Name: Sam Jones, 155.io
Uploaded: 2026-07-28T17:00:00.000Z
Duration: 15 min 26 s

Clips
More from theCUBE + NYSE Wired: ACTAI Maui 2026

Sam Jones

Co-Founder

155.io

play_circle_outline AI Agents Go Mainstream: Content Studios Upended, Engineers Displaced — Discovery, Directories and Brand Names Matter

play_circle_outline B2B studio building physical gamified video content for online casinos

play_circle_outline AI-produced video realism blurring lines between real and synthetic content

play_circle_outline From Studios to Streams: AI-Powered Live CCTV Betting and Automated Video Game Workflows

Info

Sam Jones, 155.io

Sam Jones

Co-Founder 155.io

John Furrier

>> Hello, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here in Maui for Actai Global's theCUBE. Second year, NYC Wired program, open community. Got a great vision around the future of studios, content and super secret project, which we can't get into because it's not yet announced, but it really speaks to where the market's going with AI, honestly, with physical and digital kind of connecting. It's all coming in. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it.

Sam Jones

>> Great to be here.

John Furrier

>> We were talking before you came on camera, you got the super secret project coming out, but it's AI obviously roadmap. The content business is one half complaining and screaming, "Oh my God, I'm going to lose my job at my copyrights and all this stuff." And then the other hand, you got innovators on the frontier looking at the opportunity. As Bill Tai says, "Chaos is opportunity." What's your view on how this world's changing? Because you have almost the same SaaS apocalypse kind of vibe going on with media. If you don't adapt, you die basically.

Sam Jones

>> Yeah. I run a company that I've run for the last two years. We've grown very, very quickly. We had a team of engineers and we run a content studio business. I just know from in my seat, running that business day-to-day within those two years, the tools available in AI is crazy what's happened in the last two years to the point that I've now transformed the studio that I built. I actually can remove it now. And also we've removed six engineers because the AI has replaced those guys. So to see that impact in your business, and also obviously the financial aspect is staggering to me. So we use these tools. So as a result of that, as an entrepreneur, the agents have taken away a bit of my time. It's freed me up a little bit. Not fully, of course, but a little bit. And I as an entrepreneur is thinking we've got to take these agents to the mass market. So I think the problem is in the next 12 months, there's going to be agents everywhere, and the mass market's going to find out about it almost like what you saw with Shopify. Everyone had a shopfront. Everyone you knew built a store. So then the challenge becomes how on earth do you discover these tools? Because even if you have a huge marketing budget, how are you... I can't remember half the names of the people here that I've met. How am I going to remember the names of agents that someone's built to help me do my weekly shop or manage my subscriptions or whatever it might be? So I had to choose as an entrepreneur two things. Number one, pick a day-to-day point of friction, or problem, or headache that lots of people have and have the agent fix it. To the point that there's ROI, what you spend on the agent in terms of time and finance, the ROI, the agent delivers you way more. So this is the first thing and we figure that bit out. And then secondly, how do we name it, and brand it in such a way that there's no fucking way that someone will forget the name of this? That's the challenge.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And to see a noise in some level, but also there's signal in there. You need a directory of agents almost. It reminds me of the worldwide web before search engines came out. It was like, "What's that URL?" Of course, I remember the generics, but it gets populated.

Sam Jones

>> And it's weird that we thought that brand and storytelling and so on had maybe moved away because it's all about the technology. But as technology goes closer to zero, of course, software development's never going to go to zero. But as you build tools that allow people to build technology very, very quickly without huge teams, without huge budgets or physical infrastructure, what happens is brand actually becomes more important than ever before and demand-

John Furrier

>> Brand loyalty. I mean, you see there's Apple, for example, they went through multiple waves, ups and downs. Now they're obviously skyrocketing. Brand loyalty is super valuable because people are going to be associating their life with this. And I think the content is intriguing to me. And again, we were talking before we came on camera around what AI is doing and certainly a lot of vanilla content, but it's changing the craft. And talk about your studio. First of all, how big is the studio? What's the studio's focus? There's many different versions of a studio these days. We have home studios, they have some basic production. What are you guys working on there? And what was the base like?

Sam Jones

>> So we're a B2B business, and our clients are online casinos, and the online casinos could be in China, they could be in, it could be anywhere. Not supposed to say China, but it could be China.

John Furrier

>> Asia-Pacific.

