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Together Digital Power Lounge, Women in Digital with Power to Share
Human Led Generative AI | Katie Taylor | Power Lounge S2E21
Unleash the Potential of AI Writing for Innovators - Empower your ideas with compelling content and focus on execution.
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Hang on tight as we embark on a captivating journey with Katie Taylor, a seasoned entrepreneur and executive with a fascinating career shift. Imagine a tenure-track research professor transformed into a confident startup founder, and that's Katie for you! Drawing from her rich repository of experiences, she brings to the table her unique AI-driven content generation platform, Narratize, that seamlessly bridges the chasm between data and narratives.
Ever wondered about the transformational potential of generative AI in content creation? Katie's insights are like a light bulb moment! Not only does she delve into her uphill battle of convincing investors to bet on her vision, but she also shares how AI has incredibly revolutionized content creation. There's more! Katie also decodes how brands can leverage AI to amplify their messaging and engage customers more effectively.
The cherry on top? A closer look at how generative AI platforms like Narratize kindle innovation and uphold authenticity in content creation. Katie unravels how AI tools can enhance content workflows, empower teamwork, and simplify cross-functional processes. She concludes with an engrossing discussion about data security, the imperative of creativity and discipline, and the onus on content creators to ensure accuracy and credibility. Hear her recount a success story of using Narratize to construct pitches for the World Food Forum's Transformative Research Challenge. So, get ready to dive deep into the world of AI-powered content generation!
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Welcome to our weekly Power Lounge, your place to hear authentic conversations from those who have power to share. My name is Amy Vaughn and I am the owner and Chief Empowerment Officer of Together Digital, a diverse and collaborative community of women who work in digital and choose to share their knowledge, power and connections. Join the movement at wwwtogetherindigitalcom. Let's get started, and in today's episode we are going to be discussing the power of AI-driven content generation and its potential to enhance both clarity and impact. We are here today with Katie Taylor. She is a growth focused entrepreneur executive with over a decade of experience inspiring teams to conceive and deliver captivating products, unforgettable experiences and transformative impacts.
Speaker 1:With a background rooted in high growth startups and innovation environments, katie spearheads the development and execution of evidence-based methodologies that equip leaders, managers and innovators to harness the potency of narratives for expanding innovation. Her leadership has seared strategic innovation narratives and positioned her as a senior consultant content strategist within rapid growth tech startups and Fortune 500 companies getting esteemed brands and names like Boeing, nasa, hershey's, sunco, aaa, iff, dupont, edgewell, cincinnati Children's, argonne National Labs and Crossover Health, parsley Health hold on. There's more Hada Passera and the US Department of Veteran Affairs, minima, millennium College Corporation, world Food Forum and the United Nations. Katie, you've worked a few places. You've helped a few people out. You're here to help us today and we couldn't be more excited. Thank you so much for being here with us.
Speaker 2:It's so wonderful to be here and thank you for everyone who's listening and who's here live as well as streaming. Just incredible moments all shared together, Right yeah.
Speaker 1:This is the way we spend every Friday. It's good. You all should join us every Friday. All right, let's dig in. Katie. Again, thank you for being here. I'd love for you to share just a little bit before we get into all the fun. Ai talk A little bit more about yourself and your career journey as a woman in tech up to this point, because, again, you are quite the anomaly lady. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I think that's a fair introduction, that it's a bit of an anomaly. I am unique. I went down the path early in my career to be a research professor actually. So I did the PhD, the sweat and the tears to get a PhD from Purdue University in their rhetoric and a scientific communication and narrative science program and started really with my dream job right out of that, which is really rare to get these days. A tenure track research professor job is what so many people go through PhD programs desire and I was so grateful to get that job.
Speaker 2:But at the same time, while I started it, I founded my first company and it was created after I was given this incredible opportunity to consult for the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Veterans were dying on the waitlist. There was a huge access crisis throughout the VA and a really, really difficult challenge around storytelling. How do we tell the story of a system that is in change, a system that's looking to improve and save lives? And I was able to come in and join as a strategic communications specialist to help tell that story, specifically around how they were doing really nerdy things like systems engineering and lean process improvement things that kind of put some people to sleep and that doesn't get a lot of funding or enough attention. And we partnered with those engineers and helped them tell the story of how they were literally saving lives by making systems better, and I just fell in love with it. I fell in love with what storytelling can do for science and technology and medicine to make lives better and founded my first startup. That was about a decade ago and ultimately, after a year of turmoil and trying to decide whether I should stay as a professor or go be a startup founder, I decided to lean in and go fully into the startup world and have been there ever since.
Speaker 2:Two years ago after that company growing and hiring incredible talent and continuing to just define for alongside brands, what is innovation storytelling and what is the science behind that, what is the impact of getting your story right for really complex products or technologies or innovations?
