New Sense-makers podcast episode from Collective Content. Now live!

Join our host, CC MD Tony Hallett, who this month interviews content leader Samad Masood, associate VP at Infosys Knowledge Institute. Find out about metrics at a successful content marketing and thought leadership division, AI out of the trial phase, and why it makes sense to always remind people what you do.

In our Sense-maker Sessions we interview content leaders to get you all the answers to make content work for you.

Episode transcript:

Bill: In content marketing, sometimes you just need someone to make sense of it all. In this series, we’re joined by industry leaders sharing their tips, advice, and expert knowledge on what good content is and does. Our latest episode sees Collective Content MD Tony Hallett have a sit-down interview with Infosys Knowledge Institute associate vice president Samad Masood. Making sense of AI, content marketing metrics and more.

From our studio in London, this is the Collective Content podcast.

Tony: So this is our, latest in our CC event series. Where we go deep with a prominent content leader at the kind of company that we’re used to working with. Today’s guest is Samad Masood. Samad, really, really great to welcome you here today. Looking forward to learning about you, your views, your career, all that good stuff.

Samad: Thank you.

Tony: How are you doing today?

Samad: I’m good. Thank you, Tony. Thanks for having me. And, Yeah.

Tony: Well, like I said, we’re, we’re glad to have you here, and we’re going to dive straight in with the personal stuff. Just a little bit about your career, your background. I know you play five-a-side. I know you’ve told me about, like, pubs with good food and all that sort of thing. So you live London?

I believe you like London. You’ve seen the world. And I want to get actually straight into your background because you like a lot of people I know, started off as a journalist working at some some, well, some titles I knew back in the day the sort of infoconomys and places of this world, became an analyst, you went to Accenture.

And you’ve ended up where you are now. But tell us about those early days. First of all, is it the common route.

Samad: Yeah. I mean, the thing that’s, I have to always mention is that I didn’t grow up in the UK. I grew up in, in Southeast Asia. I was an expat kid, and, but, you know, I was I was always sort of, I suppose I was a British foreigner in a way. I came to the UK, in the 90s for uni.

And when I graduated, sort of just landed in a in a job as a journalist. Didn’t really know what I wanted to do. But I landed a job as a journalist and, and took it from there. And I was very lucky early on to have been mentored by some very, I mean, my first year was mentored by a real old, Fleet Street hack who, you know, literally had been employed by the publishing company to shout at young people.

And, In those days –

Tony: A great tactic, a great learning curve.

Samad: Yes. Those days, it was it was legal. And, you know, but it really gave me a grounding in, in writing and, news reporting. You know, I had to do, daily news reports, weekly newsletters and, a couple of features for a magazine. So, you know, the proper, you know, kind of. And it’s always been, it’s always been B2B, you know, trade journalism.

And then I was very, you know, I started in a risk magazine, or an offshoot of risk magazine and really wasn’t that into financial services. And luckily, you know, in those days I was the youngest on the team. So they said “oh, you write the internet page.” You know, like, like we say to people “you do the social media bit” or you, you know, you give the young person that sort of thing.

And that led me to a job in, infoconomy, writing for information age and in for economist. And after a few years, you know, I think there’s an interesting line that goes from my early training and learning as a journalist through my corporate experience.

I was always really interested in telling, you know, the actual story and what I found was interesting story. And what became frustrating with journalism was that, you know, for all of our high principals, the fact was that we weren’t always encouraged to write the most interesting story. We’re encouraged to write the most surprising story or the thing that was going to get some, you know, get someone to read, or now increasingly click.

So I guess it was old school sort of clickbait and, and I felt like I really wanted to go deep on some of these issues, particularly because it was trade journalism. And I have to say, I’ve always been fascinated with how businesses work, the challenges they face, and such.

So that then led me from journalism. I got a job on computer wire. Which was then owned by Data monitor. And that was kind of a nice stepping stone for journalists because it was owned by an analyst firm, but still had a very kind of news reporting ethic.

