AI Pet Care: Transforming Veterinary Services

Speaker 0: how do you see ai transforming pet care over the next decade?

Speaker 1: so i think ai is, you know, is eating the world. i think ai at the moment is, it has proven itself to be extremely helpful in a lot of industries across a lot of sectors in a very short period of time. whereas, you know, when we talk about sort of web one, it took some time for us to realize the power of of web one. it was really truly towards the end of web two where we started to kinda realize that, you know, the googles and the metas and and the amazons and, like like, all of these platform players. like, you know, web two is owned by ten companies, where web three obviously is gonna be owned by people like you and me. right? it's gonna be sort of owned by everybody. and and it's hard to argue that now when you see openai and a couple of companies really dominating and becoming very big, achieving evaluations that took google twenty years to achieve. right? but in a period of six years. right? so, you know, specifically, in the pet care space, i think we're, again, ten, fifteen years behind in terms of ai. there are a few guys that are are sort of building some cool stuff, but there is nothing that is transformative yet. okay? nothing that i've come across, that is remarkable, right, and including my own products. right? i think what we have is good, and and and it will, you know, be improved over time. and so what i think is gonna happen and and and the way i view it is, there is a supply and demand issue where the supply is here of veterinary professionals and the demand is up here. right? and so to bridge that gap between the pet owner that needs help, with whatever health issue they may have, and the availability of a a a doctor in veterinary medicine or a technician you know, it depends on which country you're talking about. but broadly speaking, globally speaking, it it is a problem. right? and so i think what's gonna happen is you're gonna need tools in the toolbox that helps to streamline the work of a professional in the industry. and i think, you know, our kinda wearable can do a lot of things. like, as the pet kinda comes in to the clinic, you know, through the pim system, the sort of patient management system, that data could have been pulled in straight away as the vet kinda you know, as the person walks to the room with the vet, everything is up on the screen. you know, they already have real time health markers. like, a vet gets, in average, five minutes to diagnose a pet. and sadly, quite often, you know, due to time constraints and, you know, they're asking the pet owner, have you seen this? have you seen that? you know, what really happened? it's trying to triangulate information. and i think what we can do is we can help to give that information a lot faster. and, also, we can help with, you know, pets that don't need to go to the vet. things can happen, and and the help can happen from the the comfort of one's home. right? and it could be a tele vet instead or it could be a technician. it could be someone else. right? and so i think ai is going to help to bridge the gap at home and in clinic in hospital experience and make sure that pets that are in really dire need goes in, and pets that can be helped from the comfort of one's home, that can happen from home. there's gonna be a lot of ways to diagnose and give next step recommendations and kinda educate the pet owner on what they can do themselves. but also, i think in a similar way, there's gonna be a lot of, tech that's gonna help the professional side to get a second opinion really fast. instead of going out asking another busy colleague in the clinic, they're gonna be able to kinda ask the ai, like, here's the data. what's your take on it? it's like, okay. well, it's the same as i thought. okay. great. so now i got a second opinion. i feel a little bit more comfortable with this diagnosis i'm gonna give the the the pet owner. and i think, you know, there's gonna be a lot of ways to streamline saving time and giving them the ability to actually do more, and this will then help to kind of help to bring down this gap in supply and demand. right? the current demand in the us market is, like, it's gonna take thirty years to educate enough vets to meet that demand. right? so that's just not gonna be the only solution. that's part of the solution, but i think tech and ai is really gonna help to drive that other, mismatch in supplying demand. and i think, you know, we play a little role in that. i think our group can play a larger role in it in due course, but i think there's a lot of other really cool pet tech companies out there that are springing up. and if there's any investors out there listening to this, look at pet care and pet tech companies and invest in them. you know? if the ecosystem is not there for the pet tech entrepreneurs, you know, we're we're not gonna be able build these great companies that's gonna help the pets and the pet owners and the pet professionals. so yeah.