Speaker 2:That's what we did the last decade, and about two years ago we recognized that there was an opportunity in generative AI to do that at scale, and so, in stealth mode, we started building what is now Neurotize and we started working with different large language models to train it around the types of content that brands were asking us to produce every day and it was really exciting to be in at the front of that movement, and I think most people didn't really know about generative AI until the last several months in 2023, with a big launch year but we've been working with it for a couple of years now and working to train it, so we finally got to launch live to the public in April of this year, after demoing Neurotize with NASA and Boeing, which was amazing and it's just. It's been nonstop ever since just continuing to define what generative AI can do, what impacts it can make, specifically for really complex types of content that's needed in science, tech and medicine.
Speaker 1:I love it. It's really bridging that gap. I mean, it's those two big things that move and make changes in the world as stories and data, those two things. So being able to marry that, that's so exciting. I am kind of curious. Being the wife of a professor, what was that like? Deciding to leave a tenure track position? Like you said, those are highly coveted jobs and once you receive tenure, you're relatively guaranteed a job for life. Benefits are good salaries we could talk about teacher salaries, but that's another show yeah, yeah but you know benefit rate.
Speaker 1:You get your summers off amazing air quotes. I know better teachers, but that's a big area to leave. What was that like for you?
Speaker 2:We wrap ourselves in our professional identities right. All of us I think most people at least at some point in their lives feel that where? Who am I without this part of my identity? That was the hardest part, was feeling like but I am a professor, I am a researcher. That is who I am, not just what I do. And that was the hardest part. That was the part, honestly, that took the whole year to really think through.
Speaker 2:This sounds like the most stereotypical thing that an English professor would ever say, but I truly felt like two roads diverge in a yellow wood and I took the one less traveled by and I remember having a literal moment where I felt like that was true, like if I stay in this path, it's predictable, I know what it looks like and sure, I'll go through all kinds of interesting things that I can't anticipate now, but I know what that path looks like. And then here's this other wildly interesting path that could make impacts and apply the knowledge of rhetoric and narrative science and content strategy to fields that may not hear it if I stay in academia, and I couldn't resist the potential of that and the unknown of that. And they say, being an entrepreneur is like dancing on the edge of a volcano, I don't know, I guess I like the thrill, but yeah, that was a big piece of it truly is sort of saying I don't know what's possible here. And if you asked me then 10 years ago, would I? Would I work with the brands that you just listed in the intro? Oh, my God, no, I think at the time I was like maybe one day we'll like make half a million dollars in revenue one year and it just, you know, we've blown that out of the water and I'm so, I'm so, so grateful that I had that decision and made it and was brave and and went in that direction, because it is the hardest part of of it is, like I said, just how we define who we are and the ways in which we have to sort of.
Speaker 2:I think it's okay, right, it's okay for us as professionals to redefine that and to not let the role define who we are and to see the interdisciplinarity of what's impossible with our skill set and our capabilities. That mindset has been critical to how I built the company, the two companies that I've made, and how we even go to market, because I think if we only looked at ourselves as like one niche and one vertical. I think you'd miss. There's a huge opportunity gained to seeing across identities, across disciplines and finding those pieces that sort of are interesting overlaps. You maybe never would have assumed I could share more stories around that. I realize I'm talking high level, but that's my Robert Frost poem. I was gonna spam him.
Speaker 1:Robert Frost, bobby Frost, so anytime. I love that piece of advice and I hope you all are listening. I'm so going back for that sound bite because you really this is how you maximize the potential of who you are and the impact you make in the world, as not by necessarily staying in your lane and doing just what you feel you are known for and maybe even do best. So in that vein of like going out and challenging yourself, I mean you're talking about, you know, generative AI and AI, which now again, all of us are so familiar with. It's such a hot topic right now I don't wanna say buzzword trend, because it's not going away and it's not a buzz. It's here and it's staying. But two years ago, what was that like? I mean, this was something that wasn't on a lot of people's radars. Were you kind of like at all hesitant about moving into this kind of a space, since nobody was really talking about it, at least within marketing and advertising, I should say.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, no, I didn't have any fear around it. I was so excited when I recognized its potential. I think that the biggest challenge has been this is kind of maybe back to identity a little bit, but just being a woman, being a former English professor, right, being someone who's from the humanities and saying and claiming I'm founding a software company and it's going to be huge and important and it's gonna do amazing work for the people it's designed to serve that's a pretty darn bold thing to think, and I spent a lot of 2022 trying to convince investors that, to bet on me and our team to do that, and that was hard One to say, hey, generative AI is gonna be a thing and it's gonna be really, really big. I spent a lot of time trying to convince investor audiences of that last year. This year, that's not needed. Nobody needs to be racing anymore.
