February 17, 2025 • 54 mins
Unlock the secrets of harnessing the power of storytelling in business with our guest, James Warren, the visionary CEO of Share More Stories. From a thriving corporate career at Altria Group to leading an innovative startup, James shares his passion for storytelling and how it transformed his entrepreneurial journey. Discover how his AI-driven platform, SEEQ, is revolutionizing the way businesses engage with audiences by leveraging the emotional depth of personal stories.
Explore how Share More Stories is pioneering the future of business storytelling by embracing human-centric approaches. James discusses the importance of visualizing emotions to gain deeper insights into customer and employee experiences, and how these insights can drive impactful change. Learn about the company's commitment to preserving human essence in research through long-form narratives and their exciting plans to evolve into a platform provider, offering more autonomous and meaningful engagement with their innovative storytelling tools.
Want to join a community of AI learners and enthusiasts? AI Ready RVA is leading the conversation and is rapidly rising as a hub for AI in the Richmond Region. Become a member and support our AI literacy initiatives.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome RVA to Inspire AI, where we spotlight
companies and individuals in theregion who are pioneering the
development and use ofartificial intelligence.
I'm Jason McGinty from AI ReadyRVA.
At AI Ready RVA, our mission isto cultivate AI literacy in the
greater Richmond region throughawareness, community engagement
(00:24):
, education and advocacy.
Today's episode is madepossible by Modern Ancients
driving innovation with purpose.
Modern Ancients uses AI andstrategic insight to help
businesses create lasting,positive change with their
unique journey consultingpractice.
(00:44):
Find out more about how yourbusiness can grow at
modernagentscom, and thanks toour listeners for tuning in
today.
If you or your company wouldlike to be featured in the
Inspire AI Richmond episode,please drop us a message.
Don't forget to like, share orfollow our content and stay up
(01:07):
to date on the latest events forAI Ready RVA.
Welcome back to another episodeof Inspire AI, where we dive
deep into the intersection oftechnology, leadership and
innovation.
I'm very excited to introduceour incredible guest, whose work
is reshaping the way businessesand communities connect and
(01:30):
learn through the power ofstorytelling.
Joining me is James Warren, thefounder and CEO of Share More
Stories, a human experienceresearch company.
They've built the SEEQ that'sS-E-E-Q platform, an innovative
AI-driven storytelling-poweredtool that helps brands and
(01:53):
organizations understand andengage their audiences on a
deeper level.
James is a visionary leader whobelieves that storytelling
isn't just about words.
It's about unlocking emotions,perspectives and untapped
potential to drive meaningfulchange.
With a background in strategy,marketing and consumer insights,
(02:15):
james is passionate abouthelping brands translate stories
into actionable intelligence,whether it's improving customer
loyalty, amplifying diversevoices, fostering empathy or
shaping brand narratives.
Share More Stories is at theforefront of using AI and
storytelling to make employeeexperience and customer
(02:37):
experience more impactful.
Today, we're going to exploreJames' journey as an
entrepreneur, the role of AI inresearch and storytelling, and
how businesses can harness thepower of narrative to build
stronger connections.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
James, welcome to Inspire AI connect here and talk
a little bit about the work wedo and how that fits, frankly,
into the larger ecosystem of thework you all are doing and what
you particularly are leadinghere with Inspire AI.
So really grateful for thechance to be here and share our
(03:15):
story a bit.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Outstanding.
So can you tell us a little bitabout yourself and your
business and your interest in AIplease?
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Sure.
Well, let's see, I've been inthe Richmond region for about 20
years, originally New York.
The New York area is home.
I've actually lived in lots ofplaces, but that's home because
that's where our family is fromand that's where I really grew
(03:45):
up.
And in terms of me, you know,I've got a family, I'm married,
I've got four kids and we'vecome to see Richmond as home
today.
You know, all of my kids havegrown up here on some level or
another, and there's so muchabout Richmond that I love.
I love the innovation, I lovethe culture, I love the way
people are really connectingaround meaningful issues and
(04:09):
challenges.
But what I've always lovedabout Richmond and what drew me
to Richmond was this sense ofpotential that Richmond had
potential, was aware of itspotential and wanted to do
something about it.
And I don't just mean the city,I mean the whole region, and I
think that's true inentrepreneurship and innovation
and in technology.
And so I started our companyShare More Stories here in
(04:32):
Richmond just over 10 years ago,and I started it after my
corporate career.
It was time to sort of make atransition from that work and I
really knew two things almostall along that I wanted to be an
entrepreneur and I wanted to dosomething in writing and
storytelling because those weretwo of my earliest passions and
(04:54):
loves writing andentrepreneurship.
I'm sure we'll talk about bothof those a little bit more as we
go.
And so Share More Stories cameabout 10 years ago plus, really
in a desire to say how can wecreate a place and a space for
people to connect more deeplythrough our individual stories.
I believe that stories are a keypart of the nucleus of our
(05:15):
human experience and that whenwe share those stories with one
another, we activate things inone another, we activate empathy
, we activate connection, welearn more about one another and
we built a business out of that, because we think that, at the
end of the day, businesses arejust groups of people trying to
meet other groups of people'sneeds, and so we want to be a
(05:36):
place where employees, customers, community stakeholders are
able to share their stories withcompanies and company leaders
who want to listen to thosestories and who want to learn
from those experiences andultimately want to create better
product services, organizations, cultures.
As a result, we came aboutinterest being interested in
(05:58):
that.
There's a funny story about itwhich I'm sure we'll get into,
but ai really became the, thetechnology platform and the tool
set for us to do what we do ina more scalable and quantifiable
way, for us to really say we'vecollected these stories,
whether it's 10, a hundred or athousand, and we really want to
(06:19):
understand in those stories,what are they telling us about
the way people feel about theirexperiences?
In those stories, what are theytelling us about the way people
feel about their experiences?
And so we're using AI toquantify emotion to understand
these experiences deeply,individually and authentically,
and also at scale.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Wow, that's beautiful .
I definitely connected withyour relationship to Richmond.
I've lived here most of my lifeas well and I feel a lot of
that connection deeply rooted inthe community, and it's super
important to me to seeentrepreneurs building
relationships with the communityso that we can all thrive and
(07:02):
let each other's experiences.
So, yeah, I really connectedwith that.
That's awesome and you startedtouching on this a little bit,
but can you tell us a little bitabout the origin story of share
more stories and what's thewhat inspired you to create the
platform centered aroundstorytelling?
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah.
So back in 2014, when I wasexploring different potential
businesses that I wanted tocreate, like I said, I kind of
knew at a macro level I wantedto do something.
I would say three things.
I want to do something in tech.
I knew I wanted to do somethingfor myself, build my own
company or business and I wantedto do something related to, at
(07:43):
the time, even more specifically, writing.
I considered myself a frustratedwriter for most of my life.
More broadly, I definitelyconsider myself a lover of
stories my own and otherpeople's and so you know, the
very, very first version wasactually a place where we could
help aspiring writers connectwith one another and even write
(08:04):
collaboratively.
There's a deep tradition inwhen you're studying creative
writing, of writing circles noteven just things like fiction or
poetry, but any kind of writingwhere you want to perfect your
craft.
It means a lot of trust.
But if you create places andspaces where writers can share,
critique, sometimes evenco-write and collaborate, it
(08:26):
unlocks a few things that don'tcome when you're just staring at
the pen and pad yourself orstaring at the blank screen.
So I originally was likeexploring, like collaborative
writing, collaborativestorytelling spaces and there's
other examples of that, whetherit's the storytelling circle or
the choose your own adventuremodel, and all of those things
(08:48):
were really interesting to menot terribly interesting at the
time to lots and lots of people,and so I kept saying but
there's something about thestory and the storytelling or
more, like we say, story sharingthat was attractive to myself
and other people that we weretalking to, and what we started
to hear was this seems likesomething that could be really
(09:09):
really useful, especially now.
Now, ironically, in 2014, wewere hearing people saying
things like social media feelsreally really broken and dark,
so I want a place where I canconnect and share, maybe in a
little bit more authentic way,and so we initially started
creating a place for people toliterally just share their
stories, to express themselvesSome light guardrails, if you
(09:32):
will.
We wanted to focus on personalstories, where people could
express what was going on intheir lives or on a particular
issue or topic, and we quicklylearned that content development
, content creation, contentasking people to share their
stories needs focus, it needsstructure, and so that allowed
us to start developing tools andexperiences, both online and
(09:56):
offline, that gave people areason to share their story, or
something to respond to which wecall the prompt and all of
those things for the firstcouple of years were sort of the
precursor.
We were still exploring what'sthe business model, because we
did want it to be a business.
We wanted to help companies,help people, and we wanted to do
(10:16):
that in an entrepreneurial way.
And so I was at a conference upin New York called the Future
of Storytelling Summit.
This is a, at the time, awell-known festival of people in
tech, communications arts,media entertainment, coming
(10:37):
around this question of what isstorytelling and what is the
future, and at that time therewas a lot of time and energy
being spent on immersivestorytelling.
Ar and VR were really startingto grow, and so there was a lot
of heavy, heavy focus on tech asa future of storytelling, which
is understandable.
I was facilitating a workshop orco-hosting a workshop, and in
that workshop there was a personwho was a director of consumer
(11:05):
insights at a really largeconsumer goods company and they
were expressing like I thinkthis is interesting, but I'm
really looking for other usecases of storytelling.
I'm trying to figure out how wecan use storytelling as better
research, to better understandwhere people are coming from.
So we're experimenting withthis but frankly, I haven't
found a lot of people doing alot in it.
(11:26):
And that was one of thosemoments that you have as an
entrepreneur or a creator oranybody trying to do something,
where your inner voice says openyour mouth.
So I said we're doing somethinglike that and she turned around
and said, well, like, like whoare you and what are you talking
about?
I said share more stories.
(11:47):
We're exploring the rolestories play in developing
insight kind of came out and shewas like really, I think that's
fascinating, I'd love to talkmore about it.
So after the conference, shegave us, um, her card, I gave
her my card and within weeks shewas coming to Richmond to demo
our storytelling insightsplatform, which we hadn't fully
(12:11):
built yet.
We had a website, we werecollecting stories, we were very
qualitatively and in a humanway assessing these stories, but
we weren't yet figuring out howto do that with tech.
So I asked my development team.
I said can you help me find atool, any kind of tool, that can
analyze stories and createinsight?
(12:33):
And they said that'sinteresting.
I'm not sure.
They said I assume you'retalking about more than just
like basic keyword sentimentanalysis.
I said yeah, something thatwould like rock for a fortune
100 consumer goods company andthey're like okay.
so we found a company that had alittle tool.
Um, they were using earlierstage ai, early language models
(12:57):
to identify not just sentimentbut key emotions, values and
needs.
And they were a company thatgot bought by IBM and they got
rolled into IBM's Watson suiteof tools and we found it.
