Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome RVA to Inspire AI, where we spotlight companies and individuals in the region who are pioneering the development and use of artificial intelligence. I'm Jason McGinty from AI Ready RVA. At AI Ready RVA, our mission is to cultivate AI literacy in the greater Richmond region through awareness, community engagement, education and advocacy. Today's episode is made possible by Modern Ancients driving innovation with purpose. Modern Ancients uses AI and strategic insight to help businesses create lasting, positive change with their unique journey consulting practice. Find out more about how your business can grow at modernagentscom, and thanks to our listeners for tuning in today. If you or your company would like to be featured in the Inspire AI Richmond episode, please drop us a message. Don't forget to like, share or follow our content and stay up to date on the latest events for AI Ready RVA.

Speaker 1: 1:14

Welcome back to another episode of Inspire AI, where we dive deep into the intersection of technology, leadership and innovation.

Speaker 1: 1:23

I'm very excited to introduce our incredible guest, whose work is reshaping the way businesses and communities connect and learn through the power of storytelling. Joining me is James Warren, the founder and CEO of Share More Stories, a human experience research company. They've built the SEEQ that's S-E-E-Q platform, an innovative AI-driven storytelling-powered tool that helps brands and organizations understand and engage their audiences on a deeper level. James is a visionary leader who believes that storytelling isn't just about words. It's about unlocking emotions, perspectives and untapped potential to drive meaningful change. With a background in strategy, marketing and consumer insights, james is passionate about helping brands translate stories into actionable intelligence, whether it's improving customer loyalty, amplifying diverse voices, fostering empathy or shaping brand narratives. Share More Stories is at the forefront of using AI and storytelling to make employee experience and customer experience more impactful. Today, we're going to explore James' journey as an entrepreneur, the role of AI in research and storytelling, and how businesses can harness the power of narrative to build stronger connections.

Speaker 2: 2:53

James, welcome to Inspire AI connect here and talk a little bit about the work we do and how that fits, frankly, into the larger ecosystem of the work you all are doing and what you particularly are leading here with Inspire AI. So really grateful for the chance to be here and share our story a bit.

Speaker 1: 3:17

Outstanding. So can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your business and your interest in AI please?

Speaker 2: 3:25

Sure. Well, let's see, I've been in the Richmond region for about 20 years, originally New York. The New York area is home. I've actually lived in lots of places, but that's home because that's where our family is from and that's where I really grew up. And in terms of me, you know, I've got a family, I'm married, I've got four kids and we've come to see Richmond as home today.

Speaker 2: 3:53

You know, all of my kids have grown up here on some level or another, and there's so much about Richmond that I love. I love the innovation, I love the culture, I love the way people are really connecting around meaningful issues and challenges. But what I've always loved about Richmond and what drew me to Richmond was this sense of potential that Richmond had potential, was aware of its potential 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 in entrepreneurship and innovation and in technology. And so I started our company Share More Stories here in Richmond just over 10 years ago, and I started it after my corporate career. It was time to sort of make a transition from that work and I really knew two things almost all along that I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I wanted to do something in writing and storytelling because those were two of my earliest passions and loves writing and entrepreneurship. I'm sure we'll talk about both of those a little bit more as we go.

Speaker 2: 5:00

And so Share More Stories came about 10 years ago plus, really in a desire to say how can we create a place and a space for people to connect more deeply through our individual stories.

Speaker 2: 5:11

I believe that stories are a key part of the nucleus of our human experience and that when we share those stories with one another, we activate things in one another, we activate empathy, we activate connection, we learn more about one another and we built a business out of that, because we think that, at the end of the day, businesses are just groups of people trying to meet other groups of people's needs, and so we want to be a place where employees, customers, community stakeholders are able to share their stories with companies and company leaders who want to listen to those stories and who want to learn from those experiences and ultimately want to create better product services, organizations, cultures.

Speaker 2: 5:54

As a result, we came about interest being interested in that. There's a funny story about it which I'm sure we'll get into, but ai really became the, the technology platform and the tool set for us to do what we do in a more scalable and quantifiable way, for us to really say we've collected these stories, whether it's 10, a hundred or a thousand, and we really want to understand in those stories, what are they telling us about the way people feel about their experiences? In those stories, what are they telling us about the way people feel about their experiences? And so we're using AI to quantify emotion to understand these experiences deeply, individually and authentically, and also at scale.