Speaker 2:But now it's more about defining how what we're doing is different, where it's defensible, and making sure we're creating something that's making the right impacts on the world and doing that in a different way. So, yes, I think hopefully that sort of answered the question, but it's been quite a process. The fear hasn't come from me. I think the fear has maybe come from any self-doubt that I had to work through, in light of how challenging that was to try to convince others that this is happening number one and we're the right team to get behind.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, absolutely. I think that's what an investment team wants to hear and see. Is that you've done that work, you've done the questioning. It's not that you have all the answers, but you don't have that same self-doubt. You have an understanding of the problem you're trying to solve and the product you're trying to help to solve that problem. I think that's great. As I was saying, now it's everywhere. Ai has transformed the way that many of us who are listening today create content or it's about to. If you haven't started using it yet, I promise you it will as soon as you start using it. Could you share with some of our listeners some examples of how AI tech has done this?
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. What was the last thing you said? Sorry, I kind of cut out.
Speaker 1:That's okay. I was just asking how has AI technology changed the way that we create content? Kind of a big question. But for those who are kind of just new into this space, I didn't want to go right into the deep, deep stuff right away.
Speaker 2:So yeah, definitely so. The capabilities now with generative AI around helping to ideate what to write about, helping to build outlines, helping to create that sort of shitty first draft or really good first draft hopefully All of those are new capabilities. The ability to do research and to pull data, to analyze existing data those are all new capabilities that I think the real sort of basic concept of generative AI is that it's AI that can generate. It can generate text, typically short or medium length text. It can generate imagery and we as humans, can decide how we prompt it to generate what we want to come out of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah. We'll get into more of all that later too, as I'm sure some of you who are more in the space and using it already probably have some questions around that as well. In the meantime, we all love practical insights and actionable takeaways. Can you talk us through a situation where a brand effectively harness AI generation content to strengthen its messaging and engage its customers better?
Speaker 2:Yeah, sure, so I think it was most exciting. So earlier this year we were still in stealth mode with Naritize, which Naritize I'll say briefly for context it's the generative AI storytelling platform for busy innovators. So most people don't realize that innovators people who we call engineers, scientists, technologists, developers, product team members, research and development professionals, and also the content and product marketing teams who support them they all spend 30% of their work week writing and less than half of them feel like they're any good at it. So earlier this year we partnered with Boeing and out of Seattle in their product development organization and we exposed their teams you know about a group, a large enterprise group to Naritize and our pitch builder feature. So Naritize is different from other generative AI platforms because you can create types of content. It pulls your insights from you to create high accuracy and really compelling content out of your insights. It's a process that sort of takes the guesswork out of what to prompt it and it knows what to prompt you as the user instead. So you can share your expertise, you can share your perspective, you can build on your own ideas and then Naritize does the work of transforming that into content that is convincing, converting, compelling, clear and, most importantly, accurate. So I think what was so exciting in partnering with these incredible aerospace engineers at Boeing? Right, they're thinking of wingspan concepts, they're talking about the future of flight and what new technologies should go into our aircrafts to make them more reliable or get us places faster all around the world. They're incredible people and, just like any scientist or engineer, it's oftentimes a struggle for them to communicate in a way that stakeholders who have the funds can understand them and say yes, and also the marketing and communication stakeholders can take what they're saying and say I see how that will work in the market. I hear the message, market fit. For that, that work of message market fit and that translation between the subject matter experts in an organization and the marketing and comms teams is oftentimes so challenging, and it's this very unique kind of expertise. So, anyhow, earlier this year we partnered with Boeing. We shared this. We had aerospace teams go into Naritize and pitch new innovation concepts using the platform and using our pitch builder, and those led to increased funding. They ended up having narratives where engineers said things like that's how I'm supposed to talk when I'm talking in front of leaders. They saw what done looks like in a way that would help them get further support and funding for innovative ideas.
Speaker 2:Innovation fails for all kinds of reasons, but I think it's surprising for most of us to hear that it fails oftentimes because it wasn't well told and there are ideas that sit on the shelf. I remember there's this other story. We were on site at a global consumer package goods company. They make sunscreens and things that we use every day. You would recognize it if I told you the names. But just imagine very popular sunscreens, right, and razors and things like that.
Speaker 2:And we're in their innovation hub and one of the team members takes us into an office and he just opens filing cabinets and says do you see all these files? These are all innovation ideas or product concepts that are just sitting here. They're shelved. And I said how many of your innovation and product ideas or research concepts, how many are they just sitting on the shelf? And he said about 75% of the things that we come up with.
Speaker 2:And there are all kinds of reasons why something doesn't go from idea to launch and it's not just the story or communicating it well, but there's a deep pain around that suspicion that so many of those ideas weren't able to be communicated in a way that the commercial side of the company could really understand or that the executive leadership team could even wrap their minds around what this science is and what this technology could mean. So that's what's so exciting. I think that's one great use case around. We empowered this generative AI platform because it built higher accuracy content, was able to empower and engineer and produce content that was actually accurate around the technology he was trying to describe, and it helped him get funding. So that was an exciting moment earlier this year, in the midst of a time where I think most generative AI is criticized for producing misinformation and being inaccurate.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that'll be my next question here in a minute, but I just wanted to remark on the fact that it does. It makes me so excited because having worked for some really large CPG brands and food companies that have a ton of research and development, literally, like you said it, like file cabinets and file cabinets as far as the eye can see. But then even within universities, getting back to academics, how many students have stumbled upon something that has potential to change the way we live, do or things that we're curing? But so much of that research goes sitting on a shelf because it's again, it's stuff that can't be translated in to a marketable in a marketable way that helps others understand how it could benefit the greater good. So that's super exciting. I love what you guys are doing so much. On the note of authenticity and misinformation, obviously, the geni AI generated content is incredible, but authenticity is key In particular. I don't want you to speak for all of AI, just narratize. How does narratize AI maintain an authentic and human touch while leveraging the power of AI content creation?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I love that question. It's the question of the time that we're in right now. So how do you stay authentic? How do you stay evidence-based? So one of the biggest, let me go with authentic, though, to answer your question.