And so we started playing inWatson early and using the text
of people's stories to analyzetheir experiences, to analyze
(13:20):
what they were writing about,and that began the process of
building out the Seek platform.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Wow, I hear a lot of motivations in there, but the
story is really fascinating andinteresting how you've blended,
you know, like a fundamentalhuman approach that prioritizes
depth over noise and personaltruth.
Right, absolutely, absolutely,and not misunderstanding, and
(13:50):
authenticity over transparency,right.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I was just going to say.
I think the you know when yousay prioritizing the human and
the authenticity, that's exactlyright, because you know our
ethos is human plus digital.
And we start with human for areason.
We're a technology company, butwe are deeply, deeply, it's
ingrained in our origin and youknow, from my perspective, it
will be part of who we are foras long as we are.
(14:14):
Which is to say, these tools,these technologies, we're not.
We don't see them as somethingto be afraid of.
We see them as something to beleveraged and utilized to make
the human experience better.
And in this case, we'reliterally using it to understand
the human experience so we canmake it better, so companies can
make it better.
And so, for me, prioritizingthe human in there there's no
(14:38):
other way to do it Prioritizingtheir story and their experience
is crucial to what we deliverfor our customers and clients.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Yeah, we need that.
Through the AI-relatedtransformations that our world
is going through, we need tokeep that connection.
So thank you for recognizingthat.
So how has your backgroundinfluenced your approach to
innovation?
Were there pivotal moments thatshaped your entrepreneurial
journey?
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, probably a couple.
I mean just briefly.
The first was, you know, Istarted my first business when I
was 14.
And actually, now that I thinkabout it, I started my.
I really started my firstbusiness when I was 12.
And my neighbor and I wanted tomake money in our neighborhood.
So we, we were two kids whostarted a cleaning business and
(15:28):
we called it super kid powerbecause we had read a book
called kid power, and our firstcustomer didn't pay us a lot but
it was fun.
And then our second customer,um, they had four young kids,
probably all under the age offive, maybe six, and they said
we'd like to hire you to kind ofhelp clean the house today.
And we were like, okay, sure,Sounds great.
(15:50):
Me and my friend Norman, and wespent, you know, the first half
of the day cleaning that houseand we went home to lunch.
We came back the second half ofthe day to keep cleaning the
house and we weren't done at theend of the day.
And we told them you don't haveto pay us because we can't come
back tomorrow.
And they were like, well, here,take some for what you did.
(16:16):
And we were like, because wereally didn't, we could not come
back.
It was a lot.
So I think the entrepreneurialbug was quieted for a little
while.
But in 14, I started a businessselling audio video equipment in
New York to, like businesses,churches.
I loved doing AV work, I lovedthe equipment, I loved all of
that and I loved a little bit ofthe hustle of, you know,
figuring out how to makesomething that people would want
(16:39):
and buy or sell something thatpeople would want to buy.
So that kind of planted theseed a little bit more firmly
early on, Used some of thatmoney to help my family, used
some of that money to helpmyself pay for a part of college
and I was grateful for thatopportunity.
And then, you know, lifestarted to kind of settle down.
(16:59):
I started a career.
I was working at Altria Groupfor years, working in a lot of
their new businesses and newproduct areas, and I really
enjoyed doing that because,again, I loved building and I
loved creating.
But I realized after a whilethat what I did at Altria both
running big brands and hugeportfolios was at the same time
(17:21):
very similar and also extremelydifferent, you know, compared to
starting a company and buildinga product from scratch.
And so the last 10 years havebeen sort of picking and
choosing different pieces ofthose insights and experiences
to try to be a better leader, bea better teammate, help our
company deliver better productsand services.
(17:42):
And you know, I think sometimesI do a really good job of it
and other times I'm strugglingmightily.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Of course, we all struggle from time to time.
So an entrepreneur at age 12,maybe carried over to 14 and
beyond what were some of themindset shifts you had to make
when you went from corporatelife to startup life?
Speaker 2 (18:09):
I remember one of the first times I was like,
presenting the I, the earlyideas, kind of the concepts for
share more stories, the peopleare presenting it to you like
you sound very corporate and Iwas like, okay, and they were,
and their hidden message waslike you've got to be less
corporate in this space and Iwas like I don't know what that
(18:29):
means or how to do that.
I mean, I've spent almost 20years in corporate and in that
space I felt like I was veryentrepreneurially innovative and
almost didn't fit entirely intothat model.
And so language and style andthere's a confidence and
assumptiveness that comes whenyou're presenting things in a
(18:51):
corporate context and you kindof already not that you know the
answer, but it's like theoutcomes are fairly known and
somewhat determined.
It's like we're either going todo A or B, it's, it's not.
Hey, there's a million choicesand you might, you, you have
this much of a chance of hearinga yes, it's okay, a or b, maybe
(19:12):
c.
And in an entrepreneurship andstarting a company where you're
exploratory for a while,everything is uncertain,
everything is is almost like ano until it's a yes.
And so I had to learn how toflip that script and see the
journey and the vision as thedriver of my own optimism, of
our team's optimism, and not seeno's as no's, see no's as data,
(19:35):
as insight, so that I couldlearn quickly what was working
and what was not working is notworking, and I'm not saying we
don't do that and people don'tdo that in a corporate.
I think over the last decade, 20years, people have pulled more
and more experiences,innovation-based experiences,
from the entrepreneurial worldinto the corporate sector, but
(20:00):
you're still dealing with a verydominant culture and mindset.
That is generally.
How do we deliver these results?
Incrementally better, quarterover quarter, year over year.
And you want a certain amountof predictability, because the
more predictable it is, the moreyou can sort of forecast what
you're going to get.
And there's very little in theearly stages and even in the
middle stages about theentrepreneurial journey or the
(20:23):
startup journey that'spredictable, and so that I had
to really get comfortable withthe lack of predictability
compared to what I was used toWow.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Yeah, that makes total sense.
Ok, so storytelling has been apowerful tool for centuries.
How does Share More Stories,modernize this art using
technology?
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Yeah, I mean, stories are great for two things right
they're great for connecting andthey're great for learning.
And so we see stories asconnectors all around us.
We see that in what brands dowith stories either the brand
story in ads and social and longform content, customers or
(21:09):
employees on social.
And we see the reason why theydo that because it drives
engagement, because we'rehardwired to react to and to
listen to people's stories farmore than we are to.
You know, we hear an opinion,we want to argue it, we hear a
story, we want to lean in andlearn more, and so, you know,
the connection piece is a given,and that's not the space,
necessarily, that we're focusedon.
We're focused on the learningside, and so the practice of
(21:31):
story sharing is a practice ofhelping individuals, groups and
companies learn about peoplefrom their stories, and that
goes back in time to the phrasethe moral of the story.
The moral of the story meansthere's a lesson in the story,
there's something at the end ofthe story that can teach me how
to avoid that danger or how tobe more successful if I do this,
(21:53):
or how to achieve the results Iwant to achieve.
And so I believe, we believethat in every person's story or
stories there are lessons forthemselves, for the people that
they are a part of and for thecompanies and organizations that
are trying to serve them.
And so, if you think abouttraditional research, which is
predominantly qualitative andquantitative, qualitative is
(22:15):
dominated by focus groups, butnow there's a lot more out there
.
There's in-depth interviews,there's ethnography.
That is a space that is nowseeing, and has, for the last 10
, 20 years, a lot of innovation.
That's technology driven years.
A lot of innovation that'stechnology driven.
On the quantitative side, mostof that technology was going
there early because you weredealing with large data sets.
(22:36):
You're trying to figure out howto derive meaning and insight.
What we've learned is theopportunity.
The really rich opportunity isto innovate in that qualitative
side of the space, because it'sstill very open and there's
still a deep need to say we moreor less have our finger on the
pulse of what people think orfeel or experience with our
(22:58):
brain, our product, but we arestill having a hard time
structuring that insight andactivating that knowledge and
data in a way that can aiddecision-making, and so that's
where technology comes in.
For us, it's taking thosestories, really taking those
people's experiences, knowledgeand data in a way that can aid
decision-making, and so that'swhere technology comes in.
For us, it's taking thosestories, really taking those
people's experiences that theytell us or they write, turning
that into actionable data, inour case, quantifying the
(23:20):
emotions of those stories andthen developing insights like
what does this mean, what shouldyou do about this and why, so
that company leaders anddecision makers can do something
with it.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Okay, yeah, I really love the connect and learn piece
that's kind of wrapped up in,and you know that's like my
development mantras how do Ilearn from others?
And I leveraged collaborationto do that right.
There's a ton of reasons whyyou want to connect and learn at
the same time, and the moral ofthe story is you capture your
(23:59):
experiences and you make senseof them in a structured way.
Right, that's fun.
How do you see like this?
I don't see this frameworkevolving as more companies begin
to embrace storytelling as astrategic tool.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah, I think there's a few things I think we already
see in different ways companiesinside the organization and in
the marketplace, the consumer,the employee, the human is
craving more human-centeredexperiences.
We see that there's lots ofindicators of that, what people
are spending their time, moneyand energy on.
And the smart money says, oh,it's not about the tech for
(24:42):
tech's sake, it's about techenabling those human-centered
experiences in less frictionedways, more impactful ways, more
enjoyable ways, more emotionalways.
And so, critical to that, aningredient of that is what is
the emotion.
What do people feel about theseexperiences?
And so I think you know, for usit's starting there, but it can
(25:03):
go lots of places.
It can go from understandingthese experiences to really
helping create what we'restarting to do now frameworks
for how companies might engagetheir employees or customers
based on these emotions, basedon these we call them emotional
bundles, things that sort of.
These five or six emotionsreally go together when you
think about this type ofconsumer or this type of
(25:25):
employee and if you want toincrease this, you've got to
decrease this that's a really,really powerful idea of like,
hey, how do I navigate thisconsumer or these consumers,
what they want out of theseexperiences, now I understand
them, now I got to figure outwhat they want, and I need sort
of the toolkit, I need thedecoder ring, I need the
magnifying glass to say what doI pay most attention to?
(25:47):
And these emotions help us knowthe answer to that.
And so I think you know.
For us that's the journey, butI think, more broadly, it's
finding use cases where AI andother technologies are being
used in an intentionallyhuman-centric way to make the
human experience better.
And I think, if we make thatsort of our mantra, there's
(26:09):
plenty of things we can createthat have an intrinsic positive
benefit for humanity, versus therisks that we are seeing with
technology run amok, where it,at a minimum, might be used by
one human to harm another and ata maximum, you know, might
eventually be the things that weare most afraid of, with good
(26:30):
reason, for I don't think that'sa foregone conclusion, and I
think that humans today, doingwhat you're doing, doing what AI
, ready, rba are doing, doingwhat we're doing, are a big
piece to making sure it turnsout the way that benefits humans
the most.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Amen, james, that's really great, thank you.