Tony: Yeah, I remember, think with those people, when you look each other up on LinkedIn, you’ve got dozens of people in common. But actually don’t know each other that well. And I think that starts in that era.

Samad: I was lucky. I was lucky to kind of just get the tail end of that era and, yeah, there’s a large network of those people who kind of it was that, you know, you experienced it as well. That shift to the internet, that we were all kind of finding.

Tony: An exciting time to get to be a journalist or an analyst or just following the businesses and doing things then. So tell me, so that journalist to analyst move, that was helped by being within that same umbrella organisation.

Samad: It was because, the, the critical thing that really changed things for me was that when I was at computer Y, we worked on something called the Global Computing Services Newsletter. And our main product, we would spend the morning writing news stories, and then we’d spend the afternoon like scanning the internet for press releases on, I.T outsourcing contracts.

And then we’d have to then input those I.T outsourcing contracts, the details into a spreadsheet. And by the end of it, that was like a multi thousand row spreadsheet that now makes a lot of money or still makes them a lot of money. But, you know, after six months, you could have asked me any question. You could have given me 2 or 3 points of data on an I.T outsourcing contract.

And I could probably have guessed, the vendor, the services, the cost, the price, the duration. You know, it just like gave me this year of real in-depth understanding of the IT services industry. And so I moved from writing about software to services. And that, long story short, led to a job at Accenture, sort of supporting their research.

Tony: Okay. And I think I first came across your name back in your analyst days, and we would get through the classic sort of research notes. And I remember your name from that. And then I think I knew of you’re going to Accenture. So please also tell us about that. And then how it’s kind of come full circle to us knowing each other now.

But so what happened there?

Samad: So I was doing more on this stuff and I really enjoyed that because, to be frank, you got to stand up in front of people and tell people what you thought. You know, as a journalist, you were always encouraged, or I was always encouraged, you’re not there to share your opinion. You’ve got to find people, ask other people, and sometimes you had to prompt them with your opinion in order to get them to say the things you wanted them to say. And then you had to find someone to disagree with that opinion. And, you know, it’s all above board and such. But, it sort of felt to me like a really long way around doing what I really wanted to do, which was tell people what I thought about what was going on.

And the analyst world was ideal for that. And, you know, as an analyst, you’re given your beat and you meet lots of people. You forecasts the market size, you write about it. And it was really great fun. And I got some experience basically standing up in front of boards, private equity firms, quite senior people and advising them on my view of the market.

And I realised then that actually you didn’t have to be particularly smart to convince – to kind of, impress people. Well, all it was really was that, you know, these people are very busy and they don’t have the time to, you know, you’ve had months and months to, to to, research a beat and build an opinion.

And even if you don’t have much of opinion, they still value what you’ve learned. And, so, it gave me more of a confidence to kind of have faith in what I thought about things because, and this goes back to my journalist days, I’ve always had a bit of, anyone who knows me from those days.

I was that guy who always asked an annoying question, always asked an additional question when everyone wanted to go for lunch. And people come up to me afterwards and, you know, give me dirty looks. “I mean, stop asking those questions. Annoying.” But I had this view that, and often I’d ask questions. Very basic questions, because I just didn’t understand what people were saying.

And I think there’s another realisation that from journalism, you can’t write down the jargon someone gives you. Your editor will just throw it out. You go if you don’t understand. So you have to ask someone, “what does leverage mean?” You know, what do you mean when you say? –

Tony: I can say it means nothing. Don’t say leverage. And you’re being very humble. But what you’re talking about is it makes a lot of sense to, to then telegraph how you’ve ended up where you are now. So talk about, ending up at Infosys, and you are at a particular part of the company and please tell us all about it.

So shortened to IKI. But, tell us about the Infosys Knowledge Institute.

Samad: Yeah. We prefer the Infosys Knowledge Institute, actually. But obviously, the shortened version is easier a lot of the time. But yeah, Infosys – so I’d spent a few years at Accenture on thought leadership, but then moved into doing some other things where, I was able to work with, fintech startups.

