Christopher P. Willis on Using AI to Create a Better User Experience with Better Content

Data Driven

In this episode, Frank and Andy speak to Christopher P. Willis about Using AI to Create a Better User Experience with Better Content.

Certainly, if you have ever you read instructions or product documentation that left you annoyed and confused, then you can appreciate the work he does with Acrolinx.

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Transcript

00:00:00 BAILey

Hello and welcome to data driven.

00:00:02 BAILey

In this episode Frank and Andy speak with Christopher Willis about how artificial intelligence can help bake brands create congruent content across cultures, languages and writers.

00:00:13 BAILey

One quick word of correction.

00:00:15 BAILey

Frank made the assumption that CPO was chief product Officer.

00:00:19 BAILey

Chris is actually Chief pipeline officer.

00:00:21 BAILey

In addition to being chief marketing Officer, Acrolinx currently does not have a chief product officer.

00:00:28 BAILey

Frank should know by now what happens when you assume anything.

00:00:32 BAILey

I'll have a chat with him later.

00:00:34 BAILey

For now, enjoy the show.

00:00:44 Frank

Hello and welcome to data driven, the podcast where we explore the emerging fields of data science, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

00:00:52 Frank

If you'd like to think of data as the new oil, then you can think of us like Car Talk because we focus on where the rubber meets the virtual road and with me on this epic road trip down the information.

00:01:04 Frank

Superhighway as always is Andy Leonard.

00:01:07 Frank

How's it going Andy?

00:01:08 Andy

Good Frank, how are you doing?

00:01:10 Frank

I'm doing great, I'm doing great.

00:01:11 Frank

It's a beautiful Tuesday morning here in the DC area.

00:01:14 Frank

We're recording this on September 28th and I can't believe it's already October.

00:01:22 Andy

Almost gosh, yeah, yeah.

00:01:23 Frank

Almost October.

00:01:25 Andy

It's it's been beautiful fall weather.

00:01:28 Andy

Past few days here in sunny Farmville, VA.

00:01:33 Andy

And I'm really enjoying that.

00:01:35 Andy

Got a lot of outdoors work done in the past few days and that's always a good thing.

00:01:40 Frank

Yeah, we just built the trampoline for the kids and that was a was a lot of fun.

00:01:46 Frank

'cause the.

00:01:46 Frank

Instructions were horrible.

00:01:50 Andy

Did you get one with that big net around it?

00:01:53 Andy

Keep from bouncing off and 'cause otherwise it should come with a coupon for a free cast.

00:01:58 Frank

Freecast and free healthcare that'd be funny.

00:02:00 Andy

Yes, yes, that's right, yeah.

00:02:03 Frank

Yeah, so without further ado I'd like to introduce we have this.

00:02:07 Frank

Awesome guest today.

00:02:08 Frank

We've been really lucking out on terms of folks coming to us and and suggesting guests for us, which is quite refreshing, actually.

00:02:17 Frank

So so today we have with us Christopher Willis, Acrolinx Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Product Officer.

00:02:25 Frank

Christopher is an expert in technology, marketing and brand alignment alignment with over 20 years of experience in with some of the world biggest tech names including Perfecto.

00:02:35 Frank

Kmag and Cambridge technology group.

00:02:39 Frank

And through his work at Acrolinx, he's become a renowned thought leader on the topics of content governance and brand alignment.

00:02:46 Frank

He's also an expert on AI and how AI can help.

00:02:50 Frank

Big brands can great create congruent content across cultures, language and writers.

00:02:56 Frank

Acrolinx creates tools for developing content that feels human, relatable, and compassionate.

00:03:01 Frank

It's already used by some of the biggest brands in the technology world today, so welcome to the show, Chris.

00:03:09 Christopher

Thank you, I'm excited about your trampoline.

00:03:12 Frank

Well, thank you.

00:03:12 Frank

Thank you.

00:03:13 Frank

You should come on down I.

00:03:14 Frank

I think you're on the East Coast somewhere in Boston.

00:03:17 Christopher

I am outside of Boston, yes?

00:03:18 Frank

Awesome cool cool you never know 'cause sometimes people will put where they used to live on LinkedIn and not update that so.

00:03:26 Christopher

Nope, haven't gone anywhere in what a year?

00:03:27 Christopher

And a.

00:03:27 Christopher

Half if not.

00:03:28 Frank

Right, right?

00:03:29 Christopher

A lot, not a lot of travel, yeah?

00:03:30 Frank

Year and a half in the two week lockdown.