What role does AI play in yourplatform?
Can you tell us a little bitmore about that, and how does it
enhance storytelling andprovide meaningful insights?
Speaker 2 (27:09):
like I said, building in IBM Watson's platform and
tool set.
We were part of their globalentrepreneur program early on
and they decided at one pointthey were no longer going to
maintain some of those tools,particularly the personality
insights model that they hadbuilt, that we were running our
analyses through, so we had tobuild our own and our CTO, andy
Citizen, started investigatingwhat are like, broadly, the
(27:30):
platforms we could be buildingin.
And our CTO, andy Citizen,started investigating what are
like, broadly, the platforms wecould be building in and we
settled on at the time, google'sBERT model to really there was
a lot of sort of pre-built,pre-understood relationships
between words and phrases andsyntaxes and we could use that
basic level of understanding,that not even so basic, that
tremendous foundation, to startto really code emotion, to say,
(27:53):
hey, these are the 55 things wewant to measure and we started
designing algorithms to predictthose emotions.
And then we started creatingadditional programs and
analytics that would take thosepredictions, normalize them, if
you will, and create sort of acase that says, hey, this is how
people feel across these 55emotions.
That's a really, really highlevel and simplified way of
(28:15):
talking about some brilliancethat my teammate, andy, has put
together Because we had tofigure out a lot of things that
didn't exist in the way we werebuilding it.
We wanted to do a number ofthings, you know thematic
analysis, syntax analysis,feature reduction, all kinds of
things and we started to realize, hey, the linchpin here is
(28:36):
figuring out how to teach AI tounderstand the language and
understand the emotions in thesedifferent stories.
So that's what we built and whatit does now is it predicts the
emotional drivers of people'sexperiences and we're also able
to analyze those experiences ina thematic way.
So we could say, out of allthese stories, 100, 1,000,
(28:57):
whatever there's three or fourbig buckets of experience.
Thematically, we can alsocreate new ways of looking at
groups of people.
So instead of demographic orbehavioral segmentation, we're
doing emotional segmentation,psychological or psychographic
segmentation, using theseemotions, which is a really
different way of figuring out.
(29:20):
How do I connect?
You're going to behave this way, or even saying, because you
behave this way, you willautomatically behave this way in
the future.
We're trying to figure out whatdo you care about, what
motivates you, and let's usethat as a better basis for
predicting your behavior in thecontext of the brand or the
(29:40):
organization or the company thatyou're interacting with.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
So would I get it right by saying, in summary you
all bridge the human intuitionwith data-driven insights.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
That's a beautiful way of saying it Absolutely,
Because it gives the leader atool to say I think I understand
what people are carrying out,but I can't quantify it yet.
This is the tool that helps youstart to do that.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Yeah, yeah, and it's great that Seek as a platform
was built on years of hands-onfacilitation, because that gives
it a strong foundation for theAI tools that you overlaid into
the platform as you were readyto continue development of it.
So Seek seems to blendqualitative storytelling and
(30:29):
quantitative insights.
Can you break down how it works?
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Yeah, I mean we say, you know, it's kind of the best
of both worlds qual and quant.
And you know, in the early daysone of our customers would say
this is like a focus group onsteroids and we loved that but
didn't love that because weweren't sure that that would
help people understand what wasunique about it, that it was
more than just asking questionsand getting answers.
(30:54):
And so you know, now when wetalk about the qual and the
quant sort of that blend, wemean it both in terms of the
experience and the output.
From a qual perspectivepersonal stories, you know,
people being able to express intheir own words what their
experience has been.
It's rich, it's contextualizedby themselves and it's
(31:15):
engagement-driven.
The act of telling your storyis an act of engagement.
And so when we invite people toshare their stories with our
customers, with the brands thatthey buy or the organizations
they work for, they're actuallyengaging with them.
In doing that, even if it's acompany like ABC, they don't
know who it is they're puttingthemselves in a place of
vulnerability.
To say this is how I feel aboutthis experience and that
(31:38):
activates something that'sreally important for our
customers, which is, we tellthem all the time Seek is less
about you wanting to hear whatyou want to know, what you want
to know about, and it's moreabout hearing what these people
are trying to tell you, becausethey have stories and
experiences that they don't getto tell you.
They get to answer yourquestions in surveys and in
(32:00):
focus groups.
That's not really their story,that's just the answer to the
question you want to know.
So this goes much deeper thanthose types of qualitative tools
do.
And then on the quant, becausewe are quantifying those
emotions and showing that in ascalable way, just because it's
a web-based app, we can talk to10 people or we could talk to a
(32:21):
thousand, and you can't have afocus group with a thousand
people.
You can't do in-depth interviewswith a thousand people.
Very well, I can't do that typeof deep listening with a large
number of people in most of theother tools that are out there.
And so, rather than thetraditional trade-off of I
either get depth or I getbreadth, our approach is to say
(32:43):
we're definitely focused on thequal side.
We're giving you better depthwith analytics, but we're also
giving you the breadth of itbeing a web scale platform.
So you don't you're not limitedto just 20 or 30 or 50 people.
You could talk to 300 this wayor a thousand this way, and that
would be a really, reallypowerful way to help you
understand deeply what peoplefeel about your company or your
(33:04):
brand.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
That's incredible.
Yeah, I love the approach I'lltake.
Have you, have you had any orseen any surprising or
unexpected learnings from thestories you collect and seek and
those were always like justvery deep and profound and very
(33:28):
cathartic, and we love those.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
We love doing those because you get to have a real
experience in the moment.
The biggest thing we weren'tsure about is what would happen
when we went from in-personworkshops to a web-based
platform and experience you know, the people doing it in the
room where they're talking toeach other and listening and
then and thinking was great.
But ultimately we want peopleto be able to write their own
(33:52):
story, and I say write becausethat's where we're focused today
.
Tomorrow it'll be audio andvideo, but right now we're
focused on writing because thereactually is a different mental
process that they go throughwhen they're writing their story
in response to a prompt.
And so we were blown away bysomething that happened when we
launched the web-based platform,which was people actually went
(34:14):
a little deeper, and we thinkthey went deeper because privacy
wasn't their biggest questionor fear of being vulnerable with
other people.
They had almost a not anonymity, but they felt protected and
they were comfortable to becathartic.
But they felt protected andthey were comfortable to be
cathartic.
And so we had people on ourfirst project writing like 700,
(34:37):
800 word stories about theirexperiences working with a
company and feeling impostersyndrome and we were like what
happened, you know?
And so there was.
That was huge.
And the other thing I would sayis, in general, there's there's
something about visualizingpeople's emotions in their
stories by putting data to thatand helping the customer
understand in words and emotionsand in visualized data.
(35:00):
This is how your customers feelabout you.
So by not just saying, hey,there's a few quotes and
snippets that you might get froma qualitative piece, but
showing them the emotional mapof their customer base or their
workforce, that turned out to bea game changer.
We weren't doing that before.
We were just showing like 0.56or three out of five and we were
(35:23):
saying things like they feelthis way and they're high on
this emotion, and they'd be likeI don't get it.
And then we visualized theemotions and they were like holy
crap, I get it, you know.
Like now I know what this meanswhen I see like half of my
organization has a high activitylevel and the other half of my
organization is very cautious.
What could I do about?
What could I do with that kindof insight as a leader, as a
(35:45):
team member, when I realizedthat my brand.
My customers are really drivenby self-transcendence and
they're also have a high needfor structure.
What does that allow me to doas a marketer, as a product
developer, as a product manager?
To create a product and createexperiences that make them feel
like they're part of somethingmuch bigger than themselves, but
(36:06):
do it in a way that has somestructure, so they feel that
need is met, but that value ispersonified in the brand
experience.
When that started happening andour clients started getting
that, it was a moment becauseyou were like this is what we've
been working for, this is whatwe wanted when we were sitting
on the other side of the tableas product managers and brand
managers and brand leaderspaying for the research, and
(36:29):
this is what we wanted asconsumers and employees to be
heard and seen and understood.
So that was mind-boggling forme and also deeply, deeply
gratifying.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Excellent.
Yeah, I get the sense that allcompanies need this, but they
don't necessarily know that theydo this is true.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
So I want to go back to that.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
And what kind of businesses or industries have
benefited the most from SeeksInsights?
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, Great question.
I'll even take it up a step.
What kind of individual leadersin those companies are
benefiting?
And it's leaders who havealready kind of come to the
place the realization that theyneed to do a better job
listening to their customer orto their employee, that that
(37:27):
don't want to listen in order todevelop better experiences.
We're not for them and they'renot for us, because we'll be
trying to convince them thatsomething matters that they
fundamentally don't think isimportant.
And many of those leaders, bythe way, still think improving
experiences are important, butthey think that the answer to
improving experiences is basedon what they know instead of
what the consumer or employee istrying to tell them, and so we
want the listening to be thefirst step in that journey, I
(37:50):
know what you need.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Answer these 10 questions for me Right.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
I know what you need.
Now validate that for me byanswering these questions that
I've structured to tell myselfthis is what you need.
It sounds like relationshipsgoing bad, but I do think that
companies that believe increating better experiences for
the people they serve theiremployees or customers in their
communities they're the kind ofcompanies that are attracted to
(38:16):
us.
We're focusing in what I wouldcall emotion-rich and
experience-rich sectors.
We're generally focused inindustries or sectors that are
large and mature, because that'swhere you find the problems.
That's where you find companiesthat are saying, hey, we're
being disrupted from this newentrant, our brand is stale or
(38:38):
we haven't done anything tochange and our culture is
becoming irrelevant.
Whatever that is, that's wherewe usually find at least a
readiness or a precondition ofI'm willing to find other ways
to solve this problem, becausewe know we're coming at it in a
little bit of a different way.
Travel and tourism has been abig sector for us.
(38:59):
Energy in particular.
You might think energy is notemotional until you start
talking to people about eitherthe price of energy or how
energy impacts where they liveand infrastructure, and then you
realize it is deeply emotional.
It is the place where not in mybackyard lives and so figuring
out how people and consumers inthat sector interact with the
(39:22):
companies that they serve isinteresting.
Interact with the companiesthat they serve is interesting
Healthcare and wellness, ofcourse.
Really, really big industry.
Really a lot of frustration onthe consumer part and, frankly,
on the employee part I'm notgoing to.
There are people who say thisis too big and too massive and
too broken to fix.
I don't believe that.
We don't believe that we thinkall of these industries because
(39:45):
they're people, there's peoplein these companies serving
people, and financial servicesis a place that we're focused.
Again, big industries, lots oflarge, large players who also,
frankly, have the budgets toexplore things that don't fit in
the traditional boxes of moresurveys or more focus groups.
(40:07):
Because we're not coming in atthe top line item.
We're having to sort of elbowour way in a little bit and say
this is a tool you might want toconsider to help you solve a
problem that you're experiencingtoday.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
I get it Totally.
