How AI is changing content development for business, with Amanda Hurte

Speaker 4: Business School.

Daryl Pereira: Hi there, folks, and welcome. This is the Business School Podcast, where you'll learn about emerging trends in business, the kind of things that you may not find in a textbook. My name is Daryl Pereira, I'm a senior brand and content strategist here at IBM. Really happy today to be joined by Amanda Hurte, who's going to take us through an area which is quite close to me, which is around this idea of content marketing, content development and especially we can do now with some of the emerging trends in AI. But before we get there, I'll turn it over to Amanda. Can you just tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do and how you got to where you are today?

Amanda Hurte: Thank you, Darryl, for having me. I'm so excited. I'm Amanda Hurte. I am a design principle and content design director here at IBM. I'm actually within our IX consulting group, which just means that we focus on customer transformation work for brands and other clients, so we're in the consulting wing. My background is aligning with your audience, I assume. I graduated from Fisher College of Business at Ohio State, so I have a business marketing background. But, I always knew that I wanted to do something in the creative field. So out of college, I tried to find ways that I could merge that business marketing and some of that strategic insight that you get, with creativity. That manifested in my first position in the creative field as a copywriter. I started out at traditional agencies, and worked on, oh my gosh, this is dating, things like newspaper advertisements and radio scripts, and traditional campaigns for brands. Then, my career evolved. I moved up into a creative director role in digital marketing. Then, focused a bit more content creation for ecommerce, and social media, and all of the different touchpoints that surround the decision making effort today, someone on the brand side. Mostly, my background was in retail at this point. So a more traditional creative path, and then started to really draw more upon the business background that I had acquired, when I became part of IBM. When I joined IBM, my eyes were opened as to the opportunity that we had in front of us to use all kinds of different technology to further what we were doing in the copy and content space. That's where you'll hear my narrative start to shift, from copy and copywriting, into content and content strategy, and content design. Content means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. But it opened the aperture a bit more, on what actually happened with my career movement, and started to encompass more than just the actual writing, and authoring, and creation of ideas, into the application or the acceleration of how we can think about content for brands, clients, and then even the types of things that we do as content creators, or as writers, or as content strategists, how that can even be affected by technology and our personal use.

Daryl Pereira: I love that idea that you've come from both having a background, you've got the business side, but then you also bring in this creative, craft- driven side of content creation and writing.

Amanda Hurte: Yeah. I think both are really important. I talk to a lot of business students who are interested in more of that marketing and creative, insight driven field, but they're, obviously like me, I was in business school. I didn't go to portfolio school or art school to be formally trained in creative concepting. But there's a lot to draw on from the business side. If you're innately creative, and you like creative problem solving, and trying to think of new ways to come at different situations or bring new solutions, then there's definitely opportunity to merge those things in a career or extracurriculars, or whatever it is that you're looking to do.

Daryl Pereira: I think that's a great message to get out there. In terms of say your day- to- day... As you say, content can mean many things to many people. In terms of how you approach it, and then the kind of projects that you work on, who you're working with, both say from the IBM IX side as well as then, for instance on the client side, what are the kind of projects that you're involved with?