I set up a kind of open innovation program in the UK for, for Accenture and did a lot of things. And then I had kids, and was sort of thinking, you know, can I maintain this kind of client facing consulting kind of role? Because there’s a lot of effort. And Infosys came along at that point.

And, they had set up the Infosys Knowledge Institute. And I think if you think about where Infosys is as a company, you know, they, you know, 40 years old now, really one of the pioneers of the Indian I.T industry.

Tony: Yeah.

Samad: The outsourcing and services industry, and they’re now in the top tier, they’re one of the top 4 or 5 I.T services companies globally, you know, up there with Accenture and E.Y and Deloitte and IBM and such. And, you know, I think they felt it was time, the chairman, Nandan Nilekani, certainly felt it was time that they had an official thought leadership arm.

That sort of ivory tower style thing. And, and, you know, I met the, the guy Jeff Kavanagh, who is, put in the position to set it up. I think after about 4 to 6 months that I had joined and they’d got the basics in place. But I think what was really useful is that I had brought publishing experience and the experience of working in and running research teams.

So actually, while my Accenture experience has helped in many other ways, it’s helped in understanding how the consulting business works, how the client side works. Actually, most of what I’m applying at the Infosys Knowledge Institute comes from my days at Ovum and Computer Wire as well.

Tony: Well I was going to say that publishing experience, so there are parallels with this other, so if we talk about we, we tend to talk about the big GSIs. So that sort of, you know, it’s – I’m not going to name all your competitors – but a grouping of, say, somewhere between 20 and 35 companies everyone in tech knows, just like they know Infosys.

And those companies have tried different things over the years, different versions of the ivory tower, but really smart people saying really smart things who don’t always have a publishing background. So you have the analyst background and the publishing background. And you’ve brought that in. So talk a little bit –

Samad: Just don’t have the smart bit as well. So yeah, I fully agree.

Tony: No, shut up with that. So so you’ve spoken to me at different times about the models different companies have to make this work. One of the areas we’re moving on to is it’s about the measurement of the results of this kind of work. And we’re inevitably going to speak about AI a bit later as well.

But, but how do you then approach that? So if you’re justifying budget, if you’re trying to show results and this is the way, how do you go about that? And I know we’ve, we’ve even talked about a book which is quite recent and quite prominent. If you want to bring that into the conversation.

Samad: Yeah. No, certainly. So I mean, there’s a lot to unpack in what you’re saying there. And I think, you know, I’ll, I’ll start with, you know, the ivory tower thing. I think a lot of organisations are challenged because, with thought leadership, because they are challenged by it, because they, they do see it as the ivory tower stuff, and they see it as “oh, this needs to be really, really smart.”

And in a way, I feel like, many organisations aim too high, too fast. In that they are they are trying to, they want to be so good. They want to be that one report that everyone emails around, and everyone talks about. But we’re talking here about, you know, the top 1% of things that get published, if not less.

I mean, you look at a great organization, in the industry, like McKinsey, which is world renowned for what it publishes. You actually look through everything they publish. There’s still only a fraction of it that really is that well known? And they do a great job of what they’re doing and have been doing it, you know, ever since they started.

They’ve been doing that. It’s the mainstay of their marketing and their branding. So, you know, I think, you know, to your, your point about, how do you make sure that you keep getting fed? And get budget and things like that? In any large corporate there are multiple, mulitple stakeholders.

And I think Infosys is in that top tier of extremely large global companies in which there are more stakeholders than you can count. And you need to focus and target yourself while also ensuring you’re in some way creating some clear value for all of those critical, the critical people that you need to. Now in a smaller organisation or maybe an organisation – and I’m not even talking to that small – I mean, like I say in Accenture, these firms are, a whole other level of size, right? A lot of those I.T firms, those top 20, many of those you’re going to quite middling sized businesses. And of course, it’s all in perspective. But where you might only have a handful of stakeholders, but you’ve got to identify why those stakeholders identify the different things that drive them and what they’re interested in.

And then so much of it is clear, concise messaging internally that you have to keep repeating because a lot of people don’t, they sort of shrug and go, what are you doing here? Why are you even here? What are you doing for me?