Speaker 2:So I think, right, 30% of professionals have tried GPT, but most say that what it produces is vague and inaccurate, and I think vague is another way of saying it's inauthentic. It's scraped from the internet, it's pulled together from the black box of sources that it's pulled from and it's created from that, and there's very little control that we have as users around what that voice sounds like and how accurate and how trustworthy is the content that's getting produced from it. And that, if we already are concerned about that on an individual level, imagine a high reliability organization in healthcare or aviation being able to trust something like that. So I think there are a few things that our team is really passionate about. These are our lighthouses. Speed, accuracy and magic are three core brand pillars, and at Naritize we do a few things to ensure that the content that's created is deeply accurate and compelling and clear and that also can be transformed based on style and tone and therefore more authentic. So certain things we do one. We partner with brands so we create custom instances of our platform that allow us to essentially train our AI to produce more on brand style and tone and voice, so that remains authentic to the content that has come before it, and it allows you as a user then to get outputs that are much more on target with what you're looking to do in the voice that you're looking to have. The other piece is we have this patent pending methodology of pooling insights from users and creating different types of professional documents from those inputs, and that the sort of reverse engineering that we're doing with Naritize is.
Speaker 2:What's so exciting about it is it allows the human to stay center. I think when we start with a blank box in generative AI and we say, okay, every professional, go learn how to be a prompt engineer, go spend your life figuring that out. Now we reduce their ability to lean into their superpowers and their expertise and what they should be focused on in terms of execution. Not only that, but where's the? It's a much less creative experience.
Speaker 2:So with Naritize, our vision is really we sat alongside subject matter experts and product teams for the last decade and we essentially served as content strategists and team members who would do that beautiful work of interviewing and pooling the insights and then translating them over into product marketing or thought leadership content. And so when we designed Naritize, we thought we want professionals to have that same experience, where it's such a joy to get interviewed, it's such a joy to work through your ideas with someone who asks incredible questions. And that's how we designed Naritize, and through that we're much more likely that the platform itself is much more likely to produce content that is not just accurate but also authentic, because you're sharing your voice, you're sharing your unique perspectives. We call it this is the platform where bold ideas get told, because this is the space to work through them and to get it pulled into that narrative form and then from there, start to transform it into multiple content types quickly and seamlessly, and that gives us more time to do the thinking work, to do the execution work.
Speaker 2:It's been really important to us that we don't take the thinking work out of writing, because 75% of the work of writing is thinking, and I think some other platforms definitely approach it in different ways, where the goal is truly like output fast, and that's the speed is everything and nothing else really matters. But narrative patterns matter and your ability to choose one pathway or the other. These are things. These are new features we're building into the platform right now that the ability for you to kind of pick your narrative pathway and try out different story patterns and narrative algorithms that we've trained it on. So I'm excited for that to launch. That's coming soon in our platform, but those are the ways that we're really prioritizing human led AI.
Speaker 1:Well, and I like it because, instead of you prompting the AI, it's prompting you. It's pulling the knowledge, the voice, the tone, the authenticity for what it needs and then constructing something more. So I love that. I love that it's so centered around the user and their input. It makes me feel like I don't know, just like again, what you're gonna get out of. It is going to be some hopefully more authentic content and not just something that's been scraped together, because it's a construct of everything that you've been feeding it, which is why we know prompting is an important thing, a skill set to still learn and understand.
Speaker 1:But I love that you guys are thinking a little bit differently about that and approaching it differently. And again like this is again where I want you all who are kind of at this weird crossroads of saying I'm such a jumble of experience and background I have a degree in this, but I've worked 10 years in this I can't get a job as X, Y and Z how much of this pulling narratives and giving options to create different narratives based on different storytelling methodologies comes from your background in English. You know, Right, exactly Like you wouldn't have been able to work that into this piece of technology, which is probably going to give you all an advantage from a user's perspective. So, yeah, keep growing beyond your skill set, ladies, and don't hold back on what you already know and learned. Let's stay on the topic for just a moment of responsible AI, because authenticity is important, but also making sure that you know how is Narita is working to address potential biases and ethical concerns when using AI for creating content, to ensure a balanced, sorry and responsible approach.