So, going back to scaling Ithink you brought this up
earlier Can you talk a littlebit about some of the biggest
challenges you faced in scaling,the AI-powered research that's
required?
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, absolutely, because we're putting the human
at the center.
Some might say constrained.
I would say we're empowered bythe human focus.
I would say we're empowered bythe human focus.
But there are trade-offs in howone might develop a company or
product or build design, buildcode, whatever you want to do in
that space, if they were not asguided and empowered by the
(40:59):
human at the center of that aswe are.
There's ways to do all thesethings much, much, much, much,
much faster, and we're alreadydoing them much faster than we
would in traditional research.
We could go much faster still ifthe human essence center was
not our driving force, but it is, and so we learn at the speed
at which we can bring peopleinto the platform, have them
(41:21):
share their stories, analyzethose stories, deliver value for
our customer.
That's a cycle, that's not aone-minute cycle or a one-day
cycle.
That can take time to reallytake a customer through that
entire journey, because ourcustomers are the companies
paying for these services andtheir journey with us is not
quick.
And so we could come up withoutputs that are AI developed or
(41:47):
AI powered.
That would create lots offaster touch points and maybe
create value, but probablycreate even more of the illusion
of value and we're moreinterested in saying let's
really get these insights deeplyin their leadership, in their
decisionmaking, and then scale,then accelerate with that
company.
And so it's a philosophicaldifference.
(42:09):
It's not a technological one,it's a philosophical one that
says, you know, we're willing togo a little slower to make sure
that we're not sacrificing thequality of the human experience,
the human-led insight.
It's centered in humanexpression.
So I can't speed the person upin the sense that I want them
you know what I want to movethree times as many people
(42:32):
through the platform at the sametime.
So, say less, say it faster,skip the words.
Well, we kind of already havethat today, and it's called
social and it's not giving usall the best answers to
humanity's problems.
And so you know, I'm bettingbig on long form, our team's
betting big on going a littledeeper.
We're not trying to ask peopleto write novels, but we are
(42:55):
asking them to spend a littlebit more time than they normally
would thinking and expressingthemselves and letting that be
what drives the value creationin the platform, which, again,
is significantly more scalablethan our traditional qualitative
means are today.
Is it as scalable as looking at5 million, 10 million, 100
(43:17):
million touch points in theblink of an eye.
It's not there yet, but it issignificantly more than what we
would do if we were trying tocode 100 open ends and figure
out.
What are people trying to tellus in this highly, highly biased
survey that we just fielded?
Not taking shots, but I amsaying that a lot of our surveys
(43:37):
today don't tell us what weneed to know.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Yeah, I think that definitely sets you apart.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Yeah, I think that definitely sets you apart.
Most AI-driven companies chasethe scale by minimizing human
involvement, but your approachputs the human expression at the
core.
Right, get to scale becausethere's 8 billion people on this
planet and growing, and all ofthem have a lifetime of stories
and experiences.
I mean, we have thousands ofthoughts a day.
We create multiple memoriesevery day.
We're creating memories andstories our whole lifetime.
(44:18):
So the opportunity space is inthe hundreds of billions and
maybe even trillions of storiesthat are out there to be
understood and that's going tocontinue to grow.
So, to me, if we are creating aplatform and a process that
says human, you're at the center, then we're putting 8 billion
people at the center.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Yeah, no, I agree, I think people generally love to
tell stories.
You know, maybe they don't liketo talk as much because it's
energy depleting to some people,but they want to tell stories,
they want to share thatconnection with people.
So I think you got somethingthere.
So what's next for Share MoreStories?
(44:59):
Are there exciting developmentsor future applications of your
technology that you want to talkabout?
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Absolutely.
And you know, when we talkabout scale, we are working to
scale the platform and thatagain, is on all different sides
, right From a customeracquisition standpoint, from a
product experience standpoint.
We're doing all those thingsand in our next you know major
release, we're taking a lot ofthe things we've learned from
(45:26):
our customers and the storiesthey tell us and what our
participants' experiences areand things that we deliver our
customers.
Now we'll be able to do themand they'll be able to do them
in the platform on their own orwith our support, if that's what
they choose, in the very nearfuture.
So we have something we calliterative analysis.
Let's say, you listened to oryou collected a bunch of stories
from your employees orcustomers and maybe it was sort
(45:47):
of a let's set the foundation.
What is the experience?
Maybe it's how are peoplethriving in our organization?
Or what's the most memorabletravel experience you've had
with our brand right Baselinefoundation?
Well, once we have those stories, it's a rich, rich data set to
go, keep diving into, to iteratewhat we are learning, which is
(46:08):
mimicking the human experienceof learning.
We don't just ask a questionand walk away and think, okay,
I'm done.
We ask follow-up questions.
Well, we can ask follow-upquestions of this data.
We go back to the stories andwe ask a different question and
our analysis allows us to pullout different insights.
Or we can go back to the samegroup and actually ask them
another prompt, or we can askthat same prompt to a different
(46:30):
group and test our assumptionsand our hypotheses.
So this iterative learning,this iterative analysis that we
do in a semi-manual processtoday, that will be fully
automated in the platformtomorrow and that's gonna take
the utility and the ability forour customers as end users who
do more with this platform.
(46:51):
That is not only dependent onus as, say, their research
provider.
It really moves us from beingthe service provider into the
platform provider and thenproviding services for those who
want our help and our expertise.
And to be able to do that withmore insight in a faster way, to
be able to go back and forthand ask follow-up questions,
(47:12):
which is what most people whoare either pure researchers or
their internal customers theproduct managers, the developers
, the designers, the marketersyou get a piece of research like
that's interesting.
I have another question and ifthat survey is done or that
focus group is done themarketers you get a piece of
research like that's interesting.
I have another question, and ifthat survey is done or that
focus group is done, the onlyway to get more insight is to do
(47:33):
another focus group.
Well, in Seek, you don't haveto do that.
You can actually go back to thestories and ask a different
question.
It's got to be related, butthink about it as your own small
little AI Seek AI that reallyallows you to have a
conversation with the platformto explore the stories and
experiences on your own, inaddition to what we're sort of
(47:54):
automating for you in the way ofreporting and analytics.
That's what's next for us and,based on what our customers tell
us and what we know are some ofthe bigger trends in generative
AI, I think that's going toreally really accelerate the
platform's adoption with ourcustomers.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
Definitely, definitely All right.
So what advice would you giveto business leaders and
entrepreneurs looking toleverage storytelling?
Speaker 2 (48:19):
I love this question because it brings us right back
to where we started, right thehuman in the center of all this.
Because business leaders,entrepreneurs, founders anyone
who finds themselves in aposition where they want to
connect or learn story is areally, really good tool, and
whether you're trying to connectwith your organization, sharing
(48:40):
your own story is a really goodway to do it.
We often tell people it startswith a vulnerability of saying,
hey, I could tell a we story,but I'm going to choose to tell
a me story.
And whenever we facilitate aworkshop with leaders as sort of
pre-customer engagement, weoften tell them look, you know,
(49:02):
you spend so much of your timetalking to your organization.
This is a chance for you toopen up and really reflect on
your own experience.
And so the first thing we tellevery participant when we do a
storytelling workshop or a seeksession, as we call it, is be
yourself.
That means focus on you.
This is not about us, or we orthem, or my sister, or this is
(49:29):
about me.
The second is be courageous.
You know everything you want ison the other side of fear, as
the quote goes.
So storytelling whether you'vedone it a thousand times or you
like storytelling.
I don't tell stories you doBecause, like you said,
everybody has them in them andthe only thing required to get
it out is just a little bit ofcourage.
I don't tell stories you doBecause, like you said,
(49:49):
everybody has them in them andthe only thing required to get
it out is just a little bit ofcourage.
And we tell people.
That doesn't mean you have totell the most vulnerable,
emotionally wrenching story.
Just tell a story aboutsomething that's important to
you and why you do it.
And it allows people, even whodon't think they're being
emotionally expressive.
They will almost always tell uswow, I had no idea that was in
me.
And then the last thing we tellthem is be curious, ask
(50:10):
yourself why that matters to you.
Sometimes I say you may not know, I don't know why, and I'm like
, well, let's do it this way.
Why did you choose that story?
I don't know.
You told me to tell the story.
I know, but what do you thinkabout?
That story jumped out at you.
I mean, you know because suchand such, or because we went
here, or because when we did itit really it was just one of the
best days of my life.
Oh, so that's what matters toyou, and so we often ask people
(50:37):
to really reflect on those threethings when they're working on
their story, right.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
So the three things are be yourself, be courageous
and be curious.
Yeah, that's a pretty charmingframework and I think it's the
right framework for the humanevolution at least the part in
(51:01):
which I choose to see thegoodness of humans and the
goodness in leaders.
They're willing to step intothat vulnerable space and tell
their stories so that peopleconnect with them and don't see
them as some sort of demigod orwhatever.
And you know, force that theywould never, you know, see
(51:23):
themselves as Like.
It puts leaders into the humanspace for people when they do
share their stories that way.
I think that's super-, that'sabsolutely right.
Speaker 2 (51:33):
Yeah, it humanizes us and puts us back into
connection and relationship witheach other.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
Yeah, awesome.
If you could have anysuperpower, james, what would it
be and why?
Speaker 2 (51:46):
Well, I love superheroes and my favorite
superhero has always beenSuperman.
When I was a kid, when Superman2 came out, I immediately knew
that that sequel was the bestmovie that had ever been made,
partly because I lived in NewYork, so watching Superman fly
around New York or Metropolisreally resonated with me.
(52:09):
I guess if I could haveSuperman's powers of hearing and
x-ray vision, that's what Iwould want, because that would
match my curiosity, because morethan anything, I love to be
able to see and hear what peopleare really experiencing.
But if I'm honest about it andI kind of zoom all the way out,
(52:29):
ever since I was a little kid Ihave wanted to fly, and so if I
could fly anywhere on demand,that would be really cool.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Oh, definitely, yeah, I'm with you there, and we must
have grown up around the sametime because superman had that
impact on me.
I'll never forget watchingthose, those movies, with my dad
, who was a big fan.
Such a great story.
I'm glad it has such a stronglegacy.
And two, yeah, two.
(53:00):
Well, james, this has been anabsolute pleasure.
Thank you so much for your time.
Wish you and your company thebest in telling your stories and
telling other people's storiesand getting the rich data that
these businesses would thriveoff of.
They just have to listen totheir folks, so thank you for
(53:21):
putting that out there for them.
Speaker 2 (53:23):
Thank you so much, Jason.
I really appreciate this timeto share our story and our
experience with you All rightCheers.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
Bye and thanks to our listeners for tuning in today.
If you or your company wouldlike to be featured in an
Inspire AI Richmond episode,please drop us a message.
Ai Richmond episode.
Please drop us a message.