Speaker 1: 6:38

Wow, that's beautiful. I definitely connected with your relationship to Richmond. I've lived here most of my life as well and I feel a lot of that connection deeply rooted in the community, and it's super important to me to see entrepreneurs building relationships with the community so that we can all thrive and let each other's experiences. So, yeah, I really connected with that. That's awesome and you started touching on this a little bit, but can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of share more stories and what's the what inspired you to create the platform centered around storytelling?

Speaker 2: 7:21

Yeah. So back in 2014, when I was exploring different potential businesses that I wanted to create, like I said, I kind of knew at a macro level I wanted to do something. I would say three things. I want to do something in tech. I knew I wanted to do something for myself, build my own company or business and I wanted to do something related to, at the time, even more specifically, writing.

Speaker 2: 7:46

I considered myself a frustrated writer for most of my life. More broadly, I definitely consider myself a lover of stories my own and other people's and so you know, the very, very first version was actually a place where we could help aspiring writers connect with one another and even write collaboratively. There's a deep tradition in when you're studying creative writing, of writing circles not even just things like fiction or poetry, but any kind of writing where you want to perfect your craft. It means a lot of trust. But if you create places and spaces where writers can share, critique, sometimes even co-write and collaborate, it unlocks a few things that don't come when you're just staring at the pen and pad yourself or staring at the blank screen. So I originally was like exploring, like collaborative writing, collaborative storytelling spaces and there's other examples of that, whether it's the storytelling circle or the choose your own adventure model, and all of those things were really interesting to me not terribly interesting at the time to lots and lots of people, and so I kept saying but there's something about the story and the storytelling or more, like we say, story sharing that was attractive to myself and other people that we were talking to, and what we started to hear was this seems like something that could be really really useful, especially now. Now, ironically, in 2014, we were hearing people saying things like social media feels really really broken and dark, so I want a place where I can connect and share, maybe in a little bit more authentic way, and so we initially started creating a place for people to literally just share their stories, to express themselves Some light guardrails, if you will.

Speaker 2: 9:32

We wanted to focus on personal stories, where people could express what was going on in their lives or on a particular issue or topic, and we quickly learned that content development, content creation, content asking people to share their stories needs focus, it needs structure, and so that allowed us to start developing tools and experiences, both online and offline, that gave people a reason to share their story, or something to respond to which we call the prompt and all of those things for the first couple of years were sort of the precursor. We were still exploring what's the business model, because we did want it to be a business. We wanted to help companies, help people, and we wanted to do that in an entrepreneurial way. And so I was at a conference up in New York called the Future of Storytelling Summit. This is a, at the time, a well-known festival of people in tech, communications arts, media entertainment, coming around this question of what is storytelling and what is the future, and at that time there was a lot of time and energy being spent on immersive storytelling. Ar and VR were really starting to grow, and so there was a lot of heavy, heavy focus on tech as a future of storytelling, which is understandable.

Speaker 2: 10:54

I was facilitating a workshop or co-hosting a workshop, and in that workshop there was a person who was a director of consumer insights at a really large consumer goods company and they were expressing like I think this is interesting, but I'm really looking for other use cases of storytelling. I'm trying to figure out how we can use storytelling as better research, to better understand where people are coming from. So we're experimenting with this but frankly, I haven't found a lot of people doing a lot in it. And that was one of those moments that you have as an entrepreneur or a creator or anybody trying to do something, where your inner voice says open your mouth. So I said we're doing something like that and she turned around and said, well, like, like who are you and what are you talking about? I said share more stories. We're exploring the role stories play in developing insight kind of came out and she was like really, I think that's fascinating, I'd love to talk more about it.

