Baby Wellness AI, Turo CEO on Car Ownership Crisis, The AI Search & Revenue Enigma | Oct 21, 2025

0:13Welcome, everyone, to the Informations TI TV. My name is Akash Pasricha. It is Tuesday, October 21st. We have got a great show planned for you today. We are diving into a great story we have today about how AI chatbots are reshaping website traffic for many companies on the internet. Plus, we're talking to our cloud and compute reporter about a glitzy data center conference in Vegas last week and why that event raised more questions than answers for her. And you won't want to miss our conversation about health gadgets and babies. I'll be joined by the CEO of Nanit and an editor from the information who has first-hand experience using the devices.

0:51And finally, we're going to end with a conversation with the CEO of Turo, which is timely right now given the headlines about people missing their car loan payments. We've got a lot to get to, so let's get right on into things. The booming use of AI chatbots has raised big questions around how traffic to websites on the internet will fare over time. A new story in the information today shows that search traffic has in fact started to dip, but in a twist, revenue hasn't started to fall in tandem. Joining me now is Catherine Perloff, our advertising reporter who published that story today. Catherine, welcome back to the show.

1:25It's great to have you. Hi, Cash. So search traffic for websites has started to fall, but revenue hasn't. Walk us through what you found in your reporting. Yeah. Well, some of this is early, so it's hard to know all of the long-term impacts. But yeah, I talked to basically seven brands. These are consumer companies that sell hotels and telehealth services, and then including some in the Fortune 500. they've all seen in the past year or so less traffic to their website. So less people are coming to their websites, but that hasn't impacted revenue. You know, part of the reason why this might be happening is that some of the people who came to the websites originally maybe were people who are never going to really buy a product.

2:15I talked to someone running a hotel chain in Mexico and they would get a lot of traffic off the term weather in Cancun. But those people who maybe clicked on the website when they were just, I don't know, dreaming about a sunnier day or something, and they're in New York and it's cold out, they were not really going to ever book a stay kind of thing. So that might be some of it. And, but yeah, I think that also, but marketers aren't sitting still, right? Because there is a big concern that, you know, websites are a big way that people learn about a product. And if people aren't there to just sort of start their product, you know, consideration journey by going to your website, you might have less new customers eventually.

2:58And you might just have people who come to your website because they already know you want it, which is great because they buy it. But then how do you grow, you know? So are these business owners, the people operating these websites, are they kind of holding their breath waiting for revenue to decline? or have they sort of decided, hey, we're okay for the time being, maybe there are other ways that we can try to market ourselves on the internet? Yeah, I think that they are a bit concerned. Like, you know, one detail actually that didn't make it into the article, but I talked to a brand that they had noticed the traffic on their blogs declining, but not on the core part of their site where people make transactions.

3:35So I think that, you know, but then I guess it's like, eventually, what if the traffic does go, does decline to, you know, where people make transactions, especially with the rise of agendic commerce and different. You talked about some of the other tactics, stuff like creating YouTube videos. I mean, that's a new form of marketing that they have poured more investment into. Is this becoming widespread across the industry, even for bigger companies? I mean, you talk to people who are working at Fortune 500 companies too. Yeah, totally. Everyone is, even though they don't know if it's going to affect them overnight, everyone is not sitting still.

4:11So, yeah, some tactics include how do we show up better in AI searches? Because we know people are, you know, searching there. And actually, some of the brands have told me that people coming from AI searches are more likely to buy a product, which is kind of intuitively makes sense. It's kind of harder to click a link in an AI search. So if you do click a link, you're probably more into it. But, yeah, some of the tactics, like, you know, they've made more YouTube videos because there's been some research that AI overviews on Google surface more YouTube videos. I've also talked to brands who are tweaking the language on websites so AI can understand it better.

4:46So maybe making a more detailed response to your FAQ so that AI can pull that information if someone goes to the AI chatbot and not your website. And, you know, some brands are just shifting ad dollars. Part of that, a lot of it is spending more on paid search, which, I mean, obviously for some brands is annoying. They're getting less search traffic. So we're going to spend more to get it, you know, to pay for search traffic via Google search ads. Some, though, are considering other mediums like TV, you know, because, again, what search traffic does, especially organic search traffic, as it's called in the industry, is just about people learning about your company.