Don't forget to like, share orfollow our content and stay up
(53:52):
to date on the latest events forAI Ready RVA.
Thank you.
Welcome RVA to Inspire AI, where we spotlight
companies and individuals in theregion who are pioneering the
development and use ofartificial intelligence.
I'm Jason McGinty from AI ReadyRVA.
At AI Ready RVA, our mission isto cultivate AI literacy in the
greater Richmond region throughawareness, community engagement
(00:24):
, education and advocacy.
Today's episode is madepossible by Modern Ancients
driving innovation with purpose.
Modern Ancients uses AI andstrategic insight to help
businesses create lasting,positive change with their
unique journey consultingpractice.
(00:44):
Find out more about how yourbusiness can grow at
modernagentscom, and thanks toour listeners for tuning in
today.
If you or your company wouldlike to be featured in the
Inspire AI Richmond episode,please drop us a message.
Don't forget to like, share orfollow our content and stay up
(01:07):
to date on the latest events forAI Ready RVA.
Welcome back to another episodeof Inspire AI, where we dive
deep into the intersection oftechnology, leadership and
innovation.
I'm very excited to introduceour incredible guest, whose work
is reshaping the way businessesand communities connect and
(01:30):
learn through the power ofstorytelling.
Joining me is James Warren, thefounder and CEO of Share More
Stories, a human experienceresearch company.
They've built the SEEQ that'sS-E-E-Q platform, an innovative
AI-driven storytelling-poweredtool that helps brands and
(01:53):
organizations understand andengage their audiences on a
deeper level.
James is a visionary leader whobelieves that storytelling
isn't just about words.
It's about unlocking emotions,perspectives and untapped
potential to drive meaningfulchange.
With a background in strategy,marketing and consumer insights,
(02:15):
james is passionate abouthelping brands translate stories
into actionable intelligence,whether it's improving customer
loyalty, amplifying diversevoices, fostering empathy or
shaping brand narratives.
Share More Stories is at theforefront of using AI and
storytelling to make employeeexperience and customer
(02:37):
experience more impactful.
Today, we're going to exploreJames' journey as an
entrepreneur, the role of AI inresearch and storytelling, and
how businesses can harness thepower of narrative to build
stronger connections.
Speaker 2 (02:53):
James, welcome to Inspire AI connect here and talk
a little bit about the work wedo and how that fits, frankly,
into the larger ecosystem of thework you all are doing and what
you particularly are leadinghere with Inspire AI.
So really grateful for thechance to be here and share our
(03:15):
story a bit.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
Outstanding.
So can you tell us a little bitabout yourself and your
business and your interest in AIplease?
Speaker 2 (03:25):
Sure.
Well, let's see, I've been inthe Richmond region for about 20
years, originally New York.
The New York area is home.
I've actually lived in lots ofplaces, but that's home because
that's where our family is fromand that's where I really grew
(03:45):
up.
And in terms of me, you know,I've got a family, I'm married,
I've got four kids and we'vecome to see Richmond as home
today.
You know, all of my kids havegrown up here on some level or
another, and there's so muchabout Richmond that I love.
I love the innovation, I lovethe culture, I love the way
people are really connectingaround meaningful issues and
(04:09):
challenges.
But what I've always lovedabout Richmond and what drew me
to Richmond was this sense ofpotential that Richmond had
potential, was aware of itspotential and wanted to do
something about it.
And I don't just mean the city,I mean the whole region, and I
think that's true inentrepreneurship and innovation
and in technology.
And so I started our companyShare More Stories here in
(04:32):
Richmond just over 10 years ago,and I started it after my
corporate career.
It was time to sort of make atransition from that work and I
really knew two things almostall along that I wanted to be an
entrepreneur and I wanted to dosomething in writing and
storytelling because those weretwo of my earliest passions and
(04:54):
loves writing andentrepreneurship.
I'm sure we'll talk about bothof those a little bit more as we
go.
And so Share More Stories cameabout 10 years ago plus, really
in a desire to say how can wecreate a place and a space for
people to connect more deeplythrough our individual stories.
I believe that stories are a keypart of the nucleus of our
(05:15):
human experience and that whenwe share those stories with one
another, we activate things inone another, we activate empathy
, we activate connection, welearn more about one another and
we built a business out of that, because we think that, at the
end of the day, businesses arejust groups of people trying to
meet other groups of people'sneeds, and so we want to be a
(05:36):
place where employees, customers, community stakeholders are
able to share their stories withcompanies and company leaders
who want to listen to thosestories and who want to learn
from those experiences andultimately want to create better
product services, organizations, cultures.
As a result, we came aboutinterest being interested in
(05:58):
that.
There's a funny story about itwhich I'm sure we'll get into,
but ai really became the, thetechnology platform and the tool
set for us to do what we do ina more scalable and quantifiable
way, for us to really say we'vecollected these stories,
whether it's 10, a hundred or athousand, and we really want to
(06:19):
understand in those stories,what are they telling us about
the way people feel about theirexperiences?
In those stories, what are theytelling us about the way people
feel about their experiences?
And so we're using AI toquantify emotion to understand
these experiences deeply,individually and authentically,
and also at scale.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Wow, that's beautiful .
I definitely connected withyour relationship to Richmond.
I've lived here most of my lifeas well and I feel a lot of
that connection deeply rooted inthe community, and it's super
important to me to seeentrepreneurs building
relationships with the communityso that we can all thrive and
(07:02):
let each other's experiences.
So, yeah, I really connectedwith that.
That's awesome and you startedtouching on this a little bit,
but can you tell us a little bitabout the origin story of share
more stories and what's thewhat inspired you to create the
platform centered aroundstorytelling?
Speaker 2 (07:21):
Yeah.
So back in 2014, when I wasexploring different potential
businesses that I wanted tocreate, like I said, I kind of
knew at a macro level I wantedto do something.
I would say three things.
I want to do something in tech.
I knew I wanted to do somethingfor myself, build my own
company or business and I wantedto do something related to, at
(07:43):
the time, even more specifically, writing.
I considered myself a frustratedwriter for most of my life.
More broadly, I definitelyconsider myself a lover of
stories my own and otherpeople's and so you know, the
very, very first version wasactually a place where we could
help aspiring writers connectwith one another and even write
(08:04):
collaboratively.
There's a deep tradition inwhen you're studying creative
writing, of writing circles noteven just things like fiction or
poetry, but any kind of writingwhere you want to perfect your
craft.
It means a lot of trust.
But if you create places andspaces where writers can share,
critique, sometimes evenco-write and collaborate, it
(08:26):
unlocks a few things that don'tcome when you're just staring at
the pen and pad yourself orstaring at the blank screen.
So I originally was likeexploring, like collaborative
writing, collaborativestorytelling spaces and there's
other examples of that, whetherit's the storytelling circle or
the choose your own adventuremodel, and all of those things
(08:48):
were really interesting to menot terribly interesting at the
time to lots and lots of people,and so I kept saying but
there's something about thestory and the storytelling or
more, like we say, story sharingthat was attractive to myself
and other people that we weretalking to, and what we started
to hear was this seems likesomething that could be really
(09:09):
really useful, especially now.
Now, ironically, in 2014, wewere hearing people saying
things like social media feelsreally really broken and dark,
so I want a place where I canconnect and share, maybe in a
little bit more authentic way,and so we initially started
creating a place for people toliterally just share their
stories, to express themselvesSome light guardrails, if you
(09:32):
will.
We wanted to focus on personalstories, where people could
express what was going on intheir lives or on a particular
issue or topic, and we quicklylearned that content development
, content creation, contentasking people to share their
stories needs focus, it needsstructure, and so that allowed
us to start developing tools andexperiences, both online and
(09:56):
offline, that gave people areason to share their story, or
something to respond to which wecall the prompt and all of
those things for the firstcouple of years were sort of the
precursor.
We were still exploring what'sthe business model, because we
did want it to be a business.
We wanted to help companies,help people, and we wanted to do
(10:16):
that in an entrepreneurial way.
And so I was at a conference upin New York called the Future
of Storytelling Summit.
This is a, at the time, awell-known festival of people in
tech, communications arts,media entertainment, coming
(10:37):
around this question of what isstorytelling and what is the
future, and at that time therewas a lot of time and energy
being spent on immersivestorytelling.
Ar and VR were really startingto grow, and so there was a lot
of heavy, heavy focus on tech asa future of storytelling, which
is understandable.
I was facilitating a workshop orco-hosting a workshop, and in
that workshop there was a personwho was a director of consumer
(11:05):
insights at a really largeconsumer goods company and they
were expressing like I thinkthis is interesting, but I'm
really looking for other usecases of storytelling.
I'm trying to figure out how wecan use storytelling as better
research, to better understandwhere people are coming from.
So we're experimenting withthis but frankly, I haven't
found a lot of people doing alot in it.
(11:26):
And that was one of thosemoments that you have as an
entrepreneur or a creator oranybody trying to do something,
where your inner voice says openyour mouth.
So I said we're doing somethinglike that and she turned around
and said, well, like, like whoare you and what are you talking
about?
I said share more stories.
(11:47):
We're exploring the rolestories play in developing
insight kind of came out and shewas like really, I think that's
fascinating, I'd love to talkmore about it.
So after the conference, shegave us, um, her card, I gave
her my card and within weeks shewas coming to Richmond to demo
our storytelling insightsplatform, which we hadn't fully
(12:11):
built yet.
We had a website, we werecollecting stories, we were very
qualitatively and in a humanway assessing these stories, but
we weren't yet figuring out howto do that with tech.
So I asked my development team.
I said can you help me find atool, any kind of tool, that can
analyze stories and createinsight?
(12:33):
And they said that'sinteresting.
I'm not sure.
They said I assume you'retalking about more than just
like basic keyword sentimentanalysis.
I said yeah, something thatwould like rock for a fortune
100 consumer goods company andthey're like okay.
so we found a company that had alittle tool.
Um, they were using earlierstage ai, early language models
(12:57):
to identify not just sentimentbut key emotions, values and
needs.
And they were a company thatgot bought by IBM and they got
rolled into IBM's Watson suiteof tools and we found it.
And so we started playing inWatson early and using the text
of people's stories to analyzetheir experiences, to analyze
(13:20):
what they were writing about,and that began the process of
building out the Seek platform.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Wow, I hear a lot of motivations in there, but the
story is really fascinating andinteresting how you've blended,
you know, like a fundamentalhuman approach that prioritizes
depth over noise and personaltruth.
Right, absolutely, absolutely,and not misunderstanding, and
(13:50):
authenticity over transparency,right.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I was just going to say.
I think the you know when yousay prioritizing the human and
the authenticity, that's exactlyright, because you know our
ethos is human plus digital.
And we start with human for areason.
We're a technology company, butwe are deeply, deeply, it's
ingrained in our origin and youknow, from my perspective, it
will be part of who we are foras long as we are.