Speaker 2: 11:57

So after the conference, she gave us, um, her card, I gave her my card and within weeks she was coming to Richmond to demo our storytelling insights platform, which we hadn't fully built yet. We had a website, we were collecting stories, we were very qualitatively and in a human way assessing these stories, but we weren't yet figuring out how to do that with tech. So I asked my development team. I said can you help me find a tool, any kind of tool, that can analyze stories and create insight? And they said that's interesting. I'm not sure. They said I assume you're talking about more than just like basic keyword sentiment analysis. I said yeah, something that would like rock for a fortune 100 consumer goods company and they're like okay.

Speaker 2: 12:48

so we found a company that had a little tool. Um, they were using earlier stage ai, early language models to identify not just sentiment but key emotions, values and needs. And they were a company that got bought by IBM and they got rolled into IBM's Watson suite of tools and we found it. And so we started playing in Watson early and using the text of people's stories to analyze their experiences, to analyze 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 and interesting how you've blended, you know, like a fundamental human approach that prioritizes depth over noise and personal truth. Right, absolutely, absolutely, and not misunderstanding, and authenticity over transparency, right.

Speaker 2: 13:53

I was just going to say. I think the you know when you say prioritizing the human and the authenticity, that's exactly right, because you know our ethos is human plus digital. And we start with human for a reason. We're a technology company, but we are deeply, deeply, it's ingrained in our origin and you know, from my perspective, it will be part of who we are for as long as we are. Which is to say, these tools, these technologies, we're not. We don't see them as something to be afraid of. We see them as something to be leveraged and utilized to make the human experience better. And in this case, we're literally using it to understand the human experience so we can make it better, so companies can make it better. And so, for me, prioritizing the human in there there's no other way to do it Prioritizing their story and their experience is crucial to what we deliver for our customers and clients.

Speaker 1: 14:46

Yeah, we need that. Through the AI-related transformations that our world is going through, we need to keep that connection. So thank you for recognizing that. So how has your background influenced your approach to innovation? Were there pivotal moments that shaped your entrepreneurial journey?

Speaker 2: 15:08

Yeah, probably a couple. I mean just briefly. The first was, you know, I started my first business when I was 14. And actually, now that I think about it, I started my. I really started my first business when I was 12.

Speaker 2: 15:21

And my neighbor and I wanted to make money in our neighborhood. So we, we were two kids who started a cleaning business and we called it super kid power because we had read a book called kid power, and our first customer 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 of five, maybe six, and they said we'd like to hire you to kind of help clean the house today. And we were like, okay, sure, Sounds great. Me and my friend Norman, and we spent, you know, the first half of the day cleaning that house and we went home to lunch. We came back the second half of the day to keep cleaning the house and we weren't done at the end of the day. And we told them you don't have to pay us because we can't come back tomorrow. And they were like, well, here, take some for what you did. And we were like, because we really didn't, we could not come back. It was a lot. So I think the entrepreneurial bug was quieted for a little while.

Speaker 2: 16:21

But in 14, I started a business selling audio video equipment in New York to, like businesses, churches. I loved doing AV work, I loved the equipment, I loved all of that and I loved a little bit of the hustle of, you know, figuring out how to make something that people would want and buy or sell something that people would want to buy. So that kind of planted the seed a little bit more firmly early on, Used some of that money to help my family, used some of that money to help myself pay for a part of college and I was grateful for that opportunity. And then, you know, life started to kind of settle down. I started a career.

Speaker 2: 17:01

I was working at Altria Group for years, working in a lot of their new businesses and new product areas, and I really enjoyed doing that because, again, I loved building and I loved creating. But I realized after a while that what I did at Altria both running big brands and huge portfolios was at the same time very similar and also extremely different, you know, compared to starting a company and building a product from scratch. And so the last 10 years have been sort of picking and choosing different pieces of those insights and experiences to try to be a better leader, be a better teammate, help our company deliver better products and services. And you know, I think sometimes I do a really good job of it and other times I'm struggling mightily.

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 the mindset shifts you had to make when you went from corporate life to startup life?