5:21If they're not learning about it on the web, they've got to learn about it somewhere. TV might be one place. You know, maybe billboards are another place. That wasn't an example I talked about. But you can imagine other types of things where, you know, you're trying to get more people to know about your company. And one of the things that you've written about in your stories previously is this idea of we had SEO. Now there's kind of this new emerging industry of, I think it's called generative AI engine optimization, GEO. I don't know what the right acronym is, but it's this idea that we can actually show up better in these chatbot results.

5:54How big of an industry is this in terms of startup founding right now? And what are they actually doing? Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, SEO, and I think GEO or whatever, that's the acronym I've heard now, maybe, maybe they'll come up with another one later. But I think that, you know, it's all about how do you kind of reverse engineer, like getting into the, you know, it used to be into Google search and getting placed highly there. Now it's into these AI chatbots. I don't think anyone really knows, but you know, they have some data to try to figure it out. Like, for example, you can see on a lot of chatbots, like, what sites they search.

6:29So there's been efforts to sort of get into those sites and place favorably in those sites, notably like Reddit, Wikipedia, where you want to, you know, make sure that your brand shows up well in those environments. So I think a lot of brands are consulting some of these new companies that have come up. I think there's also a lot of existing SEO agencies have pivoted to GEO tactics. But, you know, the AI companies themselves have partially become a good alternative for users because people were tired of the fact that Google search had become inundated with brands trying to catch them, you know, basically with these tactics and there wasn't actually good information.

7:11So I think that, yeah, I think that the industry right now, it's cropping up. I think maybe founders of people who work at Shadgy Boutique probably don't love it because the whole thing of what they're offering is that they have a better service that's less inundated by branding. Right. Great. Well, Catherine, it was a fascinating story. And I think we definitely should be watching how this revenue growth trends over time or whether or not revenue dips. It's something that we'll be paying close attention to. Thanks for coming on. That is Catherine Perloff, our advertising reporter here at The Information.

7:48Okay, let's get to data centers. The data center frenzy has been a fast-moving story as AI interest has continued to grow. But even as big tech companies quickly try to spring up new facilities all around the country, there are some big questions facing the industry around financing and labor and, of course, power. All of those questions were central to the discussions that happened at a big data center conference last week in Las Vegas. And I want to bring on my colleague, Anissa Gardizi, who was on the ground reporting on it all. Hey, Anissa, how you doing? Hey, I'm great. Good to be back from Las Vegas, for sure.

8:23I was going to say, so Vegas and data centers, that sounds like the most fun you could have in Vegas ever. Yeah, I mean, it definitely was a good time, and I'm glad I went, so I'm excited to talk about it. So let's talk about some of your key takeaways. I mean, before we get into the details here, what was the overall vibe of the event and how did that differ from past years that you've been at this conference? Right. So this conference brings C-level executives, bankers, investors all together to sort of trade notes on what everyone is seeing in the industry. Lots of companies do private one-on-one meetings and really use this as a time to, you know, get deal talks going.

9:02And one big difference from last year was that in 2024, people were still trying to figure out if these massive AI data centers were actually going to happen. And the talk was more about, you know, do we need this? Do you guys think these projects are real? Whereas this year, I think everyone's well aware that the projects are real and they're sort of trying to get their heads around how as an industry are we actually going to deliver on this? So people know that the projects are real and there's real dollars getting invested to it. One of the things you wrote about this week in your column is the idea that with that realization also comes some concerns from people about, hey, how are we actually going to get this stuff off the ground?

9:42What are people telling you about the major questions facing the data center industry right now? So there's definitely a concern about concentration of customers. and we've done a lot of reporting on this, but if you look at the demand for data centers and compute, it kind of trickles down to just a handful of companies, one big one being OpenAI. And I think some developers are pretty, they don't want to have a massive expansion or build out. That's all reliant on one customer. That's viewed as quite risky. And then the other thing that people are noticing, which we're also reporting on, is NVIDIA's involvement in helping some of these newer AI labs get the funding they need for data centers.