Tony: So what you’re saying is that the internal comms is vital, really, to really prove that you’re doing the good work. What are some of the other things you would advise around making that ROI argument internally?

Samad: I think it depends on your organisation, obviously, but I have always been – because I accidentally landed in writing, I was never really convinced anyone was reading anything I was putting out there. And I just thought it was all, kind of, laughable to think people were reading it.

Tony: Feel like you to say until.

Samad: Yes.

Tony: Okay. Go on. Okay. Going to give myself a point for that one.

Samad: And actually, I think I’ve put a lot of effort and we’ve put a lot of effort in the Infosys Knowledge Institute at tracking the performance of our content. And you can call it content performance marketing. We can call it content marketing. But we’ve certainly taken a lot of elements, of that approach and fed that into how we track the impact of our content.

So a lot of our discussions internally, both to our own team members and our stakeholders, to say “look, this is how it’s performing. This is how we can increase it and can improve it.” And I think we’re in a very fortunate position that because of this strong brand and reach that we do get a lot of readers and we get a lot of views and we’re able to, cut that and see how many of those are coming from client organisations and I feel in Infosys, we’ve become part of the journey with marketing to develop more content marketing, more content performance.

While also having a very thought leadership led approach to choosing the topics, understanding how you write something in a quality way. How you don’t just mimic what people are saying, but try and bring some new angle to the story. And I think, you know, as I mentioned a bit earlier, you can be in a large organisation and people will often just not know what you really do, or why you’re there.

And so that internal comms, whether it is on the data side or, on the performance side, my recommendation to anyone is make sure that people in your organisation know what value you’re bringing, and prove that value. And unfortunately, unless you’re one of the world’s best writers of thought leadership, your content alone is not going to be enough because everyone has an opinion on content, right?

Everyone has an opinion. Now everyone can read a piece of content and go “oh, well, I wouldn’t put it that way. I wouldn’t have said that. Oh, you forgot to mention this.” You know, it’s subjective.

Tony: Yeah. I’m being particularly quiet at this point because I think we’ve absolutely got one of the great soundbites from this interview. And I know some of your peers who end up listening to this, I think they will recognise what you’re saying there. Yeah. I wanted to ask about 2 things. So we we’ve talked before about thought leadership and content marketing, and there’s an old, old colleague of mine who put a piece up, a few weeks back on the internet about saying he thinks it’s sort of quite separate, and content marketing, we always talk at the agency about it being a process.

It’s not about a specific type of content. It’s normally with the result and the result on a good day being a sale. And it can even be B2C, but normally being something like a lead at the end of a process. And thought leadership feels like quite a rarefied, difficult thing to do not everyone can do it.

But you see them both as part of the same equation.

Samad: I think, Charles’s piece, it was Charles?

Tony: Yes.

Samad: His piece, really, what I agree with is that your thought leadership shouldn’t be led by your content performance strategy, right? But I think your content performance strategy can be led or highly influenced by your thought leadership strategy. And that’s what we’re doing at Infosys, and it’s working very well.

We work very closely with the digital marketing team, on that. And we’re advising each other on this, they can see that our content does better than the content that others, are putting out.

Tony: That’s key, isn’t it?

Samad:  Yeah, yeah. So we’re delivering good metrics for them and they’re helping us deliver good metrics for ourselves. I think when you mentioned the rarefied element, right. Where I sort of disagree with Charles, if I’ve interpreted what he’s saying correctly, is that the ivory tower rarefied content bit, as I’ve mentioned before, it – I feel like you’re fighting a losing game there because I think any one of us could get noticed by writing something extremely provocative, timely, opinionated.

The problem is, is if you’re writing it for a corporation which has multiple stakeholders, multiple clients at different stages of relationship and conversation, you’ve got to ask yourself how do you come up with a really interesting topic that doesn’t in some way offend someone or ruin some conversation that’s happening or paint the wrong picture.

And the larger the firm, the more of these potential issues. And Charles puts in his piece, actually at the end he concludes, you’ve got to let the leaders lead. But you know, we’ve got great leaders. They’re not all thought leaders. They’re not all the sort of people who can turn all of their great experiences into a pithy article that grabs people and shocks people.