Speaker 2: 18:09

I remember one of the first times I was like, presenting the I, the early ideas, kind of the concepts for share more stories, the people are presenting it to you like you sound very corporate and I was like, okay, and they were, and their hidden message was like you've got to be less corporate in this space and I was like I don't know what that means or how to do that. I mean, I've spent almost 20 years in corporate and in that space I felt like I was very entrepreneurially innovative and almost didn't fit entirely into that model. And so language and style and there's a confidence and assumptiveness that comes when you're presenting things in a corporate context and you kind of already not that you know the answer, but it's like the outcomes are fairly known and somewhat determined. It's like we're either going to do A or B, it's, it's not. Hey, there's a million choices and you might, you, you have this much of a chance of hearing a yes, it's okay, a or b, maybe c. And in an entrepreneurship and starting a company where you're exploratory for a while, everything is uncertain, everything is is almost like a no until it's a yes. And so I had to learn how to flip that script and see the journey and the vision as the driver of my own optimism, of our team's optimism, and not see no's as no's, see no's as data, as insight, so that I could learn quickly what was working and what was not working is not working, and I'm not saying we don't do that and people don't do that in a corporate.

Speaker 2: 19:43

I think over the last decade, 20 years, people have pulled more and more experiences, innovation-based experiences, from the entrepreneurial world into the corporate sector, but you're still dealing with a very dominant culture and mindset. That is generally. How do we deliver these results? Incrementally better, quarter over quarter, year over year. And you want a certain amount of predictability, because the more predictable it is, the more you can sort of forecast what you're going to get. And there's very little in the early stages and even in the middle stages about the entrepreneurial journey or the startup journey that's predictable, and so that I had to really get comfortable with the lack of predictability compared to what I was used to Wow.

Speaker 1: 20:32

Yeah, that makes total sense. Ok, so storytelling has been a powerful 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 and they're great for learning. And so we see stories as connectors all around us. We see that in what brands do with stories either the brand story in ads and social and long form content, customers or employees on social. And we see the reason why they do that because it drives engagement, because we're hardwired to react to and to listen to people's stories far more than we are to. You know, we hear an opinion, we want to argue it, we hear a story, we want to lean in and learn more, and so, you know, the connection piece is a given, and that's not the space, necessarily, that we're focused on. We're focused on the learning side, and so the practice of story sharing is a practice of helping individuals, groups and companies learn about people from their stories, and that goes back in time to the phrase the moral of the story. The moral of the story means there's a lesson in the story, there's something at the end of the story that can teach me how to avoid that danger or how to be more successful if I do this, or how to achieve the results I want to achieve. And so I believe, we believe that in every person's story or stories there are lessons for themselves, for the people that they are a part of and for the companies and organizations that are trying to serve them. And so, if you think about traditional research, which is predominantly qualitative and quantitative, qualitative is dominated by focus groups, but now there's a lot more out there. There's in-depth interviews, there's ethnography.

Speaker 2: 22:21

That is a space that is now seeing, and has, for the last 10, 20 years, a lot of innovation. That's technology driven years. A lot of innovation that's technology driven. On the quantitative side, most of that technology was going there early because you were dealing with large data sets. You're trying to figure out how to derive meaning and insight. What we've learned is the opportunity.

Speaker 2: 22:42

The really rich opportunity is to innovate in that qualitative side of the space, because it's still very open and there's still a deep need to say we more or less have our finger on the pulse of what people think or feel or experience with our brain, our product, but we are still having a hard time structuring that insight and activating that knowledge and data in a way that can aid decision-making, and so that's where technology comes in. For us, it's taking those stories, really taking those people's experiences, knowledge and data in a way that can aid decision-making, and so that's where technology comes in. For us, it's taking those stories, really taking those people's experiences that they tell us or they write, turning that into actionable data, in our case, quantifying the emotions of those stories and then developing insights like what does this mean, what should you do about this and why, so that company leaders and decision 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 I learn from others? And I leveraged collaboration to do that right. There's a ton of reasons why you want to connect and learn at the same time, and the moral of the story is you capture your experiences and you make sense of them in a structured way. Right, that's fun. How do you see like this? I don't see this framework evolving as more companies begin to embrace storytelling as a strategic tool.

Speaker 2: 24:18

Yeah, I think there's a few things I think we already see in different ways companies inside the organization and in the marketplace, the consumer, the employee, the human is craving more human-centered experiences. We see that there's lots of indicators of that, what people are spending their time, money and energy on. And the smart money says, oh, it's not about the tech for tech's sake, it's about tech enabling those human-centered experiences in less frictioned ways, more impactful ways, more enjoyable ways, more emotional ways. And so, critical to that, an ingredient of that is what is the emotion. What do people feel about these experiences?

