A very warm welcome to you, Curt.
Could you please walk us through your professional journey so far that has shaped your career as a leader in the industry?
You’re being kind. A journey and a leader are big words, but sure. I can sort of tell you where I’ve come from. I I’ve been in involved in the SaaS world for. A little over 20 years, and I love building things.
I love I love building all types of things, whether it be technology, digital technology, or even things in the physical world. But I think that love or journey started, in in college. I had a professor, a guy named John Stilgo, who studied the built environment and really encouraged us to think about how we build, how what we create impacts others, and I sort of took that into the digital realm and I have been fascinated.
So, if you go back 20 years, I was involved in, some payroll applications for, banking entities, and they were designed for small business. And I was brought into kind of think about, voice of customer and customer journeys and really be the customer for the dev teams.
And we didn’t have terminology like user experience or many of the things. I we didn’t even call it SaaS then. We call it an application service provider, an ASP. So, it really sort of started there, and I got hooked. I loved it.
And, and that’s taken me to big publicly traded companies that have been focused on consumer applications and, additional kind of, commercial online banking. And then I’ve run teams and innovation pods around the world, and I’ve been very fortunate. I’ve always had different roles, so I sort of have gotten a bunch of different opportunities to see businesses and technology in some new ways, and here we are today. So that’s the journey if that helps.
Host: Your career sounds and seems so diverse and so adventurous.
Curt: It’s definitely diverse. It’s definitely different, and, and that’s made it exciting.
Host: So now segueing our focus to AI, it’s such a hot topic right now. It’s fascinating to see how it’s changing the game in so many areas. How do you think AI has transformed operations across industries, and how AI has impacted content creation practices in today’s world?
Curt: Yeah. If I had to distil it down. AI is a tool that just makes things easier, faster, and can provide insights very quickly. Think of maybe our first interaction with ChatGPT.
Chat GPT summarize this email I have or summarize this presentation or help me create a presentation. So, it’s all about making things faster, summarizing, and providing insights. But we, as humans, are providing those prompts to, to the LLM or the large language model, which is the AI. And so, it’s changing the way we do things and making it more efficient. And when it when you talk about content, as you were asking, there are some studies they’re saying now with, AI, we will see over the next 2 years almost a 20 x increase in the amount of content created.And that’s merely because it allows us to do things much faster and much more easily. So, yeah, it there’s this tidal wave of content that’s arriving because of the massive productivity gains that are being seen through AI. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely making us, making things faster and easier.
Host: Absolutely. I just agree with you. Like, AI is here not to replace us, but to work with us, collaborate with us Yeah. And just enhance all the efforts we’re all trying to put in. Adding on to that, Acrolinx has recently announced new AI abilities aimed at transforming content creation to be more valuable and compliant. How does AI help achieve this goal, and what is the overall role of AI in Acrolinx’s success?
Curt: That that’s a great question. Well, first, if people don’t know what Acrolinx is, we, we help, provide guidance and alignment for content. And that could be everything from tech docs to marketing or to other types of content that companies are creating. And our value prop is really around the ROI. If we if someone is doing and we do an analysis typically that would say, if someone’s doing, a oh, gosh.
A couple of 1,000,000,000 words per year creating, content, they will oftentimes probably have 15 million infractions against a style guide. And a style guide typically is kind of the guidance documents for a company when they’re creating content. So Acrolinx is really making sure that people the tone, the quality, we score, the, kind of the diversity, all of the elements or even the regulatory compliance of what people are saying in their content is correct or is aligned to what the company wants. And AI helps us and helps a company leverage that ROI, but faster. So, we have we have 2 things called get suggestions and AI assistant.
That’s a new they’re new parts of our product and our platform. So if you are writing something, and for your company and you create, maybe a technical document a piece of technical documentation and you want suggestions, hit get suggestions, and our, our AI will leverage to produce a response that will help you, if you’ve got writer’s block or if you want additional insights to help you create content better and faster. But we still always ground it and align it back to the company’s style guide. So, it’s sort of Acrolinx making AI better and AI making Acrolinx better. So, there’s a symbiotic relationship between the two.
Host: An amazing collaboration, if I must say.
As we all know, leading a top-notch team is not an easy task. What tactics do you integrate to establish and manage your high performing product team at Acrolinx? Please spill your secrets…
Curt: It’s funny. We live in a world that is everyone’s remote. Right? You’re remote.
I’m remote. We’re talking via the video here, and I’ve probably oh, gosh. About 10 years ago, I started to work with teams in China and, in the Netherlands and India and all across the United States. And I found that communication when you’re dealing with a remote team is really kind of what makes you effective. If you have bad communication, you’re gonna have a bad, kind of team throughput or output.