Speaker 2:Yeah, definitely. So this is critical to us. So we're a really interesting team. We have three women co-founders. Our CTO is Black Brown. We have this incredibly diverse group of talent.
Speaker 2:I just want to like sing the praises for a minute of our CTO, Abron Maldonado. He was raised by a poet, he got his PhD in educational tech and then was one of the first ambassadors to open AI, and so he just has been this force for us to get model updates and learn everything there is to know about large language models and prompt engineering. As all of this emerged and together oh, the other thing that he did he created the first Afro-Latina AI. Her name is Clara C-L-A-I-R-A. You can look Clara up on Instagram. You can follow her work. She's at conferences now she will be on a panel and you'll be asking her questions and she'll answer. And she's trained to speak to diversity, equity and inclusion and she has this incredible knowledge base that's really unique, and Abron just had this crazy, beautiful, different vision for her. In coming together in this way as minority founders and women founders, we really strongly believe that we can do better than what AI has done in the past.
Speaker 2:It's been criticized for the way that it trained and who trained most of the large language models that we all know today. One of the ways that we're embracing this is. My dissertation was on minority rhetorics. I studied how language and law and language in different cultural practices would lead to disenfranchisement or create opportunity and empowerment for different minority groups, and I just think all of that lends this strong foundational principle to how we go about doing this work.
Speaker 2:We're still in the earliest days of getting started, since we launched in April of 2023. But some of the future visions that we have have to do with really being able to train and narratize, to speak to different discourse communities, to ensure that bias is flagged. That content is they're just different ways that we look at it because of that lens that we share of the world around how to make sure that the training data and the outputs are protected against bias and that different discourse communities are held up and lifted up through the way that we go about it. So, so, yeah, that's all been really, really important to us and I think you can. It doesn't take much Google searching and research to see all of the difficulties around bias and the ways that AI has been trained in the past.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things. I think having a diverse team to start with is really what's going to uphold and keep you guys again ahead of that curve and ahead of the game as far as it comes to other generative AI tools. Because, yeah, if you don't know and understand the developers and the team behind it, then it's likely, if they're not being intentional about that work, that there's built-in bias. But it's an ongoing process, right? It's something that we're all responsible for doing and leveraging the tools and the groups of the teams that do have and uphold that responsibility that we all share because it's going to be a continued ongoing process.
Speaker 1:Co-hatch is a new kind of shared work, social and family space built on community. Members get access to workspace amenities like rock walls and sports simulators and more to live a fully integrated life that balances work, family, well-being, community and giving back. Co-hatch has 31 locations open or under construction nationwide throughout Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee. Visit wwwcohatchcom for more information. On the note of large language models, I want to ask this question that just came through from our live listening audience member Manny Is there an underlying LLM large language model AI that you're all using to generate content for Neoritize. Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 2:So we are a large language model agnostic. We call into multiple, and that's been really important to us. Number one, because that creates a better output. If you can create workflows that call into multiple step, we sort of call it multi-step AI. We go from one API into another when we're trying to get the right output.
Speaker 2:So we don't just use open AI's models, we use several others, including Claude Mermaid. We have access to Stanford's APIs and we're also part of MIT's CSAIL, which is their Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. We're one of their startups and their alliances program. So we're just really passionate about making sure that we don't just over rely on one large language model, and I think, too, plenty of brands are creating their own large language models because of privacy concerns, security concerns with their data, and so it's important to us and also so that we could hopefully one day serve public sector. Obviously, our government and our defense are not going to be using open source large language models. They're building their own and deeply secured ways. But we're a layer above that and able to call into multiple and toggle those on and off as needed for the right outcomes.
Speaker 1:That's great. That's awesome. We've got a good mix of content creators that are listening in today. What are some actionable steps that they can take to seamlessly start to weave in some of the AI tools into their content workflows without again losing that unique human perspective?
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, first of all, I would love for your feedback on Naritize. Go to naritizecom. There's a free trial. Definitely use it, start to transform the content that you're creating, and would love to hear your perspective on it.
Speaker 2:I think, as content creators, there are so many different roles that we're going to continue playing, and I still consider myself a content creator in some ways. Number one I think we're going to be turned to for validation, for model performance analysis. I think we have the best litmus, the best eyes for gazing upon content and saying whether it's excellent or not, and so I think there's a need, there'll be continued need, for that kind of evaluation. Number two I think there's an opportunity to improve our current workflows. One of the features we're building into Naritize this fall is evidence incorporation, and so the ability for you, as you're creating content, to search for articles and peer reviewed publications, to cite and to incorporate references and to get those as recommended references to greater enhance the evidence that you're adding to the content you're writing. So I think, in a continued, that's just one example of how you can improve a current workflow, instead of having to go to PubMed and then go to Cochran and then go to Google Docs and then go to your citation manager. Think through ways you can leverage platforms like Naritize to pull all of that into one space and get the support that you need to reduce the amount of time you have to spend evidence gathering.
