How has Runway's customer profile evolved with recent developments in generative AI in the last year?

We remain focused on storytellers. Storytelling can take different shapes and forms. It can happen inside production and professional environments, like post-production companies and ad agencies that are already using Runway. It can also happen inside marketing teams and small teams — a handful of people working in a company or a small business. For Runway, Generative AI is driven by finding ways of embedding this technology to augment people’s ability to tell stories.

On the research front, we're focusing on multimodal AI systems to enable new types of creativity tools. Which will also translate into new market opportunities. At the core, this wave of AI research is enabling new ways of interacting with software and synthesizing media that will fundamentally transform existing customers' workflows.

A second-order effect of this new wave of improved models is the democratization of productivity and creative tasks that used to be very hard to do without highly specialized training. As models continue to automate what used to take multiple hours of work and translate that into seconds, we will continue to see leveling of capabilities that only a handful of people had access to. Think about creating professional ads, product photography, and editing a large volume of content. Anyone can use “Erase and Replace” — a tool we have in Runway that allows you to professionally swap a background and generate any sort of original background, hundreds if you want in seconds — opens the door for non-technical users to drive creative work without specialized tools.