Speaker 2: 25:00

And so I think you know, for us it's starting there, but it can go lots of places.

Speaker 2: 25:04

It can go from understanding these experiences to really helping create what we're starting to do now frameworks for how companies might engage their employees or customers based on these emotions, based on these we call them emotional bundles, things that sort of.

Speaker 2: 25:20

These five or six emotions really go together when you think about this type of consumer or this type of employee and if you want to increase this, you've got to decrease this that's a really, really powerful idea of like, hey, how do I navigate this consumer or these consumers, what they want out of these experiences, now I understand them, now I got to figure out what they want, and I need sort of the toolkit, I need the decoder ring, I need the magnifying glass to say what do I pay most attention to?

Speaker 2: 25:47

And these emotions help us know the answer to that. And so I think you know. For us that's the journey, but I think, more broadly, it's finding use cases where AI and other technologies are being used in an intentionally human-centric way to make the human experience better. And I think, if we make that sort of our mantra, there's plenty of things we can create that have an intrinsic positive benefit for humanity, versus the risks that we are seeing with technology run amok, where it, at a minimum, might be used by one human to harm another and at a maximum, you know, might eventually be the things that we are most afraid of, with good reason, for I don't think that's a foregone conclusion, and I think that humans today, doing what you're doing, doing what AI, ready, rba are doing, doing what we're doing, are a big piece to making sure it turns out 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 your platform? Can you tell us a little bit more about that, and how does it enhance storytelling and provide meaningful insights?

Speaker 2: 27:09

like I said, building in IBM Watson's platform and tool set. We were part of their global entrepreneur program early on and they decided at one point they were no longer going to maintain some of those tools, particularly the personality insights model that they had built, that we were running our analyses through, so we had to build our own and our CTO, andy Citizen, started investigating what are like, broadly, the platforms we could be building in. And our CTO, andy Citizen, started investigating what are like, broadly, the platforms we could be building in and we settled on at the time, google's BERT model to really there was a lot of sort of pre-built, pre-understood relationships between words and phrases and syntaxes and we could use that basic level of understanding, that not even so basic, that tremendous foundation, to start to really code emotion, to say, hey, these are the 55 things we want to measure and we started designing algorithms to predict those emotions. And then we started creating additional programs and analytics that would take those predictions, normalize them, if you will, and create sort of a case that says, hey, this is how people feel across these 55 emotions. That's a really, really high level and simplified way of talking about some brilliance that my teammate, andy, has put together Because we had to figure out a lot of things that didn't exist in the way we were building it.

Speaker 2: 28:24

We wanted to do a number of things, you know thematic analysis, syntax analysis, feature reduction, all kinds of things and we started to realize, hey, the linchpin here is figuring out how to teach AI to understand the language and understand the emotions in these different stories.

Speaker 2: 28:43

So that's what we built and what it does now is it predicts the emotional drivers of people's experiences and we're also able to analyze those experiences in a thematic way. So we could say, out of all these stories, 100, 1,000, whatever there's three or four big buckets of experience. Thematically, we can also create new ways of looking at groups of people. So instead of demographic or behavioral segmentation, we're doing emotional segmentation, psychological or psychographic segmentation, using these emotions, which is a really different way of figuring out. How do I connect? You're going to behave this way, or even saying, because you behave this way, you will automatically behave this way in the future. We're trying to figure out what do you care about, what motivates you, and let's use that as a better basis for predicting your behavior in the context of the brand or the organization or the company that you're interacting with.

Speaker 1: 29:44

So would I get it right by saying, in summary you all bridge the human intuition with data-driven insights.

Speaker 2: 29:53

That's a beautiful way of saying it Absolutely, Because it gives the leader a tool to say I think I understand what people are carrying out, but I can't quantify it yet. This is the tool that helps you start to do that.