00:03:35 Frank

Well, welcome to the show so so.

00:03:38 Frank

Tell me about what so, so you're a CMO and a CPO.

00:03:43 Frank

That's that's, uh.

00:03:45 Frank

That's an interesting mix I I can see how the two are related, but can you explain kind of like what it is you do for acrolinx and maybe a little bit about.

00:03:54 Christopher

So I do a bunch of things.

00:03:55 Christopher

I I I joined the company to run marketing and marketing has.

00:04:00 Christopher

A lot of.

00:04:00 Christopher

Reach in this organization because of what we do and who we sell to.

00:04:05 Christopher

So I reach into pipeline.

00:04:07 Christopher

I reach into the product process on product marketing in there and come from a background where this approach really resonates and makes a lot of sense and the way that we collect and build and use data is very aligned to the way that I've.

00:04:24 Christopher

I've built content in the past.

00:04:28 Frank

Interesting, interesting.

00:04:29 Frank

So the the product at acrolinx it it.

00:04:33 Frank

It uses AI to create content.

00:04:36 Frank

So, so like what does that do is?

00:04:38 Christopher

Different so we are.

00:04:38 Frank

It kind of NLP.

00:04:40 Christopher

We're improving content, so we're we're about being improving the quality and effectiveness of enterprise.

00:04:47 Christopher

Content so the easiest way to think about what we do is everybody that writes everybody that owns a content organization, whether that's in a development group with technical documentation or product manuals, or marketing content enablement content, internal education.

00:05:04 Christopher

All these folks have a whiteboard in their office and.

00:05:07 Christopher

On that whiteboard are all the components of language, the way that they want to create their content.

00:05:12 Christopher

It's the tone of voice.

00:05:13 Christopher

It's the clarity level education level of their of their readers.

00:05:17 Christopher

It's the amount of compassion, emotion, inclusiveness that they want in their contents.

00:05:22 Christopher

The words that they want to use and that they don't want.

00:05:24 Christopher

Use, it's all up there on the whiteboard.

00:05:26 Christopher

They feel good about it.

00:05:28 Christopher

They've defined essentially the voice of their group or their organization.

00:05:32 Christopher

The problem with that whiteboard is that it's in their office and nobody can see it, and even if they could, we don't have a writers pool in the world anymore.

00:05:40 Christopher

We're all writers when you go to work, a byproduct of your work is.

00:05:45 Christopher

Content, and so.

00:05:46 Christopher

As a marketer I get my best content from folks that don't touch marketing.

00:05:51 Christopher

They're just smart people that can create so they don't.

00:05:55 Christopher

They don't care about what's on my whiteboard at all, and.

00:06:00 Christopher

When we were, I mean, the last seven or eight years you talked about.

00:06:03 Christopher

The potential for the digital shift, and I think everybody been using that as a marketing buzzword like digital shift is coming.

00:06:10 Christopher

You got to get ready and I don't know if anybody ever really thought it was coming, but it was a great way to so some fear into our prospects that if you don't modernize, the world is going to change.

00:06:20 Christopher

Holy crap March hit last year and the digital shift arrives and now you're only touchpoint with your consumer is through digital content for some period of time and it became really apparent to folks that how you commute.

00:06:36 Christopher

Gay matters and then all the things that happened last year from from a social standpoint.

00:06:43 Christopher

Language took on a very lead role.

00:06:46 Christopher

And how do you as an enterprise ensure that you're communicating in the voice of your audience?

00:06:53 Christopher

And that's where Acrolinx comes in.

00:06:54 Christopher

We look at terminology.

00:06:56 Christopher

We look at.

00:06:56 Christopher

It's style guidelines voice guidelines to be able to create this essentially central lexecon of how to communicate his business and then.

00:07:07 Christopher

Either your writers in real time use acrolinx in their sidebar and what in whatever authoring tool they're using, whether they're using something like madcap flare or Adobe products or Google Docs or Microsoft or anything in a browser.

00:07:21 Christopher

Uhm, you're able to use acrolinx in real time to check there your content.

00:07:25 Christopher

Acrolinx checks for all the components that.

00:07:28 Christopher

It's learned from your organization to create great content and provide you with the score.

00:07:32 Christopher

You can improve over time or through automation.

00:07:35 Christopher

So think in terms of continuous process, continuous delivery of content.

00:07:42 Christopher

I'm checking content in it's being scored delivered back to me.

00:07:45 Christopher

I'm making changes and it's rolling out at the speed of my.