Sam Jones

>> Yeah, yeah. So we have gaming companies, and online casinos as customers of ours all over the world, number one. Number two is there's thousands of games in online casinos, slot games, crash games, live poker games, and guess what? AI is now making better versions of these games quick. You don't need now artists and all the rest of it to build games. So we had to build as a company, if we wanted to be an entrant into online casino content, which is what we do, we had to build something so different, and unique on the human eye to break through. So I did a lot of research before we started this company. What are the most trending videos on YouTube, and Instagram, and TikTok? And there's a whole category of things where people throw 200 ping pong balls over the side or down some stairs or they like hit a soccer ball trying to hit something in the distance. People do these challenges on Instagram and one of the categories of this type of content that's extremely popular is marble racing. People watch old school marbles racing down this track and there's something perhaps nostalgic about it. There's an ASMR element to marbles on wood. It sounds cool, emotion's cool, and people watch like millions of people watch these videos. So I looked at that, then I looked at this other thing. I went to many European cities, Amsterdam, London, Paris. They all have shops that sell plastic ducks. I think in Amsterdam, the seven or eight shops that sell, people love these ducks, and people race ducks in charity things all over the world. They have charity duck race through the village river. So, I wanted to build a river that did this so people could bet on it. So anyway, to answer your question, what does our studio do? We build physical structures, marble race, duck race, coin flip machines, plinko boards. We build things like that, which we then film using PTZ cameras we talked about earlier today, Canon PTZ. We film the whole race taking place. We live stream it to online casinos, and people sat on their sofa can bet on duck number, the Elvis duck, or they can bet on marble number two, or whatever they're into. So we make chaotic video stuff that's bettable.

John Furrier

>> And so you mentioned earlier on your focus as an entrepreneur and you got to look at those workflows. What were some of the things that jumped at you as you started going through the transition and transformation of AI and start thinking about the tooling for your studio? What was the focus? How did you prioritize that piece of it? Because that seems to be the trend. And we're hearing it again here. I hear it everywhere I go. Don't do a side pilot project. Pick something core that you know you can take out or drive revenue, not just cost take up, but it seems to me, it's not like the old IT days where it's like, "Hey, get some approval, get the budget, deploy it, roll it out, waterfall it out." Now, it's like you can game it out. What's your thoughts on that?

Sam Jones

>> So what happened, we probably have built 50 games. So the reason we needed a huge warehouse was because it's like MrBeast style warehouse. We're making all of these crazy games and some of them were popular, some of them weren't. So we needed space that allowed us to iterate. And a lot of people are like, "Why build that thing if it's not going to work?" It's like, "Well, that's the way business is. Sometimes it doesn't work, but you only know by trying many." So after we'd built 10 or 11 games, marble racing, duck racing, we gave it to our clients. And I remember one client in Asia said to me, he said, "Our customers love your games. The marble race, the duck race, they love them. It's amazing AI." And I said, "Thank you very..." I said, "What?" He said, "No, it's amazing AI video." I said, "What are you talking about? We have a marble track and a dark river." And he didn't believe me. He said, "I don't believe you." And we filmed it so well with these Canon PTZs that he thought it was all made up.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And you're like, "Good idea. Write that down."

Sam Jones

>> So I had to have one of my team walk around the studio, showing him the actual thing. But it made me realize my content is real-world, but it's not real-world enough. So we started making games on phones, and then I was at this conference in Vegas last year, about six months ago. And I know you know about this technology, but I saw a stand which was tracking people as they walk through the casino floor. I said to this guy, "What's this technology?" And he said, "Oh, we use the same stuff that Tesla used to track vehicles and pedestrians." So I said, "Is it work live?" He said, "Yes." I said, "Is it accurate?" He said, "Yes." So I immediately thought we can make a betting game based on tracking people and vehicles. So two weeks later we acquired the rights to CCTV footage, real traffic, real roads, and we applied this software on it, where we put a line in the middle of the CCTV and it counted the cars passing, and we launched it as a game, and it blew up. It's our most popular game.

John Furrier

>> And what are they betting on? Whether someone turns left or right or volume?

Sam Jones

>> It's a 30-second game, and you get to say, "Is it over 36 cars or under 36 cars? Is it odds or even?" So in 30 seconds, how many cars? It's like roulette, but-

John Furrier

>> Yeah, it's awesome.

Sam Jones

>> And it went viral. But we're using AI in that game, because number one, we're taking the CCTV feed. Number two, the AI clips 30 second segment from the live. Number three, it counts how many cars. Number four, it prices the odds. Number five, it tests everything worse.

John Furrier

>> You're a bookie.

Sam Jones

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Basically, you're a bookie.

Sam Jones

>> So now I don't need my studio. This crazy physical studio where I built all these mad games, all our games now are based on videos. So I have somebody in London right now, because Arsenal have won the league today in the Premier League. I have someone filming the whole thing, and we're going to turn that into a game.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. I mean, we've been talking about physical AI. We were just talking about physical AI and robotaxis, autonomous vehicles. There's a lot of other robotics, but you're getting at a whole nother physical integration. And again, one of my pet peeves, Brian knows about, I say this all the time in theCUBE, is that the physical and digital worlds are coming in. You're essentially taking the physical world and gamifying it.

Sam Jones

>> Yeah, yeah, it's exactly right.

John Furrier

>> I mean, and then you could pulse the zeitgeist and say, "Hey, the cooking videos are hot. Let's bet on that or let's do whatever's trending."

Sam Jones

>> We're speaking to now some people who've never, ever been spoken to by the online casino industry. I'll give you an example. In Africa, we're speaking to people who film wildebeest crossing the planes and they go across rivers with crocodiles in it. They work with David Attenborough and stuff like this, but they're like beautiful content. But I can put AI on top of the wildebeest tracking how many are going to cross the river, and if a croc grabs one of them, what happened and we can turn that into a game.

