawel: Well, we have a lot in store which is exciting for us and our developers as well. We will have the first implementation project at Supra Bazar for the Voice Commerce solution. We have the Cosmos migration planned as well. We will be extending our partnerships network, focusing on law firms and consulting companies like Grant Thornton — so definitely expect some partnerships coming up. We have the launch of our AI Broker Software planned as well. Soon we will be also opening a bridge to BSC.
Q: Why do you want to create VAI? What do you expect it will bring you and the community?
Anthony: Great question! In terms of what we expect, we expect to change the way business and legal services are handled globally. Our Assistants have a very broad scope, so we expect to be in a few sectors. With our AI Sales Assistant (The Merchant), it can be integrated as a voice commerce solution and to conduct Intelligent Shopping.
In the current global landscape, when we can’t have the human touch, at least we can have our VAIOT Assistant to make the experience more enjoyable and accessible overall. With the Insurance Broker/Aggregator (The Broker), you can expect to see us in both the large insurance space and the DeFi insurance space. With our Legal Assistant, we aim to be in every law firm streamlining processes and revolutionizing the legal system as it exists today.
Q: With any business, it is about making those sweet Benjamin’s. How does VAIOT derive revenue to sustain itself?
Pawel: Well as we already mentioned we have our first commercial deal signed — meaning revenue. Regarding revenues from sales of products and services, we intentionally made the VAIOT development process a gradual development plan with three business lines, where the first business line is the one developed now for B2B2C purposes. Thanks to this approach we can now offer the solution to clients, get commercial deals (like the one we got with Supra Bazar), earn money on implementation projects, and keep developing and delivering our goal — AI Legal Assistant.
Q: Can you tell us more about Intelligent Contracts? How does it work?
Michal: With pleasure! The concept of intelligent contracts evolved for us as well since we founded the company in 2018, but it always was all about connecting the capabilities of AI and blockchain. We treat intelligent contracts as the full technology set but to make it easier, we say intelligent contracts are smart contracts enhanced with AI and prepared by an AI assistant.
The whole idea was since we are not all lawyers (or people with legal skills) and we are not all developers (we don’t necessarily possess the skills to use smart contracts daily) We should still be able to have access to blockchain capabilities. Most of us struggle with different contracts we sign, or we need to sign; we know that law firms are expensive; we know that the overall concept of smart contracts is full of opportunities.
That is why we came up with an idea of our own, cheap, fast, personal lawyer who will create or analyze a contract for you based on the combined knowledge of many lawyers and law firms and he’ll be able to give it to you in both a traditional and digital manner.
Q: You have quite a few partners, perhaps you would like to tell us a bit more about them? 👀
Anthony: Having a strong partnership network is part of our Business Plan. We know how important it is for our dev plans to have partnerships with both tech projects and for example law firms and consulting companies. Our list of partnerships is extensive and still growing.
VAIOT cooperated with IBM that resulted in a joint development project for VAIOT’s PoC based on IBM’s Watson and IBM Cloud components. More dev projects are planned to follow recently signed implementation deals for our clients.
We work closely with Grant Thornton which is a renowned consulting company with huge legal and compliance departments globally. Grant Thornton, as our partner and VFA Agent, supports us from a legal and compliance perspective.
Recently we started the cooperation with uniqly.io to implement Intelligent Contracts created by VAIOT AI Assistant in the internal processes of the company. They will allow for faster, cheaper, and secure DeLa (Decentralized Law) contracting between Uniqly and its employees or clients.
VAIOT is also forming its network of law firms supporting the cause with Hance Law Avocats and few others to come.
We partnered with many companies from the crypto space like ORAICHAIN, PAID Network, CoinFirm, DAO Maker, and a few other companies that support our cause. We did our regulated token sale in cooperation with DAO Maker in a form of rSHO.
You can find a complete list on our website: www.vaiot.ai
Blaze: Love PAID and DAOMAKER.
Q: I think that there is some definite synergy especially with PAID as they are also doing business smart contracts?
Anthony: Yes, we have many strong partners and are also working on some new partnerships in the AI Blockchain space. We have long-term plans of really connecting the AI-Blockchain community, an “AI Alliance” if you will. Our partnership with PAID is more strategic than technical, they have their own systems, but we felt that in-fighting would do us no good. Especially since the DeLa (Decentralized Law) space is still young and the community is small. Those who travel together, travel furthest.
Q: You also have some great partnerships and users i.e., Supra Bazar for example. The being of any great product though is users. How do you plan to get them on board en masse?
Pawel: The beauty of our 3 business lines is that they all follow different business models and require different user handling. The first one for example (Supra Bazar example) — is a B2B business line where we offer the software to businesses, and they implement it as their channel hence the users come through their network as they are using their own branding.
With the AI Legal Assistant, it obviously requires a different approach — you need to build the user base from the scratch but as you know this is all sales and marketing strategy which is a topic for a separate Whitepaper ;) We obviously have some marketing plans for the AI Legal Assistant launch but it will also use partners and clients (yes, the AI Legal Assistant will also be delivered to businesses) to drag their users/end-customers to the solution.
Blaze: I love that ethos. Collaboration should be the name of the crypto game!
Anthony: before we open it up, we just released a new episode of Meet VAIOT! The weekly episodic introduces team members and covers a range of topics from token economics to VAIOT internal operations:
Q: In terms of strategy, how will you ensure outcomes are achieved? Do you look to hire more employees in the short run, or will you be prepared to scale as growth in the market continues?
Pawel: We are expanding our Team all the time now. We are actually just hiring a Product Development Manager. We recently onboarded two new marketing team members. We are constantly looking for blockchain and AI devs to enhance our dev team. We are scaling our partnership network as well — we need this to effectively built our solutions. I guess we are good here ;) We are also working closely with our private investors and shareholders as they are committed to supporting the company long-term by providing networking opportunities, client deals, and equity investments.
Q: VAIOT plans to combine artificial intelligence and blockchain to introduce its Virtual AI Legal Assistant to the market. Basically, how efficient an AI product will perform is almost completely dependent on the density and relevance of the data with which the AI product was built to the Field in which it is being deployed. In your case How were you able to get all the required data needed to build and train your AI algorithms to perform efficiently within the Legal Field. I can only imagine the amount of data you will need to achieve this. Were you able to also get support from legal institutions to make this possible?
Anthony: Great question and commentary. To be brief, we are currently building a network of law firms and legal professionals that will assist us with populating our AI Legal Assistant with thousands (eventually millions) of contracts.
As you may know, when it comes to training AI systems there is significant front-end onboarding, labeling, etc. but as our Assistant gets fed more contracts, the smarter it gets, and the more intuitive it is when it comes to analyzing and generating new contracts. It is a slow process, but something we are already well into from a developmental standpoint. 🚀🥳
Q: That concludes this AMA, thanks so much for coming out guys!
Anthony: Before we go, for all of those looking to find out where to access our VAI Token, we are available on KuCoin, Gate.io, UNISWAP, and Bilaxy! Careful, there are two VAI tokens, make sure you’re searching for VAIOT when trying to access our token!
Anthony: Thanks, it was a pleasure to be here.
Pawel: Thank you so much for having us.
Michal: Thanks for having us!