10:24The concern there from some is that, you know, that also hinders a lot of the growth and the demand on a single company, which has an incentive for that demand to be there. But others are viewing some of the NVIDIA involvement as more of a, you know, this has to happen in order to unlock capital. So it was a little mixed on that one. And what about the leasing deals that we've written about for how they're going to finance these chip purchases? Yeah, I think that's definitely causing some people to sort of raise their eyebrows and say, like, why can't companies like OpenAI or XAI buy their chips?

10:56And, you know, how does this leasing structure actually work out if we're investing in this building and this power infrastructure and the chips are like on a lease? You know, what does that mean for the future value? It's definitely something that my colleagues reported on last week with XAI that most attendees were tuned into. Did you get any kind of a sense from from the people here around this notion that, hey, there might be a bubble, perhaps there is a lot of people have written about the funding bubble that is sort of bubbling up here, I guess you could say. You know, it's always hard to tell where the cracks are in a bubble like this.

11:34And I wonder if you at all saw signs about who these companies are hiring or perhaps ways in which these companies are managing themselves that maybe give a kind of an indication that, hey, things are getting really frothy right now and we should be concerned. One example is definitely the number of companies that have massive infrastructure projects underway that have never done this type of project before. I ask data center operators all the time, you know, if we are in a bubble and if things are so frothy, like what should I be looking for in terms of things falling apart or, you know, not getting done on time?

12:09And the main thing people point to is newer operators, you know, promising the world, the fastest timelines. And then if they miss some of those deadlines or timelines, how does that shake out? And I think there are a few upstart companies that are sort of coming up against their big moment of, can they actually deliver? And I just want to read this line here. You said in your piece this week, you said, I talked to several people who are being recruited by some of the new entrants to help fix urgent operational challenges, a major red flag in their view. And so, I mean, operational challenges, the thing hasn't even really been built yet, and they're trying to figure it out.

12:52Very quickly, before I let you go, I do want to ask you about some of these newer data center players that are popping up, or rather the newer companies that are building these plants, Poolside and Fermi, another company that we've talked about. What is the consensus around these newer companies and their ambitions here in the data center space? It's definitely that they're going to have to hire senior talent from the hypersalers or other companies in order to build out on time. I think everyone is saying that they can pour concrete and build faster than the next person. But, you know, I think the industry has sort of been taking those companies' word for it, but maybe in the future are going to be way more, you know, particular about which companies they actually choose to work with if, you know, the first companies that said that they could do this aren't successful.

13:39And then did anybody talk about the alternatives to NVIDIA at this event? Was this something that came up, whether it's the hyperscalers that are developing their own chips or even these chip startups? Did that come up at all? For sure. So, I mean, everyone is well aware that there's more activity with AMD chips. And then also, you know, Google has been talking to more data center companies about hosting TPUs. So not much talk about chip startups, but TPUs and AMD chips were definitely something that people know there's demand for and are sort of thinking through, you know, should we offer these?

14:16Great. Well, Anissa, thanks for coming on. We appreciate you giving us everything on the ground from the Vegas event. That is Anissa Gardizi, our cloud reporter here at The Information. Okay, we have talked a lot on this show about the data tracking health gadgets that have taken over the tech sector. It turns out these trackers aren't just for adults. In fact, they are also for babies. Nanet is a startup that has developed a camera baby monitor with a software platform that tracks everything from baby sleep to their breathing motion to smart insights about when their next nap should be. The company counts GB among its investors, and I want to bring on its CEO, Anushka Salinas, to talk about how she is building her business.

14:56Anushka, welcome to TITV. It's great to have you. Thanks for having me. So very quickly, I want to get into the business, but tell us what exactly does this monitor track for parents' babies? Yeah, well, a decade ago, Nanit pioneered the smart baby monitor category using early stage AI to replace what essentially had become a one-way radio. That was the technology at the time. So we were founded with sleep research at the core of everything that we were building. And we continue to do that today. Science is at the basis of all of the features we build. Looking at the broader market landscape, you know, the innovations aside from Nanit have really focused on kind of short-term safety concerns versus that holistic view of a child's health during their first five years of life.