Speaker 1: 30:05

Yeah, yeah, and it's great that Seek as a platform was built on years of hands-on facilitation, because that gives it a strong foundation for the AI tools that you overlaid into the platform as you were ready to continue development of it. So Seek seems to blend qualitative storytelling and 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 days one of our customers would say this is like a focus group on steroids and we loved that but didn't love that because we weren't sure that that would help people understand what was unique about it, that it was more than just asking questions and getting answers. And so you know, now when we talk about the qual and the quant sort of that blend, we mean it both in terms of the experience and the output. From a qual perspective personal stories, you know, people being able to express in their own words what their experience has been. It's rich, it's contextualized by themselves and it's engagement-driven. The act of telling your story is an act of engagement. And so when we invite people to share their stories with our customers, with the brands that they buy or the organizations they work for, they're actually engaging with them. In doing that, even if it's a company like ABC, they don't know who it is they're putting themselves in a place of vulnerability.

Speaker 2: 31:35

To say this is how I feel about this experience and that activates something that's really important for our customers, which is, we tell them all the time Seek is less about you wanting to hear what you want to know, what you want to know about, and it's more about hearing what these people are trying to tell you, because they have stories and experiences that they don't get to tell you. They get to answer your questions in surveys and in 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 than those types of qualitative tools do. And then on the quant, because we are quantifying those emotions and showing that in a scalable way, just because it's a web-based app, we can talk to 10 people or we could talk to a thousand, and you can't have a focus group with a thousand people.

Speaker 2: 32:25

You can't do in-depth interviews with a thousand people. Very well, I can't do that type of deep listening with a large number of people in most of the other tools that are out there. And so, rather than the traditional trade-off of I either get depth or I get breadth, our approach is to say we're definitely focused on the qual side. We're giving you better depth with analytics, but we're also giving you the breadth of it being a web scale platform. So you don't you're not limited to just 20 or 30 or 50 people. You could talk to 300 this way or a thousand this way, and that would be a really, really powerful way to help you understand deeply what people feel about your company or your brand.

Speaker 1: 33:06

That's incredible. Yeah, I love the approach I'll take. Have you, have you had any or seen any surprising or unexpected learnings from the stories you collect and seek and those were always like just very deep and profound and very 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't sure about is what would happen when we went from in-person workshops to a web-based platform and experience you know, the people doing it in the room where they're talking to each other and listening and then and thinking was great. But ultimately we want people to be able to write their own story, and I say write because that's where we're focused today. Tomorrow it'll be audio and video, but right now we're focused on writing because there actually is a different mental process that they go through when they're writing their story in response to a prompt. And so we were blown away by something that happened when we launched the web-based platform, which was people actually went a little deeper, and we think they went deeper because privacy wasn't their biggest question or fear of being vulnerable with other people. They had almost a not anonymity, but they felt protected and they were comfortable to be cathartic. But they felt protected and they were comfortable to be cathartic. And so we had people on our first project writing like 700, 800 word stories about their experiences working with a company and feeling imposter syndrome and we were like what happened, you know? And so there was. That was huge.

Speaker 2: 34:44

And the other thing I would say is, in general, there's there's something about visualizing people's emotions in their stories by putting data to that and helping the customer understand in words and emotions and in visualized data. This is how your customers feel about you. So by not just saying, hey, there's a few quotes and snippets that you might get from a qualitative piece, but showing them the emotional map of their customer base or their workforce, that turned out to be a game changer. We weren't doing that before. We were just showing like 0.56 or three out of five and we were saying things like they feel this way and they're high on this emotion, and they'd be like I don't get it. And then we visualized the emotions and they were like holy crap, I get it, you know. Like now I know what this means when I see like half of my organization has a high activity level and the other half of my organization is very cautious.

Speaker 2: 35:41

What could I do about? What could I do with that kind of insight as a leader, as a team member, when I realized that my brand. My customers are really driven by self-transcendence and they're also have a high need for structure. What does that allow me to do as a marketer, as a product developer, as a product manager? To create a product and create experiences that make them feel like they're part of something much bigger than themselves, but do it in a way that has some structure, so they feel that need is met, but that value is personified in the brand experience. When that started happening and our clients started getting that, it was a moment because you were like this is what we've been working for, this is what we wanted when we were sitting on the other side of the table as product managers and brand managers and brand leaders paying for the research, and this is what we wanted as consumers and employees to be heard and seen and understood. So that was mind-boggling for me and also deeply, deeply gratifying.