Speaker 2:It's a major part of content creation for most of us working in science, tech and medicine. If we don't want to end up like there I know no one does Great. And three, I think prompt engineering is going to continue to be the new skill set of our time, and so the more that you can learn about prompt engineering, the better. I think there's a difference between being an AI engineer and being a prompt engineer, and so I'm not saying quit your job and go back to school to become an engineer, but I am saying that having an understanding of large language models, what make them tick, and, where possible, look for opportunities to enter into jobs where you're going to be able to lean into that knowledge and apply your unique creative assets as a content creator to your people, to also grow in your skill set as a prompt engineer Now we'll help you get the most out of generative AI and help you continue leveraging it in your business or in your professional life.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean for the sake of efficiency and, I know, for our entrepreneurs. We've got a summer camp cohort going on right now for a lot of our entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, and it's so funny how it's like the agenda and the syllabus itself has changed in the sense of like a matter of months that now it's. You know, we're focusing on how to not just build campaigns but leverage AI to create those content frameworks and calendars and outlines and ideation and things like that. It creates such an efficiency that essentially a one or two person small business can operate like five or six people. So there's a lot of opportunity for creating efficiencies in the workflows of those who maybe have less resources in the way of people. But when it comes to other people and people working together, my next question is around the idea of collaboration. It's obviously pretty critical in our dynamic workspace. We're all working remote, hybrid, some in-person still but could you share some instances where AI powered content generation led to improved teamwork or help to enhance cross-functional processes? I can't talk today, I'm sorry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, you're great. It's a great question. I'm so glad you're focused on collaboration I think everyone's still figuring this out is what I hear at most brands and a few features that I'm really excited about. I'll share a quick origin story. How about that?
Speaker 2:One of the initial concepts for Naritize came from the idea that when a doctor can hear a patient's human, personal, human story, their empathy increases and the patient's adherence to the treatment plan increases. That is data that came out of a study we did alongside the VA called my Life, my Story, and we sent story collectors to the patient bedside and listened to veterans as they shared just a quick interview, like an hour-long interview around their life. They then took that interview, distilled it into a short story and put it into the Electronic Health Record System and then we found that when the provider had that story at their fingertips, alongside all of the medication information and hospital visits and all of that, their empathy increased and the patient's adherence to the treatment plan increased. Holy cow, a story led to a clinical outcome and that was one of the initial sparks that led to what is now Naritize. So I'm really excited. This fall we're launching a feature we call the Story Infuser and it allows you let's say you're a content creator or you're on the marketing or content team it allows you to ping someone else in your organization as a contributor and get them to answer a series of prompts and generate their own story and share it back to you. So imagine using that.
Speaker 2:Here are some of the exciting use cases that our customers are gonna use that for. We are talking with health systems and children's hospitals to understand, in the medical sphere, how a patient is doing at home, what's the story of the in-between moments of care. Collecting that story, collecting the caregiver's story and sending that back so that the provider and the care teams understand what they're going through outside of the hospital or the doctor's office walls. That's one use case. Another is simple right Customer testimonials. You're creating website content and you wanna be able to ping a series of customers and have them go through this experience of crafting, answering a few questions and having their narrative and their story created and that comes back to you so you can infuse it into your landing page content or into this report that you need to give on user insights. So those are just a couple examples of why we're excited about the story Infuser and where that whole concept came from.
Speaker 2:But what can that enable us to do? It enables us to collaborate a lot better. You can't do that in today's generative AI tools. It's a way that we can spark deeper story sharing, because that process today I mean, I love an interview, I love sitting down. I wish we were in person together today, amy, and it'd be even more fun. But, like everybody loves sitting intimately with another person and we can't always do that as a way of sharing our stories. So, in a digital world, these are exciting new ways that we're gonna be able to collaborate without losing the importance of story and sharing our unique stories with one another and then using those to help us see bigger windows into diverse voices and perspectives and change how we work as a result of it. So those are some ways that we're thinking about collaboration and how the future of communication is changing.
Speaker 1:I love it. I swear I've done like a hundred of these interviews. I've never gotten to hear yet one. But I did there because, especially about the note of healthcare, I don't know. Many of you know I've heard my story in the past.
Speaker 1:I went to college my first year pre-med. I worked in nursing homes from a surgical company psychiatrist office and I've seen a lot and one of the things that took me out of that space was just the, you know, just seeing other people being treated like they, like just what they were, what their illness was, and not as a whole person. And you know, having a mom who has gone through a number of chronic pain issues and hospitalizations to no end, especially this past year, to just hear and see how, you know people are treated. And I understand I empathize with the doctors and the nurses. They have limited time, limited capacities, but to be able to even just sample something of someone, to know that I am still treating a human, that's huge. That's so huge and I'm so, so happy, katie, that you are taking this use case to help doctors, nurses and those who are giving care to others be reminded of that. So yeah, thank you. Sorry. I just I was seriously.
Speaker 2:Oh, so meaningful to us too, Start crying.