John Furrier

>> We could turn Actai Maui into a game and bet on if Brian falls down over or under on when he drops his board.

Sam Jones

>> No, the first night we... So where we see interesting application for this is Taylor Swift making a game for her fans. So he recording herself walking onto stage and filming all the fans looking at her and saying to people, "If you can guess how many fans I pass in this next minute, you win a chance to come to the tour with me." It's stuff like this.

John Furrier

>> If they do the fan cam, we got to make sure that you don't bring your girlfriend, your secret girlfriend from your wife.

Sam Jones

>> We can blur the face. We can blur the Face.

John Furrier

>> That Coldplay thing. By the way, the guy on that fan cam where we had his mistress, he's a Cube alumni. We interviewed him and that was the only video they had of him online, YouTube video of him wearing a suit because he was a CEO. So our video that Brian and I did with that guest was like zillion views. I forget what it was, but it was funny. Not funny actually, because it was sad for the couple. All right, what's next? I mean, I think agents are going to be big. Where's your head at in terms of how you see this evolving? Because obviously you're actually getting real-time feedback. You're like a forward-deployed creative, you're a forward-deployed entrepreneur, because you're essentially leaning in to what's presenting to you.

Sam Jones

>> We're going to launch, we're going to parcel up an agent of our own. I mean, I'm using agents now in the business, but it's still a bit tricky to set one up. It's getting easier, but in 12 months my mom will have an agent, and my sister will have an agent, and my kids will use their agents. So I want to put a tool into the market to do that.

John Furrier

>> There's a lot of growth hacks. In fact, it was ironically just watching a video this morning on someone giving a little pro-tip on Claude, you can actually give it an agent to scrape Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube shorts to see what's happening this week. So a lot more of these tools. So everyone's going to have access. You also got the creator market blowing up, especially in B2B, you're starting to see explainer videos a lot more. Media is becoming a personal thing. It's not like you need to have the big studio so people are going to want to develop. What's your view on that? Because you're going to see a lot more entrepreneurial bases where you have these micro communities influencers. I mean, I hate the word influencer per se, but like that notion of like everyone's a media company, even the companies themselves.

Sam Jones

>> Yeah. We're in that crazy little era where things are popping up so frequently that we've probably got another 12 to 24 months of thousands of applications that can help you, but it's like our phones, there's only so much room for your favorite apps. So I mean, people yesterday were talking about things. I've forgotten about them already. So you're going to end up seeing a handful of them category kill.

John Furrier

>> Yeah. Well, great to have you on. Thanks for sharing. Great opportunity. I love the market right now. It's so creative. It's so different. And if you just lean into it, you can get it. Thanks for coming on.

Sam Jones

>> By the way, what an honor to be here in Maui. I know this looks like a backdrop, but this is real. Look at that. I didn't hear that's real. Let's head into the ocean.

John Furrier

>> All right. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. More coverage. It's a special event. Obviously the innovators coming together, the builders, the operators, the investors are all coming together. It's a diverse crowd, all curious, exploring and being open, like us. That's our motto, the NYC Wired program. Thanks for watching.

Sam Jones, 155.io

John Furrier

Sam Jones

>> Great to be here.

John Furrier

Sam Jones

John Furrier

Sam Jones

John Furrier

Sam Jones

>> So we're a B2B business, and our clients are online casinos, and the online casinos could be in China, they could be in, it could be anywhere. Not supposed to say China, but it could be China.

John Furrier

>> Asia-Pacific.

Sam Jones

John Furrier

Sam Jones

John Furrier

>> Yeah. And you're like, "Good idea. Write that down."

Sam Jones

John Furrier

>> And what are they betting on? Whether someone turns left or right or volume?

Sam Jones

>> It's a 30-second game, and you get to say, "Is it over 36 cars or under 36 cars? Is it odds or even?" So in 30 seconds, how many cars? It's like roulette, but-

John Furrier

>> Yeah, it's awesome.

Sam Jones

John Furrier

>> You're a bookie.

Sam Jones

>> Yeah.

John Furrier

>> Basically, you're a bookie.

Sam Jones

John Furrier

Sam Jones

>> Yeah, yeah, it's exactly right.

John Furrier

>> I mean, and then you could pulse the zeitgeist and say, "Hey, the cooking videos are hot. Let's bet on that or let's do whatever's trending."

Sam Jones

John Furrier

>> We could turn Actai Maui into a game and bet on if Brian falls down over or under on when he drops his board.

Sam Jones

John Furrier

>> If they do the fan cam, we got to make sure that you don't bring your girlfriend, your secret girlfriend from your wife.

Sam Jones

>> We can blur the face. We can blur the Face.

John Furrier

Sam Jones

John Furrier

Sam Jones

John Furrier

Sam Jones

>> By the way, what an honor to be here in Maui. I know this looks like a backdrop, but this is real. Look at that. I didn't hear that's real. Let's head into the ocean.

John Furrier