Speaker 1: 36:42

Excellent. Yeah, I get the sense that all companies need this, but they don't necessarily know that they do 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 Seeks Insights?

Speaker 2: 36:59

Yeah, Great question. I'll even take it up a step. What kind of individual leaders in those companies are benefiting? And it's leaders who have already kind of come to the place the realization that they need to do a better job listening to their customer or to their employee, that that don't want to listen in order to develop better experiences. We're not for them and they're not for us, because we'll be trying to convince them that something matters that they fundamentally don't think is important. And many of those leaders, by the way, still think improving experiences are important, but they think that the answer to improving experiences is based on what they know instead of what the consumer or employee is trying to tell them, and so we want the listening to be the first step in that journey, I 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 by answering these questions that I've structured to tell myself this is what you need. It sounds like relationships going bad, but I do think that companies that believe in creating better experiences for the people they serve their employees or customers in their communities they're the kind of companies that are attracted to us. We're focusing in what I would call emotion-rich and experience-rich sectors. We're generally focused in industries or sectors that are large and mature, because that's where you find the problems. That's where you find companies that are saying, hey, we're being disrupted from this new entrant, our brand is stale or we haven't done anything to change and our culture is becoming irrelevant. Whatever that is, that's where we usually find at least a readiness or a precondition of I'm willing to find other ways to solve this problem, because we know we're coming at it in a little bit of a different way. Travel and tourism has been a big sector for us. Energy in particular. You might think energy is not emotional until you start talking to people about either the price of energy or how energy impacts where they live and infrastructure, and then you realize it is deeply emotional. It is the place where not in my backyard lives and so figuring out how people and consumers in that sector interact with the companies that they serve is interesting. Interact with the companies that they serve is interesting Healthcare and wellness, of course.

Speaker 2: 39:27

Really, really big industry. Really a lot of frustration on the consumer part and, frankly, on the employee part I'm not going to. There are people who say this is too big and too massive and too broken to fix. I don't believe that. We don't believe that we think all of these industries because they're people, there's people in these companies serving people, and financial services is a place that we're focused. Again, big industries, lots of large, large players who also, frankly, have the budgets to explore things that don't fit in the traditional boxes of more surveys or more focus groups. Because we're not coming in at the top line item. We're having to sort of elbow our way in a little bit and say this is a tool you might want to consider to help you solve a problem that you're experiencing today.

Speaker 1: 40:19

I get it Totally. So, going back to scaling I think you brought this up earlier Can you talk a little bit 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 by the human focus. I would say we're empowered by the human focus. But there are trade-offs in how one might develop a company or product or build design, build code, whatever you want to do in that space, if they were not as guided and empowered by the human at the center of that as we are. There's ways to do all these things much, much, much, much, much faster, and we're already doing them much faster than we would in traditional research.

Speaker 2: 41:09

We could go much faster still if the human essence center was not our driving force, but it is, and so we learn at the speed at which we can bring people into the platform, have them share their stories, analyze those stories, deliver value for our customer. That's a cycle, that's not a one-minute cycle or a one-day cycle. That can take time to really take a customer through that entire journey, because our customers are the companies paying for these services and their journey with us is not quick. And so we could come up with outputs that are AI developed or AI powered. That would create lots of faster touch points and maybe create value, but probably create even more of the illusion of value and we're more interested in saying let's really get these insights deeply in their leadership, in their decisionmaking, and then scale, then accelerate with that company. And so it's a philosophical difference. It's not a technological one, it's a philosophical one that says, you know, we're willing to go a little slower to make sure that we're not sacrificing the quality of the human experience, the human-led insight. It's centered in human expression. So I can't speed the person up in the sense that I want them you know what I want to move three times as many people through the platform at the same time.