So, we certainly use a lot of tools, and we have a very diverse team. A lot of my team is in Germany, and we use, certainly, kind of all of the above. We use Google. We use Slack. We use, Zoom.
We use, a whole bunch of other tools. But one of the things that I found, and this is gonna sound funny, but I, we use Slack a lot for kind of quick messaging. And I instead of just typing things, I will send videos less than 2 minutes long, sometimes 60 seconds. So, when you’re and so when I’m sending a message out to the team or responding to someone, they might send me a written question and I’ll respond with a video. Because I want them to see my face.
I want them to see my expressions. I want them to hear my tone of voice. And when you’re working with high performance teams, and the teams I work with are brilliant, far more brilliant than I will ever be. But these ling linguists and scientists, they need to know my emotion. How am I feeling when I’m talking to them?
They need to see my eyes. So, I do a lot of that, and it was silly at first. They were like, oh, Curt can’t talk unless he sends a video. But now sort of the whole company is doing it, and that has helped bring us together. And the other offshoot of that is when you I found when you’re dealing with teams around the world, you’ve got to be simple in your communication.
I’ve worked as probably you have as well with a bunch of leaders that that maybe have very complex messages. And oftentimes, super smart people love to have complex messages, because complex seems smarter. And I and I’m not disparaging that, but what happens when you have complex messages that you’re distributing globally to teams, sometimes you can confuse people.
So, ultimately, I try the people that I work with are very smart. I don’t need to micromanage them, so I give them a lot of latitude. Try to communicate via video. I try to simplify kind of goals and messages and then set them free. If we hired someone to be, one of our chief scientists or top scientists, linguists, developers, product leaders, we have to trust them with their role.
So, I give them a lot of latitude, communicate often, but also just sort of set them free to as long as they know my overarching goals for what we’re trying to accomplish, I’m gonna let them do it. They should solve it, but I have to be clear in my message. So, hopefully, that gives you a little insight into kind of how I’ve approached, the global teams.
Host: I absolutely think the strategy that you mentioned right now, it’s spot on.
I’m going to let my team know that we should also start using it. Instead of just sending a message, record yourself and send the video message. Yes! Exactly.
So, AI and machine learning’s growing integration across industries sparks fears of job loss and higher unemployment.
This is a big concern for many people. How do you see the balance between innovation and job security playing out, and what’s your stance on this issue?
Curt: Yeah. I mean, I think there are a lot of people that, think, technology is all good, and then other people think of technology as a harbinger of evil. And, and I tend to think of technology as a neutral force, but I’m excited about it.
I love new ways of solving things. So, I’m not scared about AI. I have kind of multiple models in my head, but I think of think of when candles gave way to electricity. Think of when copiers were a thing, and they are no more.
Host: Exactly. It’s just evolution.
Curt: Landlines to telephones or telephones to cell phones.
Did people’s jobs who were involved in those things change? Absolutely. They have to! But did would I rather have my cell phone to stay in touch with my kids than my landline? Absolutely.
So, I think we can make it a force for good, and we can use it in good ways. And as far as kind of displacement of workers, things will change, and that’s just a part of life. So, we shouldn’t be afraid of that.
Host: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more.
Let’s talk about how quality content is everything in today’s digital era. Why is it important of, value added content for companies, and, like, what are the key indicators of quality content in your view?
Curt: Yeah. I mean, content is a big topic. It could be written.
It could be technical. It could be the podcast like we’re doing or video cast. It could be something else. And I think the way you think of value add or good content is alignment with a purpose. What does the company want to do?
What do we wanna do here? We wanna talk about technology. So, hopefully, our questions and our conversation is aligned to that purpose. And as I said earlier, most companies or all companies typically have a style guide, And that’s just a guidance document. Say, as you know, it could be, like, 12 pages, it could be 400 pages long. But it talks about tone, brand, inclusion, maybe technical terminology that needs to be used. Maybe you’re in financial or medical field, and you have to use certain regulatory guidelines when you talk about certain things. So, quality content is really aligning to whatever that purpose is, and it’s content that that either has no purpose or rambles or doesn’t achieve the goal, that is, I would say, low quality content. And then also people are starting to think about content as data, which I think is fascinating.
How does it perform? Think of when we put something on the web, on a website, what is the search engine optimization? What are the keywords? Is it impactful when people are searching in a help desk or and providing prompts?
Do they get the right response back? All of that is really about, value add and content performance. So, if you align, direct, and guide your content against a North Star, like a style guide or, like a some other tool that helps provide those guardrails, you achieve far better content. So, I we’re seeing far more of that. Certainly, we love to do that at Acrolinx, but we’re seeing far more of that, throughout all content.
Host: Alright. I’m just going to add something to that. A quality content is also when there is a human touch to it.
Curt: Like Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.