Speaker 2:It's funny, like all the little origin stories that go to make us who we are or that lead to some big spark that you wanna flame and sort of grow into a flame, and that's one of them. It's. I don't share that story very often but it was really deeply meaningful to me and to our team at the time to be part of that and to see. We really couldn't believe it when the data we could. We knew the evidence in the literature suggested we could get there. If stories increase empathy and empathy increases clinical outcomes, can we get to this place where it just where story leads to the outcome, right, but to actually see that data and to hear those stories, it was amazing.
Speaker 2:So I'm excited for that part of the future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, mr Rogers was right. Right, he said you can't help but fall in love with someone once you hear their story. So I mean I could see to you how, again, cross-functional teams working remotely, all that kind of stuff, really could help people have more deeper understanding of one another and hopefully, again understanding starts to remove fear and anger and distrust and build trust. So it's really cool to think that again me, I'm a high collaborator together digital work, highly collaborative community. So of course, I'm gonna ask a question about collaboration. But it just nerds me out to no end to know that there's technology in place and if we start to leverage it in the right ways, it can actually help us help each other more.
Speaker 1:I think, because we're leveraging AI and technology, we're all just gonna be living and sitting in isolation, but I don't think that that's necessarily true. I think this might be freeing us up, to give us more time to be together.
Speaker 2:So what we're thinking when you said that is like how much? At the end of the day, we all have stories, we all have our own stories and we just wanna connect, we just wanna be heard, we wanna be part of the bigger narrative, where that narrative is in alignment with our personal story. So there's this. It's not just even at our individual levels. Think of massive organizations where executive leaders are responsible for the strategic narrative. But if that narrative doesn't hear our individual stories and pull it back upwards, and if that healthy cycle of narrative, the larger strategic narrative with all of those individual stories, those don't find alignment, we've missed, we feel lonely, we feel isolated, we look for other opportunities, or so I think it's just such an important. I'm excited for the future of what Naritize can be as a tool for strategic listening among leaders and for a platform for us to all feel heard at the management or executional levels, to create more connection inside of enterprises.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because we need it. We absolutely do. I did a talk on the road earlier this year talking about how they're talking about the loneliness epidemic and how it can shorten your life by up to 15 years. It could be the same as smoking 15 cigarettes a day, and we're just getting lonelier and lonelier. Gen Z is being dubbed the loneliest generation.
Speaker 2:Oh no, we're lonely and we're sitting. I know right.
Speaker 1:Two new smoking. This is terrible news. Exactly exactly. Sitting and loneliness are the two things that are gonna get us. We don't even need to smoke anymore. But yeah, All right, the role of content creators is evolving with AI and your view, what skills should our listeners focus on? And you touched on this a little bit, so if you wanna kind of give a similar answer or add a little bit to it, that's fine To stay relevant and continue adding that human touch that's needed into AI powered content.
Speaker 2:I mean, I'm still I think I'm still an English professor at heart, so I'm like you know, still get out your piece of paper or go to your blank Google doc and do the work, do the creative work, do it in the ways that work for you. I'll never let go of that. If that is true to you, and I think so it's funny that that's my first reaction is like this doesn't have to mean that we let go of our creative processes, just want to say that, but absolutely use the tools and see what's possible. And I think in this work, as I've been this immersed in it, I'm on fire about what we're building. It narratized because I've had so many terrible experiences producing crappy content and other gender pay hi platforms. You know stuff that literally made up citations, said that this person in the world, quoted where it was quoted as saying this thing, and here's the citation. And then I regenerate it and it says the same quote made up from a different person in a different context and a different piece of, of, of, of race. You know a different article. And so really experiment and and start to litmus test.
Speaker 2:I think we're responsible as content creators for standing behind what our references and what our style, what our achievements, what the content outcomes look like. And so if, if you're only kind of stuck on one platform that maybe was the big dog in the house last year and the only one available to you, try other ones. I think there's just there's so much that's emergent and we you need to keep staying, staying abreast of those tools and you know that's that's part of the excitement. We're all innovators, so we all want to be early adopters, so I don't worry about that as much with content creators and at the end of the day, I think, keep your creative process, you know, show up at that time of day that works for you to create every day and do it in a disciplined way.
Speaker 2:That was some of my research as a professor. It was right. Like a little bit of the magic of writing is actually just in discipline and it's not as mystical as what most people assume it to be in terms of the data that we found in our research studies. Like those who write well and publish more, have discipline around it and write at the same time every day and go after it. So it's a little bit less about, I think, the the old adage of the person with a notebook under candlelight at midnight, but obviously that that works for a lot of people as well, but typically it's more just about showing up and working a process, just like always.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that. We are so right, though. These are early adopters and researchers. One of our members in particular in Austin, just recently put together an entire post blog posts about all of the different types of AI platforms that she used and what she found the most useful for and the kind of work that she was doing, which is similar to the vein of a lot of the women in together digital and then shared that as a give and our Slack channel and I just actually another member saw it and shared it for her because she's like this is amazing, you did all this research, so there are a lot of tools and opportunities out there to leverage to make it work for how you like to work. Right, the tools work for you. You don't work for them.