Amanda Hurte: It spans a wide range. The way I like to think about it, because like I said, you can say content and someone will interpret that based on where they sit or what their job is and what they need to do with said content, but thinking through all the different facets and what kind of projects that leads to and what kind of team members I would work with. If you picture a four quadrant, with an X, Y axis, and I have a little drawing that I can share if that's helpful for anyone who is more visually inclined like I am. But if you think about, you can be on a couple ends of these spectrums as a content professional. One I have is strategy to implementation, that's one A to B line. Then, creative to more technical. If you cross those things together, I start to think about the different types of work that happens in those four quadrants. For example, let's take the bucket of strategy and creative. Here, types of projects that I've worked on would be creative idea development, rebrands or repositioning for different brands, storytelling when it comes to business presentations or trying to articulate a strategy to different audiences within a business, if you're trying to create change, if you're trying to create adoption of a new concept for your team. It depends on what the goal is, but that's where that big storytelling bucket comes. Then, brand positioning. Sometimes, some of my projects have been around a brand who has acquired some sub- brands, and they're trying to figure out how those fit into the brand portfolio, and how do we adjust our story so that we can speak to the right audiences at the right times. But, " Hey, now we have this new set of offerings or this new set of products that we want to make feel like it's part of our brand family." That's that creative, strategic realm. There, you partner a lot with other strategists, other creative, like- minded people. A lot of design, hands- on designers or UX designers, and things like that. That's probably the area where I started, more or less. Then, the other side of creative would be that creative and implementation. This is a little bit more of the strategy's set and now you're activating against that. Campaign activation, so here's the brief and now we need to create all of the different pieces of collateral that's going to promote this idea. The social posts, the web copy, the scripts, the talking points for sales, all the things that you need to actually put hands on keyboard and do. Then, when I move to the other two sides of this hypothetical quadrant, I have technical and implementation. That's the total opposite. I'm a bit less on the technical implementation side, but I have lots of people on my team who are really, really good at this area. I say that on my team, we have majors and minors. Some could have a major in one quadrant and a minor in another, or they want to be learning about another area of content. I think that's great because it just makes you a more well- rounded content talent. But when I think of technical and implementation, I think of content management systems. How do you think about setting up a content management system for web purposes to make it easy to author content? Or maybe, you're actually authoring content for a brand, or for a client, or for yourself. Projects like training guides, or SEO guides, or SEO audits. Thinking about search engine optimization for different brands, for different purposes. A little bit more of a technical mindset on how that comes to life. Then, there's also strategy and technical. That is more of the content modeling, where you're looking across, okay here's a brand who is getting ready to shift their website from platform A to platform B. They've accumulated so much content over the course of this website being live that we need to take a look and say, " Does all of this come with us? Does some of it stay behind? How do we adapt what's there to fit the new strategy?" So that when we're moving everything over to the new content management system and the new site, you're optimizing at the same time, you're telling a better story, you're activating the strategy a little bit better. That's a little bit of that technical world plus the strategic world. Long winded answer, but there's several different things that you can do in content, which is why I think it's such an exciting field. It's definitely fluid. I would say I don't think that you have to feel stuck if you start in one area and then want to explore in another. That's my philosophy and how I think about it for myself, but also for career growth for team members.

Daryl Pereira: That's great, and especially important. We'll talk a little bit more about skills I think, later. But that's great set up. Like you're saying there, content can go in so many different directions so I think it's great that you've got this framework which you can help to visualize to plot your own path, like you're saying, and to find out where you can provide the most value. Let's switch gears a little bit now. Let's talk a little in terms of what you see, in terms of evolution of content development. You talk about how your own personal evolution went from copywriting to working in this content space. What would be your observations, especially the content that's required and how content is used, especially in the business context, how have you seen that change? If you want to take that and do any kind of crystal ball, gazing into the future as well, where we might be headed. But really interested to hear your perspective, in terms of the evolution of content development.

Amanda Hurte: What I've seen is a demand for quantity, because a lot of brands... Again, I keep talking about brands and clients because I sit in the consulting space. But what I've seen is, as brands and companies try to get more tailored in their messaging, or try to do more personalized experiences, you have to have the content to fuel that" machine" or you're not going to get the return on the other side. Also, this goes back to talking about how technology has influenced content so much and continues to, which I know we'll talk more about. But thinking through different platforms that brands are interested in, if they're thinking about technology enablers. Like something like Salesforce, or Adobe Experience Manager, the things that give you the levers to pull so that you can personalize and tailor, create that seamless journey that makes the reader feel like they're in a relationship with that brand or whomever is publishing that content is very cool and very interesting. I'm not going to pretend to understand the ins and outs of those platforms. But what I have noticed is sometimes, the platforms themselves feel like magic bullets for brands or clients. You can't really realize the value of those amazing pieces of technology and platforms if you're not putting in the right types of content or you're not loading it with the right insights about the audience so that you can pair audience A and audience B with the correct content, or product information, or reviews, or images, videos that's going to appeal to the insights that we have about that audience. I've just seen technology really increase the demand for the amount of content that brands need. Naturally, next they're trying to figure out, "Well, how do I create that faster?" There's this model that I think most, including myself, are used to, where you have different teams that are specialized in different areas of the content creation process. They come together as one and create this workflow that results in content being published on insert your channel of choice here. But now, I am seeing brands and companies think about, well how can we focus efforts on the more high value tasks or the more complex pieces of content, or creative, or thinking that needs to be done? What are some of the smaller, quick turn needs, like versioning of banner ads for example, that takes a significant amount of time, but we think that there might be a better way to start to think about that type of tier of content versus some higher level, more value add tiers of content. Thinking through how it gets done is something that is really interesting to me as well, and where you focus the effort, and what the teams look like for that. Does that answer your question?