So, when you think about how humans create content, versus AI, we may go through a process of revisioning content. You gotta keep working on it.
That will create better. You may start with AI, and then the human gets involved. But ultimately, I will say, the human, we can get distracted. I could look at my cell phone, or I could be doing something else as I’m writing. How do we bring ourselves back to that guidance or the North Star?
A lot of content is being scored now by writers. So, an author, maybe you and I are creating content, and we have ways now to how did we align against our goal? And we scored a 79 or an 82 or a 93. And we now, as content creators, can judge our value that we brought to that content appropriately. So, I think there are a whole bunch of new tools that can help humans, kind of provide that additional value to content that either they made, or they made in conjunction with some AI tools.
Host: Every company faces its unique set of challenges. What challenges does Acrolinx usually encounter, and what strategies do you employ to tackle these difficulties?
Curt: Oh, goodness. Well, I mean, if we’re talking about AI and the challenges with AI, I think a lot of people think AI is infallible. And I think that’s a big challenge for us to say, it’s a great tool to use.
I’m all for it, but it is fallible. AI or LLMs can hallucinate, meaning they can give incorrect answers or answers that you did not expect. So, I think that’s a challenge in the marketplace to say, you know what? AI is great, wonderful productivity enhancer, but you need to also, approach it carefully, and make sure that you’re providing, the value adds around it. So that that’s a challenge, I think, in the marketplace.
The other challenge, I think, is AI whitewashing. Everything is AI enhanced today. And I call it AI air freshener. It’s like, you spray the air freshener in the room and, oh, it smells good. It smells new using AI.
And that’s unfortunate. But I but I think those are big challenges in the marketplace right now. I and I’ve worked a lot with private equity firms and venture cap firms in the past, and they’ll give more and more money as long as you can find a way to introduce AI into your product. And I think we’ll get over that hype cycle, but that’s been, I think, a real challenge, not only for us, but for the whole industry . When you’re when you’re dealing with AI.
So, hopefully, that answers your question.
Host: Yeah. You’ve made really amazing points right there. What exciting new features and developments can we expect from Acrolinx? It sounds like there’s a lot to look forward.
Curt: Let me think. I I’d say that the biggest thing when you think about our road map and where we’re going, is really aligned around what I call and others I think Adobe and IBM and others have talked about something called the content supply chain. And that’s kind of a new term out there. I I love it because it talks about content in a manufacturing sense.
So, think about car manufacturers or heavy equipment manufacturers. They’ve got their parts. They have to order them from suppliers, and they come in, and then they build sub-assemblies, and maybe they inventory some parts, and then they put them out and finish their product if they’re building a car or something else. And then they gotta inventory those, see how they’re performing.
Is this car selling versus that car? So that whole concept of a supply chain, maybe Henry Ford or Elon Musk, although I know he’s controversial too. But, or Jeff Bezos with Amazon or something like that. Amazing logistics. There’s this mindset now because AI is creating so much more content volume.
How do you create a supply chain? So, we are when I think about what we’re doing, and our road map is really aligned around that. How do I make sure that Acrolinx fits inside that enterprise with open APIs with and demystifying some of the really technical and geeky things around LLMs and terminology. But, ultimately, we also want to kind of do things up the stack too. I want to fact-check content to make sure it’s appropriate.
So, you see us thinking about things like that, and knowledge graphs are a wonderful extension, that that we’re really excited about how we bring that into our product and other ways to really enhance how people think, manage, measure, and create content going forward. So, it’s fun. There’s never, there’s never enough time to do all that we want to do, but you’ll see us performing a lot of new, activities within that space and then also scaling for a massive world. I wanna be able to say throw 50, a 100 million words against our platform and create better content with that. That’s kind of where, we’re really trying to go.
So massive scale, new ways of looking, validating content and improving it, and helping us sit more within that content supply chain is really the goal of the team over the next year.
Host: Sounds really exciting. So, I think it’s safe to say that Acrolinx is bridging the gap between AI and supply chain management.
Curt: I like it. New tagline.
We could do chain management for content. Absolutely! It’s making the process better and adding the value that we’ve talked about and, and really demystifying the science of what comes out of these, these LLMs and applying kind of great guidance. And we call it AI guardrails too.
Just putting guardrails around that, that supply chain.
Host: Thank you so much, Curt. Thank you for sharing your incredible journey insights with us today. We’re excited to see how Acrolinx continues to innovate and lead the industry. Thanks again.
Thank you so much for being part of our very first episode of our podcast.
Curt: I feel honoured. Cheers. Thank you so much. Thank you.
Host: Thank you, Curt. Thank you all for joining us today. I am your host, Sayali, signing off. See you soon in the next episode of Extra Mile by Your Tech Diet with the next extraordinary leader on board sharing their thoughts. So, stay tuned!
Thank you.