And in fact, many of them are leaders because they’ve been very diplomatic and they’ve not been, you know, that sort of thing. So they’ve had great, great attributes that means that they wouldn’t be the kind of, be able to kind of come up with narratives that are really surprising or shocking, although they have very smart stuff.

So it’s kind of helping them. I think it’s sort of there are very few firms, I feel, where you can align a very, very shocking, unique new, different narrative that everyone agrees with.

Tony: Okay.

Samad: And it’s difficult to have the freedom to do that.

Tony: And so, I think we probably need to tip our hat to Charles Cooper and put a link to his article in the notes to this episode. And, Coop, if you ever listen to this, we’d love to get you on the show as well sometime to discuss this.

Last thing I wanted to say about ROI conversation.

So you put me on to these guys and this book, ‘ve nothing in it to promote this book. But Cindy Anderson and Anthony Martial, you shared a panel with them, I think, one time.

Samad: Yes. Yeah, I’ve met them a few times.

Tony: Okay. And there’s an IBM link in there somewhere. I should probably say that.

Samad: Yeah, Cindy and Anthony, head up the Institute for Business Value at IBM. And, they’ve been doing this sort of stuff a long time, and I was very impressed with the book. They’ve laid out in very pragmatic terms how to calculate ROI. And I think the big, for me, it’s a seminal moment where in the past I think thought leadership was quite a vague thing in which, you know, people knew it when they saw it, but they didn’t know how to hit it out the park every time.

And, and I think what they do is sort of literally provide a formula.

Tony: They do. Yeah. And archetypes of different types of thought leadership, etc.

Samad: So they kind of define what it is, how it can make you money, and how much money you can expect it to make. Which I think in the marketing world there’s been lots of those sort of calculations, but thought leadership has not had that. And thought leadership, whether you like it or not, is a form of marketing.

And that partnership needs to get stronger and stronger.

Tony: We need to interview them as well. I feel like, speaking to the gallery, we need a roadshow is what I’m thinking. Yeah. Take this on the road. You talked about the cost per client click. Am I right in saying that as one of the metrics that you use.

Samad: Yes so one thing we try and develop internally is how much have we invested in creating a piece of content. Yeah. An asset. And then how many, client views did we get? And then roll this all up into, so we look at our total costs, we look at the total investment we put in, and we divide it by assets and all this.

And you know, it’s not a precise number, but it gives us an understanding of how we are delivering efficiently, because I think that’s the other thing in today’s environment to not be seen as too weighty a team that is just full of academic types taking their time writing and reading.

Tony: Yeah, and also vanity metrics. You’re concerned about the people you really want to reach. And there are other people who might get some goodness from that content, but they’re not really your audience.

Samad: So yeah, I mean, I think, I think the cost per click sort of calculation – and we do lots of, we’ve done lots of different calculations internally – it’s all to try and evidence the value. And I think, I mean, while, Anthony and Cindy’s book is great for the formula they create, there are still a lot of assumptions in there that you have to trust.

And, and I think cost per click is a very crude but effective way of going “Well, this is how much you spent and this is what you got.” And then using that to compare it against other sales and marketing techniques. But the challenge I find is – in every business I’ve worked in – and I think this is a challenge that Infosys finds with its clients a lot and most people won’t be surprised to hear, the availability of data is pretty poor. If the data is being collected, it’s hard to pull together or no one’s been given the time or the incentive to integrate it all and all that.

So a big thing we’ve been doing, and not just Infosys knowledge institute, but at Infosys in general, is getting better and better at pulling all that data together and getting more consistent, clear views across the piece so that we can start understanding, well, is this effective?

Is it doing what it needs to do? Rather than getting, so we want to get away from the view of thought – I’m not the only one who said this, I think, in thought leadership – get away from the view that we should be writing about topics and themes and that content strategy, towards a content strategy that is focused on who is our audience, what do we want them to do? And how is this content going to make them do that? What do we want them to do or think? And then measuring how are we going to measure that that worked.