(14:14):
Which is to say, these tools,these technologies, we're not.
We don't see them as somethingto be afraid of.
We see them as something to beleveraged and utilized to make
the human experience better.
And in this case, we'reliterally using it to understand
the human experience so we canmake it better, so companies can
make it better.
And so, for me, prioritizingthe human in there there's no
(14:38):
other way to do it Prioritizingtheir story and their experience
is crucial to what we deliverfor our customers and clients.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
Yeah, we need that.
Through the AI-relatedtransformations that our world
is going through, we need tokeep that connection.
So thank you for recognizingthat.
So how has your backgroundinfluenced your approach to
innovation?
Were there pivotal moments thatshaped your entrepreneurial
journey?
Speaker 2 (15:08):
Yeah, probably a couple.
I mean just briefly.
The first was, you know, Istarted my first business when I
was 14.
And actually, now that I thinkabout it, I started my.
I really started my firstbusiness when I was 12.
And my neighbor and I wanted tomake money in our neighborhood.
So we, we were two kids whostarted a cleaning business and
(15:28):
we called it super kid powerbecause we had read a book
called kid power, and our firstcustomer didn't pay us a lot but
it was fun.
And then our second customer,um, they had four young kids,
probably all under the age offive, maybe six, and they said
we'd like to hire you to kind ofhelp clean the house today.
And we were like, okay, sure,Sounds great.
(15:50):
Me and my friend Norman, and wespent, you know, the first half
of the day cleaning that houseand we went home to lunch.
We came back the second half ofthe day to keep cleaning the
house and we weren't done at theend of the day.
And we told them you don't haveto pay us because we can't come
back tomorrow.
And they were like, well, here,take some for what you did.
(16:16):
And we were like, because wereally didn't, we could not come
back.
It was a lot.
So I think the entrepreneurialbug was quieted for a little
while.
But in 14, I started a businessselling audio video equipment in
New York to, like businesses,churches.
I loved doing AV work, I lovedthe equipment, I loved all of
that and I loved a little bit ofthe hustle of, you know,
figuring out how to makesomething that people would want
(16:39):
and buy or sell something thatpeople would want to buy.
So that kind of planted theseed a little bit more firmly
early on, Used some of thatmoney to help my family, used
some of that money to helpmyself pay for a part of college
and I was grateful for thatopportunity.
And then, you know, lifestarted to kind of settle down.
(16:59):
I started a career.
I was working at Altria Groupfor years, working in a lot of
their new businesses and newproduct areas, and I really
enjoyed doing that because,again, I loved building and I
loved creating.
But I realized after a whilethat what I did at Altria both
running big brands and hugeportfolios was at the same time
(17:21):
very similar and also extremelydifferent, you know, compared to
starting a company and buildinga product from scratch.
And so the last 10 years havebeen sort of picking and
choosing different pieces ofthose insights and experiences
to try to be a better leader, bea better teammate, help our
company deliver better productsand services.
(17:42):
And you know, I think sometimesI do a really good job of it
and other times I'm strugglingmightily.
Speaker 1 (17:49):
Of course, we all struggle from time to time.
So an entrepreneur at age 12,maybe carried over to 14 and
beyond what were some of themindset shifts you had to make
when you went from corporatelife to startup life?
Speaker 2 (18:09):
I remember one of the first times I was like,
presenting the I, the earlyideas, kind of the concepts for
share more stories, the peopleare presenting it to you like
you sound very corporate and Iwas like, okay, and they were,
and their hidden message waslike you've got to be less
corporate in this space and Iwas like I don't know what that
(18:29):
means or how to do that.
I mean, I've spent almost 20years in corporate and in that
space I felt like I was veryentrepreneurially innovative and
almost didn't fit entirely intothat model.
And so language and style andthere's a confidence and
assumptiveness that comes whenyou're presenting things in a
(18:51):
corporate context and you kindof already not that you know the
answer, but it's like theoutcomes are fairly known and
somewhat determined.
It's like we're either going todo A or B, it's, it's not.
Hey, there's a million choicesand you might, you, you have
this much of a chance of hearinga yes, it's okay, a or b, maybe
(19:12):
c.
And in an entrepreneurship andstarting a company where you're
exploratory for a while,everything is uncertain,
everything is is almost like ano until it's a yes.
And so I had to learn how toflip that script and see the
journey and the vision as thedriver of my own optimism, of
our team's optimism, and not seeno's as no's, see no's as data,
(19:35):
as insight, so that I couldlearn quickly what was working
and what was not working is notworking, and I'm not saying we
don't do that and people don'tdo that in a corporate.
I think over the last decade, 20years, people have pulled more
and more experiences,innovation-based experiences,
from the entrepreneurial worldinto the corporate sector, but
(20:00):
you're still dealing with a verydominant culture and mindset.
That is generally.
How do we deliver these results?
Incrementally better, quarterover quarter, year over year.
And you want a certain amountof predictability, because the
more predictable it is, the moreyou can sort of forecast what
you're going to get.
And there's very little in theearly stages and even in the
middle stages about theentrepreneurial journey or the
(20:23):
startup journey that'spredictable, and so that I had
to really get comfortable withthe lack of predictability
compared to what I was used toWow.
Speaker 1 (20:32):
Yeah, that makes total sense.
Ok, so storytelling has been apowerful tool for centuries.
How does Share More Stories,modernize this art using
technology?
Speaker 2 (20:45):
Yeah, I mean, stories are great for two things right
they're great for connecting andthey're great for learning.
And so we see stories asconnectors all around us.
We see that in what brands dowith stories either the brand
story in ads and social and longform content, customers or
(21:09):
employees on social.
And we see the reason why theydo that because it drives
engagement, because we'rehardwired to react to and to
listen to people's stories farmore than we are to.
You know, we hear an opinion,we want to argue it, we hear a
story, we want to lean in andlearn more, and so, you know,
the connection piece is a given,and that's not the space,
necessarily, that we're focusedon.
We're focused on the learningside, and so the practice of
(21:31):
story sharing is a practice ofhelping individuals, groups and
companies learn about peoplefrom their stories, and that
goes back in time to the phrasethe moral of the story.
The moral of the story meansthere's a lesson in the story,
there's something at the end ofthe story that can teach me how
to avoid that danger or how tobe more successful if I do this,
(21:53):
or how to achieve the results Iwant to achieve.
And so I believe, we believethat in every person's story or
stories there are lessons forthemselves, for the people that
they are a part of and for thecompanies and organizations that
are trying to serve them.
And so, if you think abouttraditional research, which is
predominantly qualitative andquantitative, qualitative is
(22:15):
dominated by focus groups, butnow there's a lot more out there
.
There's in-depth interviews,there's ethnography.
That is a space that is nowseeing, and has, for the last 10
, 20 years, a lot of innovation.
That's technology driven years.
A lot of innovation that'stechnology driven.
On the quantitative side, mostof that technology was going
there early because you weredealing with large data sets.
(22:36):
You're trying to figure out howto derive meaning and insight.
What we've learned is theopportunity.
The really rich opportunity isto innovate in that qualitative
side of the space, because it'sstill very open and there's
still a deep need to say we moreor less have our finger on the
pulse of what people think orfeel or experience with our
(22:58):
brain, our product, but we arestill having a hard time
structuring that insight andactivating that knowledge and
data in a way that can aiddecision-making, and so that's
where technology comes in.
For us, it's taking thosestories, really taking those
people's experiences, knowledgeand data in a way that can aid
decision-making, and so that'swhere technology comes in.
For us, it's taking thosestories, really taking those
people's experiences that theytell us or they write, turning
that into actionable data, inour case, quantifying the
(23:20):
emotions of those stories andthen developing insights like
what does this mean, what shouldyou do about this and why, so
that company leaders anddecision makers can do something
with it.
Speaker 1 (23:32):
Okay, yeah, I really love the connect and learn piece
that's kind of wrapped up in,and you know that's like my
development mantras how do Ilearn from others?
And I leveraged collaborationto do that right.
There's a ton of reasons whyyou want to connect and learn at
the same time, and the moral ofthe story is you capture your
(23:59):
experiences and you make senseof them in a structured way.
Right, that's fun.
How do you see like this?
I don't see this frameworkevolving as more companies begin
to embrace storytelling as astrategic tool.
Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah, I think there's a few things I think we already
see in different ways companiesinside the organization and in
the marketplace, the consumer,the employee, the human is
craving more human-centeredexperiences.
We see that there's lots ofindicators of that, what people
are spending their time, moneyand energy on.
And the smart money says, oh,it's not about the tech for
(24:42):
tech's sake, it's about techenabling those human-centered
experiences in less frictionedways, more impactful ways, more
enjoyable ways, more emotionalways.
And so, critical to that, aningredient of that is what is
the emotion.
What do people feel about theseexperiences?
And so I think you know, for usit's starting there, but it can
(25:03):
go lots of places.
It can go from understandingthese experiences to really
helping create what we'restarting to do now frameworks
for how companies might engagetheir employees or customers
based on these emotions, basedon these we call them emotional
bundles, things that sort of.
These five or six emotionsreally go together when you
think about this type ofconsumer or this type of
(25:25):
employee and if you want toincrease this, you've got to
decrease this that's a really,really powerful idea of like,
hey, how do I navigate thisconsumer or these consumers,
what they want out of theseexperiences, now I understand
them, now I got to figure outwhat they want, and I need sort
of the toolkit, I need thedecoder ring, I need the
magnifying glass to say what doI pay most attention to?
(25:47):
And these emotions help us knowthe answer to that.
And so I think you know.
For us that's the journey, butI think, more broadly, it's
finding use cases where AI andother technologies are being
used in an intentionallyhuman-centric way to make the
human experience better.
And I think, if we make thatsort of our mantra, there's
(26:09):
plenty of things we can createthat have an intrinsic positive
benefit for humanity, versus therisks that we are seeing with
technology run amok, where it,at a minimum, might be used by
one human to harm another and ata maximum, you know, might
eventually be the things that weare most afraid of, with good
(26:30):
reason, for I don't think that'sa foregone conclusion, and I
think that humans today, doingwhat you're doing, doing what AI
, ready, rba are doing, doingwhat we're doing, are a big
piece to making sure it turnsout the way that benefits humans
the most.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Amen, james, that's really great, thank you.
What role does AI play in yourplatform?
Can you tell us a little bitmore about that, and how does it
enhance storytelling andprovide meaningful insights?
Speaker 2 (27:09):
like I said, building in IBM Watson's platform and
tool set.
We were part of their globalentrepreneur program early on
and they decided at one pointthey were no longer going to
maintain some of those tools,particularly the personality
insights model that they hadbuilt, that we were running our
analyses through, so we had tobuild our own and our CTO, andy
Citizen, started investigatingwhat are like, broadly, the
(27:30):
platforms we could be buildingin.