15:40So this is like, we mentioned breathing motion up top. I mean, look, I have not had a kid, so I don't know what to watch for. What are some of the, if I open the dashboard, what are some of the things I see? Yeah. So we, similar to some of the wearables you might see in sort of the adult space, we track critical kind of health and development metrics. So sleep is the foundation of child health. We've done tons of research that shows that. And in fact, NANIT families sleep 10 % longer than non-NANIT families. And that's because of the sort of insights that we're providing. Beyond sleep, and you mentioned, you know, nap management, which is something that we've recently innovated on, taking something that 85 % of parents do today.

16:21And, you know, using a pen and paper or manual apps and automate using AI. But, you know, next, we're really focused on advancing child development, focusing on developmental milestones like speech and motor. So everything from first steps, crawling, walking to first words, babbling and things like that. And then beyond that, it's about acute. So acute illness, we've always done things like cry detection. But, you know, what we've recently launched is cough detection, which allows parents to take a video clip of their child coughing and potentially send it to a pediatrician. Either in partnership with Summer Health, which we recently launched, or their own pediatrician.

16:59And, you know, cold season is upon us. Both of my young kids are sick, of course. It's only mid-October. And, you know, being able to sort of analyze those coughs and know, could it be croup? And is there something that I really need to do about it? Or is it just the common cold and time will heal it? How many active users do you have using the Nanit right now? Yeah, we have 1.2 million monthly active users. And I think when you look at sort of the... And what does that translate to in terms of like annual revenue right now? We're not sharing revenue numbers here. Okay. What about the profitability though?

17:30Because the last round that I could find online was 2021, which is a long time ago. Is the company profitable right now? Yeah. So we have a hardware software model, like many of the sort of companies you see out there in the health and wellness space today. And that software model combined with hardware sales creates really strong unit economics for us as a business. So we launched our subscription program back in 2020, and it's continued to scale. And we see very high adoption of people wanting to opt into our subscription because of the insights that we have provided to date and all that work that we're doing going forward.

18:04And I think to your point, I know you guys have covered the sort of wearables companies a lot here. You know, when we look at sort of what's happening out there, AI everywhere. Consumer adoption of AI is super high. We see parents are adopting AI at twice the rate of non-parents. And the trend in wearables, you know, those two things combined really push our mission forward. And I know you asked about fundraising, so I'm going to come back to it. And I'm asking about profitability because we had the CEO of Oron and I asked him this exact same question is, are you making money right now on the devices?

18:34And he said they're making north of 40 % margins on the device itself. And I wondered, have you guys been profitable there? Yes, we have extremely strong unit economics and we are profitable on our hardware purchase. And I think that model, similar to what you see in the Oura Rings of the world, is a really strong model, both economically and then in terms of the strategic value that we're building going forward. I think what you see with the adult wearables plus sort of what's happening more broadly in AI presents this really interesting thing, which is adults are tracking all their health metrics, their sleep patterns, their behavior, so that they have this not just real-time view of their health, but this longitudinal view of their health.

19:18And I find it really interesting that that has not been available for kids up until now. Well, I'll tell you, I want to bring on a friend of my, Actually, one of my editors, Meredith Massilli, she is currently on MatLev, but she has been using the Nanit. And I want to bring her on because I want to ask her about her experience. And I know that she has her own curiosities about the gadget as well. Meredith, so which product do you have right now? Which one are you using for your daughter? Hey, Kash. Yeah, coming to you live from my nursery. the nanit camera and i also have the nanit nightlight which programs different sounds and lights based on time of day and then i also have a subscription which gives you memories so it shows like your baby as it's growing and cute stuff like that but probably what i use the most is the data like we were talking about before and looking at that to really optimize sleep times and when should I be feeding the baby?