Daryl Pereira: It does and it leads to about 50 different follow- up questions. Let me try and focus on one. In terms of that idea that, especially with technology, you pick one area like personalization. You may have some content, let's say like you said, let's use the example you used, like a banner ad for instance. Where you've got a product, you've got your offering, you create a banner ad. You think okay, you put that in market, whatever channel. That could be showing up on third party websites, it could be in social media, you're getting that traffic coming back to you. But now, we're getting into this world where, what if you can make that banner ad more engaging for different audience types, so it has to be individual. Then, you end up having to create different versions of that banner ad to serve those different audience types. Obviously, then you need to come in and think about okay, if I'm writing this for group A versus group B, what is the difference there? When you starting getting into groups C, D, E, F, G, H, I, that's where you're saying that's where we start seeing this proliferation in content that's required and content professionals that can understand how to engage each of those different audiences. How is that then, in terms of... This is where maybe we could start getting into, I know I want to talk about AI and that piece of it. It's interesting because it feels like there is, especially given your background, there's a business case for we could in theory, for any given, say, product or an offering, could get down to almost having content that's for every single user because each of us is different as a human. Obviously, there's probably a barrier you're going to hit, at a point at which the cost of producing something for every individual is going to get a point at which then the cost of production is going to make it so that that's going to be incurred by the products, by the business. You're going to get to a point at which you just can't go there. Is that something that you think about, those kinds of calculations, when it comes down to how much content should we produce because each piece of content takes on our own time, in terms of then, some of the newer tools available, how that might start to disrupt that math and how we do that calculation?

Amanda Hurte: Yes. Well, well said. That's exactly it. Looking at what are those higher value tasks, or can you define the playbook, can you define the insights for that set of audiences, A through D, or whatever it is. Then, have the levers that are going to appeal to them. That's your high level strategy that you can put into place and create some examples of, " This is what I mean when I say this is a good piece of content for this audience in this channel." Because you also have to think about channel best practices. It's very time- consuming to think about doing that for maybe all of the different segments that a business might have. That's really where the conversation starts to pick up the keyword of the year, AI. It's really just beginning. I hesitate to say automation, we're not really automating the development of content. But there has been a lot of demand interesting questions from brands that I work with in the marketing and content creation space around AI. Things like, it's very new still, so what is possible? I've seen that this is possible, but I have these issues with it because I'm an enterprise level brand and we have specific security guidelines we need to adhere to. We need to make sure that it sounds like us. We don't want it to just generate any sort of messaging, that then anyone could use. How do we really think about activating AI in a way that adds value, but also doesn't degrade our message and what we're putting out into the marketplace? What I think is so very interesting about thinking through using AI for personalization and all kinds of different iterations in the content space is that, and you kind of alluded to this in your lead up here, but using AI for content demands a lot of the same talent and skills that content folks already have today. Which is why I think it's so exciting, because I start to work on some of these projects and research more, something new comes out every five seconds it seems like these days, but just really thinking about, okay these modules that fuel gen AI really don't understand content and the correlations between them. It's thinking about the things that we do as content professionals day- to- day right now, very similar actions and ways of thinking and methodologies go into thinking how to teach a learning language model what I mean when I say, " Persona A has this insight around a pain point and this is the product that's going to solve that with these benefits around it." Just how you would think about crafting a message naturally, as a content creator, or a writer, or a human today, you're just breaking that down and thinking through those connection points. And using your strategic knowledge and your background in content, but it's in service now to AI and large language models, versus documentation that is going into playbooks or helping teams work on the same page. A lot of it already exists, which is great. Then, some of it needs to be crystallized a bit more, because like I said, it's a machine we're teaching, not programming per se. I think that's why it's exciting to me, because a lot of the skills that, specifically I think about my team when I'm talking to you today, but I think about lot of those being repurposed in service to AI projects instead of traditional projects.