And our CTO, andy Citizen,started investigating what are
like, broadly, the platforms wecould be building in and we
settled on at the time, google'sBERT model to really there was
a lot of sort of pre-built,pre-understood relationships
between words and phrases andsyntaxes and we could use that
basic level of understanding,that not even so basic, that
tremendous foundation, to startto really code emotion, to say,
(27:53):
hey, these are the 55 things wewant to measure and we started
designing algorithms to predictthose emotions.
And then we started creatingadditional programs and
analytics that would take thosepredictions, normalize them, if
you will, and create sort of acase that says, hey, this is how
people feel across these 55emotions.
That's a really, really highlevel and simplified way of
(28:15):
talking about some brilliancethat my teammate, andy, has put
together Because we had tofigure out a lot of things that
didn't exist in the way we werebuilding it.
We wanted to do a number ofthings, you know thematic
analysis, syntax analysis,feature reduction, all kinds of
things and we started to realize, hey, the linchpin here is
(28:36):
figuring out how to teach AI tounderstand the language and
understand the emotions in thesedifferent stories.
So that's what we built and whatit does now is it predicts the
emotional drivers of people'sexperiences and we're also able
to analyze those experiences ina thematic way.
So we could say, out of allthese stories, 100, 1,000,
(28:57):
whatever there's three or fourbig buckets of experience.
Thematically, we can alsocreate new ways of looking at
groups of people.
So instead of demographic orbehavioral segmentation, we're
doing emotional segmentation,psychological or psychographic
segmentation, using theseemotions, which is a really
different way of figuring out.
(29:20):
How do I connect?
You're going to behave this way, or even saying, because you
behave this way, you willautomatically behave this way in
the future.
We're trying to figure out whatdo you care about, what
motivates you, and let's usethat as a better basis for
predicting your behavior in thecontext of the brand or the
(29:40):
organization or the company thatyou're interacting with.
Speaker 1 (29:44):
So would I get it right by saying, in summary you
all bridge the human intuitionwith data-driven insights.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
That's a beautiful way of saying it Absolutely,
Because it gives the leader atool to say I think I understand
what people are carrying out,but I can't quantify it yet.
This is the tool that helps youstart to do that.
Speaker 1 (30:05):
Yeah, yeah, and it's great that Seek as a platform
was built on years of hands-onfacilitation, because that gives
it a strong foundation for theAI tools that you overlaid into
the platform as you were readyto continue development of it.
So Seek seems to blendqualitative storytelling and
(30:29):
quantitative insights.
Can you break down how it works?
Speaker 2 (30:34):
Yeah, I mean we say, you know, it's kind of the best
of both worlds qual and quant.
And you know, in the early daysone of our customers would say
this is like a focus group onsteroids and we loved that but
didn't love that because weweren't sure that that would
help people understand what wasunique about it, that it was
more than just asking questionsand getting answers.
(30:54):
And so you know, now when wetalk about the qual and the
quant sort of that blend, wemean it both in terms of the
experience and the output.
From a qual perspectivepersonal stories, you know,
people being able to express intheir own words what their
experience has been.
It's rich, it's contextualizedby themselves and it's
(31:15):
engagement-driven.
The act of telling your storyis an act of engagement.
And so when we invite people toshare their stories with our
customers, with the brands thatthey buy or the organizations
they work for, they're actuallyengaging with them.
In doing that, even if it's acompany like ABC, they don't
know who it is they're puttingthemselves in a place of
vulnerability.
To say this is how I feel aboutthis experience and that
(31:38):
activates something that'sreally important for our
customers, which is, we tellthem all the time Seek is less
about you wanting to hear whatyou want to know, what you want
to know about, and it's moreabout hearing what these people
are trying to tell you, becausethey have stories and
experiences that they don't getto tell you.
They get to answer yourquestions in surveys and in
(32:00):
focus groups.
That's not really their story,that's just the answer to the
question you want to know.
So this goes much deeper thanthose types of qualitative tools
do.
And then on the quant, becausewe are quantifying those
emotions and showing that in ascalable way, just because it's
a web-based app, we can talk to10 people or we could talk to a
(32:21):
thousand, and you can't have afocus group with a thousand
people.
You can't do in-depth interviewswith a thousand people.
Very well, I can't do that typeof deep listening with a large
number of people in most of theother tools that are out there.
And so, rather than thetraditional trade-off of I
either get depth or I getbreadth, our approach is to say
(32:43):
we're definitely focused on thequal side.
We're giving you better depthwith analytics, but we're also
giving you the breadth of itbeing a web scale platform.
So you don't you're not limitedto just 20 or 30 or 50 people.
You could talk to 300 this wayor a thousand this way, and that
would be a really, reallypowerful way to help you
understand deeply what peoplefeel about your company or your
(33:04):
brand.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
That's incredible.
Yeah, I love the approach I'lltake.
Have you, have you had any orseen any surprising or
unexpected learnings from thestories you collect and seek and
those were always like justvery deep and profound and very
(33:28):
cathartic, and we love those.
Speaker 2 (33:31):
We love doing those because you get to have a real
experience in the moment.
The biggest thing we weren'tsure about is what would happen
when we went from in-personworkshops to a web-based
platform and experience you know, the people doing it in the
room where they're talking toeach other and listening and
then and thinking was great.
But ultimately we want peopleto be able to write their own
(33:52):
story, and I say write becausethat's where we're focused today
.
Tomorrow it'll be audio andvideo, but right now we're
focused on writing because thereactually is a different mental
process that they go throughwhen they're writing their story
in response to a prompt.
And so we were blown away bysomething that happened when we
launched the web-based platform,which was people actually went
(34:14):
a little deeper, and we thinkthey went deeper because privacy
wasn't their biggest questionor fear of being vulnerable with
other people.
They had almost a not anonymity, but they felt protected and
they were comfortable to becathartic.
But they felt protected andthey were comfortable to be
cathartic.
And so we had people on ourfirst project writing like 700,
(34:37):
800 word stories about theirexperiences working with a
company and feeling impostersyndrome and we were like what
happened, you know?
And so there was.
That was huge.
And the other thing I would sayis, in general, there's there's
something about visualizingpeople's emotions in their
stories by putting data to thatand helping the customer
understand in words and emotionsand in visualized data.
(35:00):
This is how your customers feelabout you.
So by not just saying, hey,there's a few quotes and
snippets that you might get froma qualitative piece, but
showing them the emotional mapof their customer base or their
workforce, that turned out to bea game changer.
We weren't doing that before.
We were just showing like 0.56or three out of five and we were
(35:23):
saying things like they feelthis way and they're high on
this emotion, and they'd be likeI don't get it.
And then we visualized theemotions and they were like holy
crap, I get it, you know.
Like now I know what this meanswhen I see like half of my
organization has a high activitylevel and the other half of my
organization is very cautious.
What could I do about?
What could I do with that kindof insight as a leader, as a
(35:45):
team member, when I realizedthat my brand.
My customers are really drivenby self-transcendence and
they're also have a high needfor structure.
What does that allow me to doas a marketer, as a product
developer, as a product manager?
To create a product and createexperiences that make them feel
like they're part of somethingmuch bigger than themselves, but
(36:06):
do it in a way that has somestructure, so they feel that
need is met, but that value ispersonified in the brand
experience.
When that started happening andour clients started getting
that, it was a moment becauseyou were like this is what we've
been working for, this is whatwe wanted when we were sitting
on the other side of the tableas product managers and brand
managers and brand leaderspaying for the research, and
(36:29):
this is what we wanted asconsumers and employees to be
heard and seen and understood.
So that was mind-boggling forme and also deeply, deeply
gratifying.
Speaker 1 (36:42):
Excellent.
Yeah, I get the sense that allcompanies need this, but they
don't necessarily know that theydo this is true.
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
So I want to go back to that.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
And what kind of businesses or industries have
benefited the most from SeeksInsights?
Speaker 2 (36:59):
Yeah, Great question.
I'll even take it up a step.
What kind of individual leadersin those companies are
benefiting?
And it's leaders who havealready kind of come to the
place the realization that theyneed to do a better job
listening to their customer orto their employee, that that
(37:27):
don't want to listen in order todevelop better experiences.
We're not for them and they'renot for us, because we'll be
trying to convince them thatsomething matters that they
fundamentally don't think isimportant.
And many of those leaders, bythe way, still think improving
experiences are important, butthey think that the answer to
improving experiences is basedon what they know instead of
what the consumer or employee istrying to tell them, and so we
want the listening to be thefirst step in that journey, I
(37:50):
know what you need.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
Answer these 10 questions for me Right.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
I know what you need.
Now validate that for me byanswering these questions that
I've structured to tell myselfthis is what you need.
It sounds like relationshipsgoing bad, but I do think that
companies that believe increating better experiences for
the people they serve theiremployees or customers in their
communities they're the kind ofcompanies that are attracted to
(38:16):
us.
We're focusing in what I wouldcall emotion-rich and
experience-rich sectors.
We're generally focused inindustries or sectors that are
large and mature, because that'swhere you find the problems.
That's where you find companiesthat are saying, hey, we're
being disrupted from this newentrant, our brand is stale or
(38:38):
we haven't done anything tochange and our culture is
becoming irrelevant.
Whatever that is, that's wherewe usually find at least a
readiness or a precondition ofI'm willing to find other ways
to solve this problem, becausewe know we're coming at it in a
little bit of a different way.
Travel and tourism has been abig sector for us.
(38:59):
Energy in particular.
You might think energy is notemotional until you start
talking to people about eitherthe price of energy or how
energy impacts where they liveand infrastructure, and then you
realize it is deeply emotional.
It is the place where not in mybackyard lives and so figuring
out how people and consumers inthat sector interact with the
(39:22):
companies that they serve isinteresting.
Interact with the companiesthat they serve is interesting
Healthcare and wellness, ofcourse.
Really, really big industry.
Really a lot of frustration onthe consumer part and, frankly,
on the employee part I'm notgoing to.
There are people who say thisis too big and too massive and
too broken to fix.
I don't believe that.
We don't believe that we thinkall of these industries because
(39:45):
they're people, there's peoplein these companies serving
people, and financial servicesis a place that we're focused.
Again, big industries, lots oflarge, large players who also,
frankly, have the budgets toexplore things that don't fit in
the traditional boxes of moresurveys or more focus groups.
(40:07):
Because we're not coming in atthe top line item.
We're having to sort of elbowour way in a little bit and say
this is a tool you might want toconsider to help you solve a
problem that you're experiencingtoday.
Speaker 1 (40:19):
I get it Totally.
So, going back to scaling Ithink you brought this up
earlier Can you talk a littlebit about some of the biggest
challenges you faced in scaling,the AI-powered research that's
required?
Speaker 2 (40:35):
Yeah, absolutely, because we're putting the human
at the center.
Some might say constrained.
I would say we're empowered bythe human focus.
I would say we're empowered bythe human focus.