Speaker 0: yeah. you hit a nail on the head with the, i'm gonna say, data enrichment because i look at it from a business point of view. and when, say, some data comes in, as a lead, we wanna enrich that lead. we wanna find out more about that company, what market they're in, how big they are, how many employees they are, what people are saying about them, what the reviews are. so, you know, we build tools to go out and do that and put some based on those things, put some proposals and packages together and some, sales scripts, and then put that in front of a salesperson before the meeting. so now they're fully prepped, and they don't have to do that work. they do the review. they do this and say, okay. now i'm ready to have this focus meeting. i have a bunch of options. i'm pre prepped similar with the vet. is that exactly we'll go and get this data. we know why the pet's coming in. we have all this data from these devices. we have our ai database. it goes through and says, okay. the pet's this age. it's about this time. you should be checking for these things based on this and give that report to the vet so they have that information ready to go ahead of time, and that just changes the game. like, i just wanted to clarify for people who may not have thought through that process where that kind of stuff changes the game. so the other thing i see from your point of view, a couple of plays, like, the data play, because a lot of times, maybe we don't know what the average steps or activity level or whatever of this animal should be on the twenty four hour period. but as soon as we have thousands of animals and we're tracking the data and we're getting this, we can now detect anomalies and do things differently than we would have been able to before.

Speaker 1: right. yeah. i mean, two great observations there, by you. i think, you know, data is the foundation for any ai to work. right? and i think, you know, if you can be as close to ground truth as possible with the ai, then, you know, incredible. right?

Speaker 0: absolutely. i just did a story on another podcast i did called silicon scoop where ai is now translating animals speak so they can start, what the birds are saying. they're they don't quite have it down to vocabulary, but distressed, not distressed, happy, not happy. same thing with pets. and so that technology is gonna come along pretty good and be able to be implemented in something like your device so it'll be able to now communicate at a higher level with the owner what the pet's trying to communicate.

Speaker 1: yeah. yeah. i mean, look. i think, you know, that type of ai combined with, like, health markers. right? so if you think about stress, you know, we see that hrv is elevated. right? like, if you then see that and you also can have some kind of ai that can listen to the sound that the dog makes, you know, the the crying or the the coughing or the barking and kinda explain what the combination of those two data points mean in in sync, then, you know, you probably got the holy grail. right? and i think that's kinda what we're alluding to. it's like, okay. can we combine real time health data and markers with image recognition, with self assessment, ai tools, with all these different things? and i think there's a lot of stuff actually there's a lot of ways to kind of create the holy trinity of at home diagnosis or triaging, where you can truly understand status quo of your pet pet's health and what they're trying to tell you. like, you know? and and that was really how i started. i was like, what is my dog? like, i know he's anxious, but, you know, it's also like, what can i do about it? okay. i'll bring him along, obviously, but, like, what's my other alternatives if i can't bring him along? if i go to a restaurant where they just don't allow dogs. and, you know, and and that was the case when i lived in singapore. you couldn't bring your dog anywhere. it was like, you know, like, e even at outdoor places where you have an outdoor seating, it's like, you know, dogs are not allowed. it's like, why? we're outdoors. right? like, come on. but, you know, that's, there are rules and regulations in singapore. one must follow them.

Speaker 0: well, there's rules and regulations everywhere. i hosted an event last night, and there was one situation where the person wanted to bring a pet in. unbeknownst to me, we were at a tavern which served food and whatnot, and they didn't have the right documentation to prove. so they they could not let them in. so it's just one of those things. you know, you have to have the documentation says it's a service animal or whatever because yeah. health canada says, guess what? this is a place that serves food. we can't have pets running around. yeah. yeah. yeah. right. yeah.

Speaker 1: it's different in spain. in spain, you can bring them anywhere. like, you know, they're like, yeah. it's different. it's different.

Speaker 0: yeah. and i've seen them in starbucks and a few other places, so i guess it depends how you prepare the food versus this. and i think people loosely interpret those rules. so, absolutely, the rules are different, and you have to follow them. and it's it is unfortunate, but it is what it is. i mean, like, it's not unfortunate you have to follow them because, i mean, rules are there to scrunch our society.