Daryl Pereira: As you're talking, it makes me think, I don't know if this would work as an analogy. I think of when I started my career in the graphic design space, and I will date myself, it was a time where, to work in that space, you had to prove yourself by the degree to which you could pick up a pen and a paper, and you could draw, and you could express yourself visually with a pen and a paper. Very quickly, over time, there was the emergence largely in the professional space of the Adobe suite of products, but whether it's Illustrator, Photoshop, these kind of tools, it became then more important over time that you knew how to best use these tools and make these tools so that you could produce work that would be standout and that could differentiate a brand. Take visual identity, take all those aspects and still be able to produce something on the back of it. Would you say that it feels like what you're saying is somewhat similar? Even though the work of graphic design as it's largely done today is quite different, and a lot of graphic designers don't need to have fine penmanship skills to be able to piece their craft. But at the same time, that craft is still very necessary and you need to have a good visual eye. You need to understand certain things when you're working in that space. Would you say that's similar, as it relates to content and the use of generative AI tools?

Amanda Hurte: Yeah, I think that's a really great comparison, that I hadn't really thought about the design tools changing in the similar way. In content, I guess we've been going strong with some of our same tools for a little while now, so the AI is a big shakeup. When I think about it, humans are good at intuition, gut instinct, emotional IQ, creativity. Then, machines are good at math. So as we get new tools, specifically I'm thinking about AI, it's a great partnership between those two things and that's why I am still a firm believer that both are needed. That human creativity, strategic, gut instinct, and then the probability, or picking up on repetition, or analyzing lots of data really quickly by machines. When we talk about AI, I think the power is in both of those things. There's also two ways that you could think about those tools, like thinking about AI progressing content professionals. One is more of what you were just describing, it's AI for content, so allowing teams to accelerate what they do. Like you were talking about graphic design, and pen and paper, how fast you could get your idea across, and then along comes Photoshop or Illustrator, and now suddenly, you just have to learn a new skill and you can do it a lot faster. Very similar. Now, I can start with an outline versus a blank page. I can get some ideas for persona creation, based on some inputs I already have or insights I already know. You could start the bones of a user journey, just with a couple friction points and talking about the industry that you're in. Then, of course you tweak that from there, then layer in the pertinent information. And you can do research really quickly. I like to take a lot of different documents and ask for key insights or key learnings from those, so I can skim really quickly. Of course, you do have to be a little bit careful that you know where that is coming from, but more of the summarization factor. " Summarize this for me in X amount of bullets," is really nice if you're trying to learn a new industry, if you're trying to learn a new concept. That's how to think about it accelerating us. Then, I think there's also the flip side, where you have content for AI, and that's more about us accelerating AI. That's opening up new ways to apply content skills, content strategy and put content talent in demand, when it comes to servicing AI, teaching AI, course correcting AI. I think that's where, like you mentioned, yes there is a learning curve, these are new tools, these are new things that we need to understand how they work at a base level. But I think it's exciting to learn new things. This is one that I think has infinite opportunities and it's just starting to scratch the surface of what content can do for it.

Daryl Pereira: I love that, the idea of what you said, what AI can do for content, and what content can do for AI, those two sides to it. Let's talk a minute about the tools. For IBM, we do have the watsonx suite, which is our generative AI suite. Is that something that you're implementing? Is that something that you're using on the projects you work with? What's your observations about using tools like that within the enterprise? I know many of us are familiar with these tools, generative AI tools especially, potentially more in the using it for our own personal needs. But when it comes to the enterprise and when it comes to use of generative AI in the enterprise, what's been your perspective and learnings there?