00:07:48 Christopher

Development process.

00:07:50 Christopher

So at the base of what we're doing, when you think about where we're at, it's it's really about taking content in stream of characters, extracting that content, buying the context of that, identifying.

00:08:03 Christopher

Uh, your tokens either at the word level at the sentence.

00:08:06 Christopher

Level and then adding in the linguistic data underneath that around morphology and compound analysis to understand what's.

00:08:14 Christopher

In the content that we're we're looking at identifying terminology and and variant detection and then laying patterns on top of that, our proprietary secret sauce to be able to provide that.

00:08:26 Christopher

That feedback of whether or not your content is correct on character on tone on terminology, and then that feeds back.

00:08:34 Christopher

To users in the form of guidance.

00:08:37 Frank

Interesting, so it guides the people who are creating the content doesn't necessarily generate the content for them.

00:08:45 Christopher

We don't override and we don't right because customers.

00:08:47 Frank

Right?

00:08:49 Christopher

If you think in terms of who our customers are.

00:08:51 Christopher

Our our customers tend to be the largest technology companies in the world, so think top 20 global technology companies almost every single one of them uses acrolinx and.

00:09:02 Christopher

A piece of guidance might be useful, it might be on purpose, so as an example, when I write through my system and I write the word software.

00:09:12 Christopher

It says Are you sure you didn't mean platform?

00:09:14 Christopher

And why does it say that?

00:09:15 Christopher

Because in my world, if we're talking about our product, I don't want my employees to call it software, it's it's platform.

00:09:21 Christopher

It's an extensible platform with integration pieces and an API.

00:09:24 Christopher

I don't want to sell it as software.

00:09:26 Christopher

But I might have meant to say software.

00:09:29 Christopher

So I don't want to.

00:09:30 Christopher

I don't want to enforce that rule.

00:09:32 Christopher

I want to provide guidance and if you agree with that guidance, you implement that guidance.

00:09:37 Christopher

We have the technology to override that, but in almost every case that doesn't make sense to the customer.

00:09:45 Andy

So is the input for the content is it?

00:09:46 Frank

What is this?

00:09:46 Frank

What this?

00:09:50 Andy

Is it spoken or written or all of the above?

00:09:55 Christopher

All of the above, so we can take in.

00:09:57 Christopher

I mean, there's a number of ways to teach the platform to be your editor.

00:10:04 Christopher

One is to pull mass quantities of content.

00:10:07 Christopher

Give me all your great content.

00:10:09 Christopher

What does it look like?

00:10:10 Christopher

Identify what you think is good and we're going to read through that, and the system will read through all that content and start generating guidelines.

00:10:15 Christopher

Based on what you believe is great content today.

00:10:18 Christopher

Uhm, there's also the ability to just go in and into our interface and set guidelines so you can set a tone of voice you can identify how lively you want your content.

00:10:29 Christopher

Today there are challenges to all of those methods because over time you're going to learn more, and that's part of what I've really been aiming to.

00:10:39 Christopher

Evolve with the product is.

00:10:42 Christopher

Gartner, the analyst firm, has said that 50% of of marketers, people that set the company voice are. I don't think this is the word they use, but I.

00:10:52 Christopher

Will use guessing.

00:10:54 Christopher

I have a good idea of what my audience wants to hear, so I define my tone of voice.

00:10:58 Christopher

I define the words that I'm going to use I I think I know what people want to hear.

00:11:02 Christopher

And if I use acronyms.

00:11:05 Christopher

Go ahead and I take all that information that I've gathered, and I teach acrolinx to to help create content like that and the output of acrolinx is an Acura link score so you're aiming for 100.

00:11:17 Christopher

Most customers are aiming for 80.

00:11:18 Christopher

You want to be 80 or better.

00:11:20 Christopher

80 means good, 90 means done, numeric value of of good and done, so no subjectivity.

00:11:26 Christopher

It's just it is what it is.

00:11:28 Christopher

This is either on my guidance or it's not on my guidance and.

00:11:32 Christopher

If I get 100 acrolinx score on a piece of content, well by God, that's going to perform fantastically. It's exactly what I think.

00:11:41 Christopher

My audience wants to hear and how I think they want to hear it.

00:11:43 Christopher

The important word in.

00:11:45 Christopher

There though, is I think.

00:11:47 Christopher

I think that.

00:11:49 Christopher

Where I want to aim to get to is the ability to create a feedback loop from my audience.

00:11:54 Christopher

So think in terms of support...