Tony: Yeah. No that’s, that’s really well said. And there’s that, there’s a tendency to think everybody is, especially companies in the tech space, that everybody is so advanced with their use of data. And sometimes it’s hard to see the woods for the trees.

And one other thing I wanted to ask you about quickly, on your LinkedIn, I’ve seen something called House of genius.

I have no idea what that is. Tell us about that.

Samad: It’s a really interesting concept. It was, founded in Boulder, Colorado, by a bunch of, sort of startup entrepreneurs. It’s really – it’s actually interesting because it really shaped my view of thought leadership as well. It’s basically a forum for an entrepreneur to bring an idea to a room of about 12 or 15 people.

But all of those people are anonymous, and some could be CEOs, some could be VCs, some could be a chef or a taxi driver or whatever. They’re not brought because of their job title. Their brought because of their ability to have opinions. And it’s basically a reverse Dragons’ Den where the entrepreneur doesn’t pitch. They bring 2 or 3 problems.

And they’re given only 7 to 10 minutes to explain their business and the problem they need to overcome. And then you go around the room and the feedback is given. And the feedback, when you give it, you’re not allowed – and this is important – you’re not allowed to say who you are, what you do. And you also are not allowed to qualify your statements.

So you can’t say something, “Well, you know, well, I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I know…” you have to explain why. But each of those people are only given a minute and a half to give their answer. So it’s high pressure and you cannot repeat something someone’s already said. You just say “yes, I agree with that person, I’ve got nothing more to add.”

So it forces this real intense thinking because you can’t fall back on this. “You know, well, I work for Google, so I know this.” So you have to really explain yourself. And that’s kind of what you need to do with thought leadership as well.

You can’t just rely on the fact that you come from a big company or that you have done these things. You need to explain to people in it, in the simplest terms. And yeah, so it’s been great. It doesn’t run so often anymore. We ran it for about ten years, about almost ten years ago now.

And, and it was great. A big startup boom in London. We were running it here and having lots of startups coming through.

Tony: I’m really intrigued. I will talk to you about it more. I am conscious that if it was over here, it sounds like a BBC radio four comedy hour somehow.

Intermission: This is the Collective Content podcast. This is the Collective Content podcast.

Tony: I think this is a good time to segue onto our sort of last section. Inevitably about the rise of AI, especially gen AI in recent years and LLMs. What role do you see for it in in your world of content?

Samad: I think the best analogy I’ve heard, or the metaphor for GenAI it comes from, one of our team members, Kate Beavan, who herself is a very esteemed journalist, now a commissioning editor. And she described it as we’ve got to see GenAI as a new keyboard.

It doesn’t take – what generative AI does, for writing – it doesn’t take away the need to think about a strong narrative and something compelling. What it does help with is a lot of pulling together your research and your data. It can help you, we’ve now got tools which are analysing all the stuff we’ve written in the past.

So just our own stuff. What did we write about this? It saves a lot of time on that.

Tony: We’re doing the same thing. Yeah, on a smaller level, I think. But yeah.

Samad: So it saves a lot of time there. It also helps with new ideas. You know it can be a good ideation tool. But fundamentally you’ve still got to come up, it can’t really come up with compelling narratives. It can come up with mimics of compelling narratives, but they don’t work every time. So yeah, I think there’s – but we’re not just writers, right?

We’re videographers, we’re research analysts, we’re data analysts, and actually we’re using AI a lot in our video and audio stuff. And, and we’re starting to use it more and more in our data analysis and research.

Tony: And you mean as a, as a tool, for example, like in editing or design and cleaning things up. And yeah, because there is – I mean, people have traditionally talked about that classic uncanny valley with, with, visual AI generated content. But I would say this, kind of use the same term for when you read something and it just doesn’t feel right.

And I think what we’ve found across all our clients, and for our own content, is the risk of anyone going there has so far been one of the main reasons why people are not thinking they can just get it to create so much. And also experienced content leaders such as yourself who understand the bigger picture and the efficiencies where there are.

