Flockx AI is on a mission to lift people out of loneliness with help from Elastic

Lifting people out of loneliness: That’s the mission of Flockx, a startup that uses the latest AI technology to help individuals, local businesses, and brands connect online and meet in real life. "Overuse of smartphones has a negative impact on mental and social health," says Devon Bleibtrey, CEO, Flockx. "We encourage people to disconnect from screens by using AI agents that direct them to social events, local clubs, and communities."

This ground-breaking app requires equally innovative technology partners. When Flockx sought a search solution as part of its technology stack, advanced AI features made Elastic the obvious choice. "Elastic is a cornerstone of our platform, powering search across our proprietary data, user information, and AI models," says Bleibtrey.

This supports a decentralized approach. Multiple AI agents, called Community AIs, connect directly to information stored in Elastic. Users can search nearby locations, find out what's happening, and explore local hotspots. Community AIs go further, determining the most engaging way to interact with these places and facilitating introductions between users.

Flockx uses the latest Elasticsearch features like semantic search, keyword search, fuzziness, proximity, scaling, and prioritization to achieve a highly personalized user experience for the end user.

The organization uses semantic search to allow users and its AI agents to interact using natural language. If initial results are unsatisfactory, the agent can refine the query and resubmit it for more accurate information.

Flockx uses Elastic's Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) framework to populate conversations with relevant information from multiple knowledge bases, including proprietary and open-source datasets. This allows agents to provide more informative and engaging responses.

Bleibtrey says, "We've implemented Elastic pipelines to convert text into vector embeddings. By monitoring these pipelines through Elastic Observability, we can track their throughput, identify scaling needs, and address performance issues."

Flockx also uses Elastic Observability to track infrastructure logs and application logs to debug issues quickly. This includes Elastic application performance monitoring (APM) for transaction monitoring and exception detection in real time. "Elastic Observability has been a lifesaver from the start," says Bleibtrey.

Flockx also takes advantage of Elastic AI Assistant to automate system configurations, including server modifications. "We use natural language to suggest changes, such as increasing the number of nodes, and Elastic AI Assistant executes those instructions directly," says Bleibtrey. It's also good news for less technical employees who use the AI assistant to query data, debug issues, and even build Kibana dashboards. This has significantly enhanced the productivity and efficiency of Flockx's team.

For a fast-growing start-up, Elastic's integration with Google Cloud is essential for Flockx as the company expands its user base. Says Bleibtrey, "Our legacy cloud provider became increasingly expensive to configure virtual servers to our exact needs. Google Cloud is a far more cost-effective alternative."

He gives the example of an activation campaign where Flockx processed more 100,000 Community AI requests over a single weekend. Elastic and Google Cloud's auto-scaling capabilities seamlessly handled demand, ensuring that the system remained stable and responsive. This eliminated the need for manual intervention and provided Bleibtrey and his team with peace of mind.

Elastic running on Google Cloud also has a positive impact on costs. Moving to the cloud helped Flockx avoid the overhead of managing its own servers. It can also reduce costs by scaling down its infrastructure during periods of low demand. "This has been crucial for managing our budget and securing additional investment," says Bleibtrey.

Speed is a major reason why Flockx chose Elastic over a traditional SQL database. Elastic provides significantly faster search results, reducing response times from hundreds of milliseconds to tens of milliseconds. "This allows us to handle more requests, lower costs, and scale our infrastructure more efficiently," says Bleibtrey.

Elsewhere, root cause analysis capabilities, combined with Elastic AI Assistant and APM tools, have dramatically improved the organization’s problem-solving efficiency, reducing time-to-resolution from days to hours or even less.

From a financial perspective, Elastic’s auto-scaling features have helped Flockx to optimize spending. By automatically scaling up or down based on demand, it avoids overprovisioning and only pays for the resources it needs. This is particularly beneficial during periods of high traffic.

Bleibtrey also stresses the urgency of bringing new Flockx features to users. "Elastic has significantly accelerated our time-to-market. Previously, setting up our infrastructure and data pipelines could take months and require a diverse range of engineering skills. With Elastic, we've been able to rapidly deploy business logic and capabilities within days or weeks, instead of months."

Comprehensive documentation also helps accelerate the business. "With Elastic, we can find answers fast without constant phone support," says Bleibtrey. Elastic AI Assistant also plays an important role. It enables the Flockx team to build queries, understand operations, and stay up to date on the latest features. "It’s also giving us much better results, from a developer experience, than other well-known foundation models," he says.

As well as providing advanced search and observability features, Bleibtrey puts Elastic at the heart of his vision for the future of communication and user experiences. Although smartphones won’t go away entirely, he envisions a future where people use a more flexible array of devices, such as smart glasses powered by AI assistants.

"As costs decrease and adoption increases, we believe AI assistants will become essential for daily life," says Bleibtrey. "They will communicate with you through various devices and perform tasks on your behalf, freeing you from the need to be constantly connected. Elastic plays a central role in our efforts to reduce loneliness and improve emotional and social health."