Amanda Hurte: When it comes to watsonx and that suite that we have access to at IBM and for our clients, the biggest thing there is when we're using and experimenting with different models, it is in a safe space in the cloud. When I'm talking about persona creation or I'm talking about journey creation, and helping get past that blank page to help a content professional, we're doing that in a tightly controlled area that is not open. This information is not going back out into the greater public. The brand information is safe, the client information is safe and it is controlled. I think that is one of the biggest things and key learnings, if you're just starting to get into playing around with AI, or you're probably using OpenAI, ChatGPT. Just know that the public versions of those, what you are putting in there is being captured and could be resurfaced at another time by somebody else. I think that's important to think about, from a secure angle. That's why so many of the projects that I'm working on, we do leverage that watsonx capability so we can compare different models and see what's working better in a safe space. Then, we can start to think about what kind of strategic documents, brand documents, depending on what the use case is, what we're trying to create or what we're trying to accelerate, we can test and learn really quickly with what's working and what isn't working. Thinking about prompt engineering, which is something that everyone is talking about and trying. What's the magic bullet for this use case versus that use case, because it can be very different. Having access to that watsonx suite, we even have models that are more IBM owned, where we can explain exactly how they were trained, what went into it, so we have that ethical rationale and explainability that I think is so important when we think about AI because we need to have an element of transparency in what we're doing. Then how that result is given, it's really important to be able to explain how that happened and where that came from.

Daryl Pereira: Like you're saying, that idea of, in the enterprise space, to have that working effectively in a system that is enclosed and dedicated to that particular enterprise is key. That's something you can leverage through tools like watsonx. Let's talk a little bit then on the skills side. I love this statement that you have, that you say that, " AI is happening for us, not to us." I feel like you touched on that, but can you be a little bit more explicit? How does that come to life for you and what do you really mean there?

Amanda Hurte: The AI for us and content for AI touched a bit on that. But in the beginning of ChatGPT democratizing this idea of how every day, regular people can start to use gen AI. Of course, there's always fear around change, and especially in fields like content creation, when hello, this ChatGPT machine is creating words. My job is also creating words. Trying to rationalize this, I think gut reaction and gut instinct is, is this a replacement? Is this tool an actual replacement for people? Through my hands- on experience and the research, like I said, computers are good at math, machines are good at math. Gen AI is really good at predicting, but it's predicting patterns, it's predicting... My phrasing is different than your phrasing, so if we talk to it enough it can probably pick up the patterns in our words, in our voices, in the way that we use language. But that takes a lot of data and something that doesn't happen overnight, when we talk back to the tailoring of messages for different brand audiences and different personas. I think that skill wise, it's something to not be afraid of, but to harness because I do believe it's happening for us, not to us. That's what I mean by that statement. Take it, and mold it, and understand the limitations because there are limitations that a human needs to come in and help finesse. I think there's a certain amount of art and science that comes together, skill wise, when we think about this emerging field. One really interesting example is, right now, I'm working hand- in- hand with data scientists. As a content creator, I've never worked with a data scientist before. They've always been this very smart, intelligent group that sits over here, and does magical things with data from our clients, but I have not ever had work sessions with data scientists. Now, we're sitting together and they are saying, " Okay, well I don't understand this marketing use case, or these artifacts, or these strategic frameworks, so I don't know how to judge what's coming out of the model. Is that good or bad, content wise?" Then, you have people like us on the other side of the table. We speak different languages, but we're trying to break that down and communicate in the most purest form, so that we understand this is typically how we do this job, then you're inputting a set of data into the model and getting this result out. Here's why that's good or that's bad. It's almost like you're adding an additional side to your brain in trying to figure out not only how to articulate what you do for a profession every day, and how you create this documentation, or how you just instinctively know that that's good, and now you have to really peel the onion back and go to the purest form of, " Why is that good," because I have to explain why it's good. It's a little bit of a mind bend, but I think that's a skill that we're going to have to learn, to articulate and document the way that we do make these connections that are creative, or that intuitive. Sometimes, that's the answer. Sometimes it's just, " Well, it's just the way that I put things together in my brain, it's the creativity," and you can edit the output from a gen AI tool. But then, other times you could really help optimize what comes out based on the way that you're articulating how a human really thinks about creating content. It's adding more science than I've ever added before to my repertoire, as far as thinking about unstructured data and how I inherently can make correlations, but now I need to explain that.