Samad: I think, you know, we don’t we don’t use AI to create new visuals. But I think the increase of that is going to make it even more important to have real people involved. And one of our strategies is to get as many of our clients and partners face to face, you know, to have them videoed or talking about their, – I would you know, it’s interesting, you know, we talk a lot about writing, but videoing video, a video interview is so much quicker and easier to do.

And so much more compelling. And then you can write something off the back of that. But writing something and having some AI visuals with that uncanny feel of them, it’s kind of, it doesn’t really do anything. Because ultimately I’d rather have no visuals. But, really we use vision more and more to prove that we have those relationships with those real people rather than to.

From a thought leadership perspective, anyway, because, you know, we it’s got to be based on people and their experiences and their thoughts, you know.

Tony: And it’s believable, and it’s real. Authentic. AI is the tool to make you better at that rather than yeah, creating it from nothing.

Samad: And then I do think, you know, we’re seeing this shift. And you mentioned this in a previous conversation, but, do we need more editors? I think, yeah, we probably need more editors, but I think we also probably need what we call producers, which are rather than writers, but, almost producers/project managers who are kind of working within our team.

And we’ve always from the start called our writers producers because we see them as, you know, they own a little business, they own their beat. They have their stakeholders, they’re the service lines or products and Infosys that they are helping create or leadership for. And they are working with those teams and their marketing teams to build content strategies and create a stream of assets that come out of that.

And they can use GenAI to help them with the strategy, to help them with the writing, to help them with all of that stuff. But ultimately, it needs to be good enough to meet the strategy.

Tony: And are you are you encouraging them to use certain tools, or are you letting them find their way and hoping to get some sort of diversity.

Samad: We’ve kind of passed the finding way stage. So we’ve done about two years of just go experiment and come back. And we had a series of sessions where people were showing off what they’d used and how they’d learned to use it. But we are now starting to roll out AI platforms.

Tony: Okay. Anything you can tell us without giving away the crown jewels?

Samad: I’m not entirely sure. Some of them are built in-house. Some, purchased.

Tony: Yeah.

Samad: But I think it’s best that I keep that quiet until we –

Tony: No, no, no, we’ll give you an armlock or something, and then get it out of afterwards.

Samad: We’ll see if they work. Then we’ll – but, you know, I think we’re entering an era of AI where it’s very similar to the many digital waves that you’ll have seen before as well. That we’re getting to that platform stage where it’s not just go to ChatGPT and then go to Claude and then go, you know, it’s actually platforms that are bringing all of those LLMs together and then giving you a process by which to go down this route.

Build your strategy. Okay, that strategy tells you, which content pieces you need and what time you should input your data. Tell you, well, these five articles, one should be on these topics. This is the SEO. Okay? Use that SEO to write an article that says this. Okay.

So it kind of guide you to all of that.

But fundamentally, you still have to write. You still have to publish something that is based on the Infosys perspective, supports the Infosys strategy and is credible and compelling enough that someone will actually read. It’s not just AI slop.

Tony: Yeah, it’s incredible hearing this because you’re describing there are so many areas where AI can be useful. But we had a content and AI event we held last November. And someone in the audience was actually a copy lead at one of our clients, and he stood up and said, actually, the writing is the last area you want to use this for.

There’s all these the other things we’re missing. You’re describing a way forward.

Samad: I think that when it first or started a few years ago, I won’t lie, I think we were all scared that what was going to happen to our writing. But actually, the reality is there’s so many more things it can help with before you even get to the writing. And so, you know, I think that’s how we’re using it.

Tony: Okay. Samad I think that’s a good point to leave it there. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Samad: Thanks. It’s been really enjoyable to talk about it, and I look forward to hearing all your other episodes.

Tony: Good, good. Well, we’re going to be producing more in this series. Content leaders, generally at big tech and professional services companies. That’s our thing. Please tune into more and look out for our latest events coming up as well. I’ve been Tony for Collective Content. Thank you.

Bill: This was the Collective Content podcast Sense-maker Sessions. Let us know what you’d like us to make sense of next.