But there are trade-offs in howone might develop a company or
product or build design, buildcode, whatever you want to do in
that space, if they were not asguided and empowered by the
(40:59):
human at the center of that aswe are.
There's ways to do all thesethings much, much, much, much,
much faster, and we're alreadydoing them much faster than we
would in traditional research.
We could go much faster still ifthe human essence center was
not our driving force, but it is, and so we learn at the speed
at which we can bring peopleinto the platform, have them
(41:21):
share their stories, analyzethose stories, deliver value for
our customer.
That's a cycle, that's not aone-minute cycle or a one-day
cycle.
That can take time to reallytake a customer through that
entire journey, because ourcustomers are the companies
paying for these services andtheir journey with us is not
quick.
And so we could come up withoutputs that are AI developed or
(41:47):
AI powered.
That would create lots offaster touch points and maybe
create value, but probablycreate even more of the illusion
of value and we're moreinterested in saying let's
really get these insights deeplyin their leadership, in their
decisionmaking, and then scale,then accelerate with that
company.
And so it's a philosophicaldifference.
(42:09):
It's not a technological one,it's a philosophical one that
says, you know, we're willing togo a little slower to make sure
that we're not sacrificing thequality of the human experience,
the human-led insight.
It's centered in humanexpression.
So I can't speed the person upin the sense that I want them
you know what I want to movethree times as many people
(42:32):
through the platform at the sametime.
So, say less, say it faster,skip the words.
Well, we kind of already havethat today, and it's called
social and it's not giving usall the best answers to
humanity's problems.
And so you know, I'm bettingbig on long form, our team's
betting big on going a littledeeper.
We're not trying to ask peopleto write novels, but we are
(42:55):
asking them to spend a littlebit more time than they normally
would thinking and expressingthemselves and letting that be
what drives the value creationin the platform, which, again,
is significantly more scalablethan our traditional qualitative
means are today.
Is it as scalable as looking at5 million, 10 million, 100
(43:17):
million touch points in theblink of an eye.
It's not there yet, but it issignificantly more than what we
would do if we were trying tocode 100 open ends and figure
out.
What are people trying to tellus in this highly, highly biased
survey that we just fielded?
Not taking shots, but I amsaying that a lot of our surveys
(43:37):
today don't tell us what weneed to know.
Speaker 1 (43:41):
Yeah, I think that definitely sets you apart.
Speaker 2 (43:55):
Yeah, I think that definitely sets you apart.
Most AI-driven companies chasethe scale by minimizing human
involvement, but your approachputs the human expression at the
core.
Right, get to scale becausethere's 8 billion people on this
planet and growing, and all ofthem have a lifetime of stories
and experiences.
I mean, we have thousands ofthoughts a day.
We create multiple memoriesevery day.
We're creating memories andstories our whole lifetime.
(44:18):
So the opportunity space is inthe hundreds of billions and
maybe even trillions of storiesthat are out there to be
understood and that's going tocontinue to grow.
So, to me, if we are creating aplatform and a process that
says human, you're at the center, then we're putting 8 billion
people at the center.
Speaker 1 (44:38):
Yeah, no, I agree, I think people generally love to
tell stories.
You know, maybe they don't liketo talk as much because it's
energy depleting to some people,but they want to tell stories,
they want to share thatconnection with people.
So I think you got somethingthere.
So what's next for Share MoreStories?
(44:59):
Are there exciting developmentsor future applications of your
technology that you want to talkabout?
Speaker 2 (45:06):
Absolutely.
And you know, when we talkabout scale, we are working to
scale the platform and thatagain, is on all different sides
, right From a customeracquisition standpoint, from a
product experience standpoint.
We're doing all those thingsand in our next you know major
release, we're taking a lot ofthe things we've learned from
(45:26):
our customers and the storiesthey tell us and what our
participants' experiences areand things that we deliver our
customers.
Now we'll be able to do themand they'll be able to do them
in the platform on their own orwith our support, if that's what
they choose, in the very nearfuture.
So we have something we calliterative analysis.
Let's say, you listened to oryou collected a bunch of stories
from your employees orcustomers and maybe it was sort
(45:47):
of a let's set the foundation.
What is the experience?
Maybe it's how are peoplethriving in our organization?
Or what's the most memorabletravel experience you've had
with our brand right Baselinefoundation?
Well, once we have those stories, it's a rich, rich data set to
go, keep diving into, to iteratewhat we are learning, which is
(46:08):
mimicking the human experienceof learning.
We don't just ask a questionand walk away and think, okay,
I'm done.
We ask follow-up questions.
Well, we can ask follow-upquestions of this data.
We go back to the stories andwe ask a different question and
our analysis allows us to pullout different insights.
Or we can go back to the samegroup and actually ask them
another prompt, or we can askthat same prompt to a different
(46:30):
group and test our assumptionsand our hypotheses.
So this iterative learning,this iterative analysis that we
do in a semi-manual processtoday, that will be fully
automated in the platformtomorrow and that's gonna take
the utility and the ability forour customers as end users who
do more with this platform.
(46:51):
That is not only dependent onus as, say, their research
provider.
It really moves us from beingthe service provider into the
platform provider and thenproviding services for those who
want our help and our expertise.
And to be able to do that withmore insight in a faster way, to
be able to go back and forthand ask follow-up questions,
(47:12):
which is what most people whoare either pure researchers or
their internal customers theproduct managers, the developers
, the designers, the marketersyou get a piece of research like
that's interesting.
I have another question and ifthat survey is done or that
focus group is done themarketers you get a piece of
research like that's interesting.
I have another question, and ifthat survey is done or that
focus group is done, the onlyway to get more insight is to do
(47:33):
another focus group.
Well, in Seek, you don't haveto do that.
You can actually go back to thestories and ask a different
question.
It's got to be related, butthink about it as your own small
little AI Seek AI that reallyallows you to have a
conversation with the platformto explore the stories and
experiences on your own, inaddition to what we're sort of
(47:54):
automating for you in the way ofreporting and analytics.
That's what's next for us and,based on what our customers tell
us and what we know are some ofthe bigger trends in generative
AI, I think that's going toreally really accelerate the
platform's adoption with ourcustomers.
Speaker 1 (48:09):
Definitely, definitely All right.
So what advice would you giveto business leaders and
entrepreneurs looking toleverage storytelling?
Speaker 2 (48:19):
I love this question because it brings us right back
to where we started, right thehuman in the center of all this.
Because business leaders,entrepreneurs, founders anyone
who finds themselves in aposition where they want to
connect or learn story is areally, really good tool, and
whether you're trying to connectwith your organization, sharing
(48:40):
your own story is a really goodway to do it.
We often tell people it startswith a vulnerability of saying,
hey, I could tell a we story,but I'm going to choose to tell
a me story.
And whenever we facilitate aworkshop with leaders as sort of
pre-customer engagement, weoften tell them look, you know,
(49:02):
you spend so much of your timetalking to your organization.
This is a chance for you toopen up and really reflect on
your own experience.
And so the first thing we tellevery participant when we do a
storytelling workshop or a seeksession, as we call it, is be
yourself.
That means focus on you.
This is not about us, or we orthem, or my sister, or this is
(49:29):
about me.
The second is be courageous.
You know everything you want ison the other side of fear, as
the quote goes.
So storytelling whether you'vedone it a thousand times or you
like storytelling.
I don't tell stories you doBecause, like you said,
everybody has them in them andthe only thing required to get
it out is just a little bit ofcourage.
I don't tell stories you doBecause, like you said,
(49:49):
everybody has them in them andthe only thing required to get
it out is just a little bit ofcourage.
And we tell people.
That doesn't mean you have totell the most vulnerable,
emotionally wrenching story.
Just tell a story aboutsomething that's important to
you and why you do it.
And it allows people, even whodon't think they're being
emotionally expressive.
They will almost always tell uswow, I had no idea that was in
me.
And then the last thing we tellthem is be curious, ask
(50:10):
yourself why that matters to you.
Sometimes I say you may not know, I don't know why, and I'm like
, well, let's do it this way.
Why did you choose that story?
I don't know.
You told me to tell the story.
I know, but what do you thinkabout?
That story jumped out at you.
I mean, you know because suchand such, or because we went
here, or because when we did itit really it was just one of the
best days of my life.
Oh, so that's what matters toyou, and so we often ask people
(50:37):
to really reflect on those threethings when they're working on
their story, right.
Speaker 1 (50:40):
So the three things are be yourself, be courageous
and be curious.
Yeah, that's a pretty charmingframework and I think it's the
right framework for the humanevolution at least the part in
(51:01):
which I choose to see thegoodness of humans and the
goodness in leaders.
They're willing to step intothat vulnerable space and tell
their stories so that peopleconnect with them and don't see
them as some sort of demigod orwhatever.
And you know, force that theywould never, you know, see
(51:23):
themselves as Like.
It puts leaders into the humanspace for people when they do
share their stories that way.
I think that's super-, that'sabsolutely right.
Speaker 2 (51:33):
Yeah, it humanizes us and puts us back into
connection and relationship witheach other.
Speaker 1 (51:38):
Yeah, awesome.
If you could have anysuperpower, james, what would it
be and why?
Speaker 2 (51:46):
Well, I love superheroes and my favorite
superhero has always beenSuperman.
When I was a kid, when Superman2 came out, I immediately knew
that that sequel was the bestmovie that had ever been made,
partly because I lived in NewYork, so watching Superman fly
around New York or Metropolisreally resonated with me.
(52:09):
I guess if I could haveSuperman's powers of hearing and
x-ray vision, that's what Iwould want, because that would
match my curiosity, because morethan anything, I love to be
able to see and hear what peopleare really experiencing.
But if I'm honest about it andI kind of zoom all the way out,
(52:29):
ever since I was a little kid Ihave wanted to fly, and so if I
could fly anywhere on demand,that would be really cool.
Speaker 1 (52:38):
Oh, definitely, yeah, I'm with you there, and we must
have grown up around the sametime because superman had that
impact on me.
I'll never forget watchingthose, those movies, with my dad
, who was a big fan.
Such a great story.
I'm glad it has such a stronglegacy.
And two, yeah, two.
(53:00):
Well, james, this has been anabsolute pleasure.
Thank you so much for your time.
Wish you and your company thebest in telling your stories and
telling other people's storiesand getting the rich data that
these businesses would thriveoff of.
They just have to listen totheir folks, so thank you for
(53:21):
putting that out there for them.
Speaker 2 (53:23):
Thank you so much, Jason.
I really appreciate this timeto share our story and our
experience with you All rightCheers.
Speaker 1 (53:30):
Bye and thanks to our listeners for tuning in today.
If you or your company wouldlike to be featured in an
Inspire AI Richmond episode,please drop us a message.
Ai Richmond episode.
Please drop us a message.
Don't forget to like, share orfollow our content and stay up
(53:52):
to date on the latest events forAI Ready RVA.
Thank you.
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