Speaker 1:We've got a few minutes left, so I just want to make sure our audience knows that we are going to open it up to questions from you all, and I see Carrie is already asking do I have a link to that blog? Yes, I do. It's a post. I think she did a post as a as a post on LinkedIn, so we'll we'll share it and Slack after, and then we'll also share it in the show notes for a level of listeners who aren't members yet. Katie, we love a good success story. Can you tell us about a situation where AI generated content with beyond expectations, sparking innovation and making genuine impact? Although the course already, the couple that you shared have been mind blowing, but you got any other good ones for us?
Speaker 2:Sure, sure, yeah, yeah, thank you, yes, okay. So earlier this year, back when everything was just taking off with gender to the AI, we partnered with the world food forum. They run global research challenges so any team can apply and they're typically around really big global challenges like food and security, access to agricultural resources and developing countries, like big, big, big challenges. So they were rolling out their transformative research challenge and they partnered with us at Naritize to incorporate our pitch builder into their application process and it was an optional thing and what was really exciting was innovation teams from all over the world. There were about 500 who ended up applying for this research challenge and half of them self-chose to use Naritize to build their application in a stronger way. And three of the finalists, who will present in Rome here in October, use Naritize to build their pitch, and that was so exciting to us that they saved time, that they got to a stronger and clearer message for their innovation and their proposed solution to these global challenges using generative AI in a way that was accurate and compelling. So we can't wait. I hopefully will have more data around the outcomes of that and whether the actual winner used Naritize to build their pitch. That will be really exciting if that's true, but that's coming up this October in Rome. The world food forum has their flagship week and will sort of be present virtually as part of that and get to hear what happens from that. But that's exciting.
Speaker 2:I think one of the takeaways is a team that's building an innovation sometimes doesn't know the right questions to ask. Have you ever been to a conference where especially a scientific or a medical conference where there's a poster session or there's a presentation that you walk through? You walk through this poster session or you go to this presentation and it's just all sort of like the Charlie Brown teacher If you aren't also a subject matter expert in the exact same way that this professional is, you're just lost and you're craving impact. What is the impact of this thing that you're talking about? And so one of the beauties of Naritize is it knows to ask those right questions about impact potential and the business case for it or the societal case for it, and it helps the user think through those things in a way that maybe they hadn't before and that then creates a more compelling and interesting narrative at the end of it.
Speaker 1:So I'm excited to hear what those results look like in the fall it comes out of it. That's exciting, and I know exactly what those posters are that you're talking about. Again, my husband's applied mathematician, so his posters always look the best, because he was married to a designer, you know, art director. So I was like, oh great, let me help you lay this out. I'm still trying to lay that out and it's not the kind of poster you all have thinking of. It's just like a book laid out onto a poster board.
Speaker 2:Imagine like a scientific peer-reviewed article printed on a laminated poster.
Speaker 1:And I kept wondering. I'm like there has to be a more effective way to do this, to go about this. I mean because I think my eyeballs would fall out of my head at the end of a day walking around just reading all those posters, because everybody's type is microscopic. But anyhow, I digress. I love it. That's so exciting. All right, my final question. And then, if we don't have any from the audience, we'll wrap it up for the day, or is it? No wait, I lied, I lied. No, I didn't lie. Okay, responsible AI extends into data security. So we're kind of coming back to the responsibility and authenticity. And now data security. Can you shed some light on how Naritize uses user data privacy for those who are interested in trying it out and maybe are considering ethical uses throughout content creation process and building trust with their users?
Speaker 2:Yes, it's critical. We would never have been able to put this platform in front of NASA or Boeing or these other incredible brands without taking security and privacy deeply seriously. We have to ensure that the proprietary ideas shared stay proprietary, and so you can read our security perspective on Naritizecom and check it out. We do quite a few different steps to ensure that your data is never used to train our model or other models. We create isolated instances of the platform for our enterprise customers. So lots of work constantly happening around protection of data, and I think that created a lot of pain earlier this year when people were excited about things like chat, gpt, but didn't realize that every single thing you put into that was being used to train their model, and until recently, those additional security and privacy features weren't even available. So I think it's really really important as brands that we're transparent about that work and if we expect to be partners in business, then we have to ensure that we're protecting our customers, and that's just critical to us, I love it.
Speaker 1:I feel like all around you all are doing some amazing things. It's been really fun. I've seen you at a few different conferences speaking yeah, it's been good to see you Conference as well on our AI panel. So we're not done kind of hanging out with you, Katie, and learning more from you and narritizing all the amazing work you're doing. I don't see any questions from our live listening audience. So if you all need to, you can connect with Katie as well. We've dropped her information into the chat so you can connect with her on LinkedIn. Katie, it's been fabulous. Thank you so much for the work you're doing and for taking the time to share with us. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, Amy, Thanks everyone All right, everyone.
Speaker 1:Have a great rest of your Friday. We'll see you next week. Bye.