Daryl Pereira: That's fascinating, because I know even what you're saying there, we see it in business where the creatives are kept at one level, the data scientists at the other. They could argue maybe the same thing shows up even at school level and into colleges, where the folks that are doing the creative stuff, quite often they may seem magical to the data scientists and the computer scientists, who may seem magical to these other types. I think it's fascinating what you're saying though, where a big opportunity that's emerging is for us to break down some of these walls, and to bring together groups that traditionally didn't necessarily spend a lot of time together. As that happens, it feels like that can only lead to good things, obviously in terms of outcomes for what you can achieve, but also in terms of bringing people together. Which you don't think that something like generative AI having this ability to, in a way, forcing groups that may not have always had the strongest connection to come together now.

Amanda Hurte: Totally. It was an eyeopener for me. I didn't think that... I just hadn't gone down that path of what teams are going to need to work together now in this new world. Even going as far as some recent research I was doing, there's now groups or roles called content science, or content scientists. That's already starting to morph into another type of skillset and using left brain, right brain. That's really interesting also, and something that I think is going to be more valuable as we start to think about gen AI for brands and content.

Daryl Pereira: How fascinating. Unfortunate we're going to have to start wrapping this up. But in terms of, if there's one piece of advice you would have, especially for content professionals, it could also be for business folks, but in terms of are there things like, " Oh man, I wish I'd known that earlier," or are there certain things that you feel that could have been very valuable? Is there any advice that you would give for people that might have an interest but haven't yet started in this space?

Amanda Hurte: Identify what you're good at and identify what you have passion for, when it comes to content. Like I mentioned, there's a lot of technical things you could do. Do you like to work in spreadsheets? Do you like to think about patterns and cracking different codes of content, and setting up templates for content? Or are you a little more on the creative and strategic side, and you want to think about setting a north star, or a vision, or coming up with ideas or headlines? Start in one of those areas. Then, I think for me, the other thing that I wish I would have known earlier is I felt like since I did graduate from a business school, that I was going down a path that was away from creativity. Inherently, I didn't have the degree that I saw other colleagues have, I didn't have a portfolio to go get my first copywriting job, I had to work at that. I felt like it was a limitation for a while. I thought, " Oh, I've made a mistake. I should have gone into a creative major if that's what I want to do." But as I've progressed, I found out the opposite is true. Actually, I feel like I have a really solid foundation in solutioning, problem solving, understanding what the real business issue is, and then you can solve it creatively. It's okay that you're not officially trained as a designer, or as a writer, or what have you in the creative field. I think those barriers are starting to come down a little bit more and I think there's a lot of opportunity for business students to move in a lot of different creative fields that maybe felt a little bit more niche, once upon a time. Identify what your passion is, what you're good at, if it is something in the content realm. Then, just talk to a lot of different people, too. Talk to different people in different types of careers and understand what it is that they do day- to- day, because that will be the thing that helps you the quickest, understand maybe where you want to start and where you want to move to.

Daryl Pereira: Well, what a great message, what a great piece of advice. All right, thank you. This has been Amanda Hurte, who's IX content guru within the IBM consulting business. I appreciate it, thank you so much for spending the time with us today, for sharing your great insights as you work in this rapidly emerging coalface and you're already charting new territory. Even to things like the content scientists, et cetera, fascinating to hear about new roles emerging. Appreciate you taking the time, thank you so much for joining us today. This has been the Business School Podcast. My name is Daryl Pereira. Tune in, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We cover emerging topics in business. We look forward to catching up on the next episode. Thank you.