20:20I'm a first-time mom, so I had no idea what I'm doing. So it's very helpful. Yeah. Let me ask you this, Meredith, and maybe Anushka, I'd love for you to chime in after that. I mean, Meredith, I wonder how you've been thinking about the amount of data that is sort of coming to you live from your daughter right now. Is it not enough, the right amount, too much? I mean, how do you think about that? Yeah. I mean, that's a great question. So So it is a lot of data, I will say. And I think the interesting thing that I didn't predict is you have this kind of emotional connection to the data as well. So, like, I will wake up and look at the sleep score.

20:57And if the baby had a good night, I feel really great. But, you know, if the baby had a not so good night, I kind of think, you know, what did I do wrong? What could I be doing better? So it's really helpful to optimize. But at some point, you know, the data starts getting in your head a little bit. So, you know, I'm curious how Nanit's thinking about that and kind of managing that data overload. So, Anushka, let's turn to you. How are you thinking about that overload? Yeah, for sure. Listen, there's so much information out there, whether we like it or not, for parents. There's, you know, your mom and your mother-in-law's opinion.

21:31There's your pediatrician's opinion. There's what ChatGPT is telling you in a non-personalized way. There's all your friends who have their own shared experiences that they want to bring to you, you know, in the world of Google and WebMD, et cetera. You know, our goal is to really bring personalized information based on what's happening with your unique child. Every child is unique. Every child develops in a unique way. And so leveraging the billions of data points that we have anonymized in our system that we build algorithms on, we're able to pair that with your child's unique data and present insights.

22:02And, you know, we're just at the beginning of this journey where our goal is to really simplify the information for you so that we can provide really clear and actionable insights. And it's, you know, our view is we never want to be telling you what to do. We're not in the business of advice. We really are science-backed in what we do. We have a large consumer research arm internally. And so it's about providing information so parents can make the best decision for their own family. You know, one family might see the same or similar information as another family. They might choose to do something totally different with it.

22:34They might choose to sleep train versus another family might choose not to. And so for us at NANED, it's really all about presenting that information and putting the power in the hands of the parents. Meredith, let me ask you this. Are you using any other smart baby gadgets at all? I don't know what this market looks like. I don't see other gadgets. I do have a ton of apps. So this is something I also didn't realize going into motherhood. there's like an app for everything. So I have a diaper rewards club app. You know, I have different sleep tracking apps just to kind of see which one I like the best.

23:07So not so much on the hardware side, but I do have a lot on the app side. Okay. And Anushka, so given that all of these apps exist and, you know, I've also read about these smart changing tables, I guess is another product that came up in our research. Do you see, do you want to be acquisitive? Would you ever consider being part of a larger company? I mean, I could totally see this being part of a larger company, you know, by way of acquisition. Yeah, I mean, we aim, I love that you brought up sort of app proliferation, right? Which just kind of adds to parenting anxiety and overload. Like, do you really need 10 apps on your home screen to manage your child?

23:47Today, people do feel like that. Our aim is to be the best and only parenting tech platform that a family ever needs, right? And we're on our journey to doing that. And so much of it is about bringing all that information into one place so that we can be the source of truth. And we envision a future where people can track and access their comprehensive health data from birth to 100 years old. And it really, it can start with NANIT, right? What we, as I mentioned, we've really focused on sleep, and I think we've led the way there. But moving into some of these more development and behavioral insights and data allows us to be that central source of truth.

24:22Right. Right. Well, before we go, Meredith, I'll give you the floor for one last question. Anything else you were wondering from from the CEO of NANN, a company that you've been following so closely the last couple of months? Yeah, I mean, I believe you're at Rent the Runway before, which I actually also used in the course of my pregnancy journey to rent maternity clothes. So I'm just curious if you took any kind of consumer subscription lessons from there and you're now applying them at Nanit. Yeah, I think interestingly, people always sort of think the businesses are totally different. How did you go from your role at Rent the Runway to the role at Nanit?

24:59And I would say they're both really deeply about building, engaging, incredible, reliable consumer experiences for people. And so there are a lot of through lines there. I think what I've loved about the experience at Nanit is you really have people for a long time. I think the hardware brings people in and creates this data that is super useful, and you can continue to provide insights on that for years to come. And, you know, I was amazed coming in at the amount of time that people use our products. The majority of users are using Nanit for one child well beyond year four, and the level of engagement is kind of insane.