BuzzFeed, the U.S.-based media company known best for its quizzes, listicles, and, for a time, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism division, is reinventing itself for the AI era. At least, that’s the pitch.
At the SXSW conference in Austin, BuzzFeed co-founder and CEO Jonah Peretti introduced the company’s next media foray: a spin-off called Branch Office, which will explore artificial intelligence in consumer-facing apps designed for creativity and connection.
The new company is an extension of the experiments BuzzFeed has run for years using AI technology, Peretti explained, in a halting presentation that began with slideshow glitches, before moving on to app demos met with silence or a polite tittering of laughter.
“We’ve been working on this secretly for over a year, and we’ve learned a lot from the BuzzFeed platform about what is coming with new kinds of AI formats,” Peretti said. “Using AI is the way of connecting people, building community around these pillars of culture, and taste, and community.”
Bill Shouldis, a director of product at BuzzFeed and the founder of Branch Office, presented two of the company’s new apps: BF Island and Conjure.
The first product, BF Island, is a group chat platform offering features for changing and editing photos using AI. This is not exactly groundbreaking tech, in and of itself, but that’s not the point.
The key feature here is not the AI toolset but the in-app library of online trends and memes, created by an editorial team, which could inspire users to create AI photos referencing blink-and-you-miss-it trends like the McDonald’s CEO taste-testing a burger, or the “frame-mogging” drama. (If you don’t know what these are, you’re probably not the “very online” audience that’s being targeted.)
Another app, Conjure, is an app similar to BeReal — the once-a-day temporary photo app — except that it instead appears to guide users to take daily photos of things besides themselves. (As a reminder, BeReal itself didn’t stick, ultimately exiting to Voodoo after losing traction.) In the demo, for instance, the photo prompt was “What lies between the trees and the moon?”, leading the users to snap a photo of the night sky. A series of spooky images flashed on the screen, followed by a whisper, “What will you conjure?”
We don’t get it, and clearly the audience didn’t either. After the demo, a lone cough could be heard among the silence, followed by uncomfortable laughter.
Shouldis then noted that AI is involved in Conjure, too, as the app has an “AI spirit for a CEO.” (Again, what?)
Peretti also introduced Quiz Party, a social app that lets you take BuzzFeed quizzes with friends and share your results.
BuzzFeed’s underwhelming presentation comes only days after the media company shared that it has “substantial doubt” about its ability to continue as a business, and was engaging in strategic conversations focused on fixing its liquidity challenges. The company, which had a net loss of $57.3 million last year, said it would focus this year on its Studio IP and new AI apps, like these.
But even the tech-forward audience at SXSW was not convinced.
As one person pointed out during the Q&A session after the presentation, BeReal had struggled to get people to come back after the novelty wore off. What would an app like Conjure do to combat the same sort of retention problem?
Shouldis said that the app would evolve, “and have different types of things happening and not just be exactly what it is today.” He referenced the potential to integrate things like video, audio, and prototyping with Claude Code to build community.
The premise behind the new apps is not unreasonable: AI can lead to faster software development, which makes it possible for companies to more quickly iterate and keep people engaged.
“In a way, software is the new content,” Peretti noted.
Of course, before you can iterate, you have to attract users. With its new apps, BuzzFeed seems to have thought more about what AI can do than what people want to do with AI, which is not a recipe for success.