Speaker 2: 42:33

So, say less, say it faster, skip the words. Well, we kind of already have that today, and it's called social and it's not giving us all the best answers to humanity's problems. And so you know, I'm betting big on long form, our team's betting big on going a little deeper. We're not trying to ask people to write novels, but we are asking them to spend a little bit more time than they normally would thinking and expressing themselves and letting that be what drives the value creation in the platform, which, again, is significantly more scalable than our traditional qualitative means are today. Is it as scalable as looking at 5 million, 10 million, 100 million touch points in the blink of an eye. It's not there yet, but it is significantly more than what we would do if we were trying to code 100 open ends and figure out. What are people trying to tell us in this highly, highly biased survey that we just fielded? Not taking shots, but I am saying that a lot of our surveys today don't tell us what we need 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 chase the scale by minimizing human involvement, but your approach puts the human expression at the core. Right, get to scale because there's 8 billion people on this planet and growing, and all of them have a lifetime of stories and experiences. I mean, we have thousands of thoughts a day. We create multiple memories every day. We're creating memories and stories our whole lifetime. So the opportunity space is in the hundreds of billions and maybe even trillions of stories that are out there to be understood and that's going to continue to grow. So, to me, if we are creating a platform 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 like to talk as much because it's energy depleting to some people, but they want to tell stories, they want to share that connection with people. So I think you got something there. So what's next for Share More Stories? Are there exciting developments or future applications of your technology that you want to talk about?

Speaker 2: 45:06

Absolutely. And you know, when we talk about scale, we are working to scale the platform and that again, is on all different sides, right From a customer acquisition standpoint, from a product experience standpoint. We're doing all those things and in our next you know major release, we're taking a lot of the things we've learned from our customers and the stories they tell us and what our participants' experiences are and things that we deliver our customers. Now we'll be able to do them and they'll be able to do them in the platform on their own or with our support, if that's what they choose, in the very near future. So we have something we call iterative analysis. Let's say, you listened to or you collected a bunch of stories from your employees or customers and maybe it was sort of a let's set the foundation. What is the experience? Maybe it's how are people thriving in our organization? Or what's the most memorable travel experience you've had with our brand right Baseline foundation?

Speaker 2: 46:01

Well, once we have those stories, it's a rich, rich data set to go, keep diving into, to iterate what we are learning, which is mimicking the human experience of learning. We don't just ask a question and walk away and think, okay, I'm done. We ask follow-up questions. Well, we can ask follow-up questions of this data. We go back to the stories and we ask a different question and our analysis allows us to pull out different insights. Or we can go back to the same group and actually ask them another prompt, or we can ask that same prompt to a different group and test our assumptions and our hypotheses. So this iterative learning, this iterative analysis that we do in a semi-manual process today, that will be fully automated in the platform tomorrow and that's gonna take the utility and the ability for our customers as end users who do more with this platform. That is not only dependent on us as, say, their research provider. It really moves us from being the service provider into the platform provider and then providing services for those who want our help and our expertise.

Speaker 2: 47:04

And to be able to do that with more insight in a faster way, to be able to go back and forth and ask follow-up questions, which is what most people who are either pure researchers or their internal customers the product managers, the developers, the designers, the marketers you get a piece of research like that's interesting.

Speaker 2: 47:24

I have another question and if that survey is done or that focus group is done the marketers you get a piece of research like that's interesting. I have another question, and if that survey is done or that focus group is done, the only way to get more insight is to do another focus group. Well, in Seek, you don't have to do that. You can actually go back to the stories and ask a different question. It's got to be related, but think about it as your own small little AI Seek AI that really allows you to have a conversation with the platform to explore the stories and experiences on your own, in addition to what we're sort of automating for you in the way of reporting and analytics. That's what's next for us and, based on what our customers tell us and what we know are some of the bigger trends in generative AI, I think that's going to really really accelerate the platform's adoption with our customers.

Speaker 1: 48:09

Definitely, definitely All right. So what advice would you give to business leaders and entrepreneurs looking to leverage storytelling?

Speaker 2: 48:19

I love this question because it brings us right back to where we started, right the human in the center of all this. Because business leaders, entrepreneurs, founders anyone who finds themselves in a position where they want to connect or learn story is a really, really good tool, and whether you're trying to connect with your organization, sharing your own story is a really good way to do it. We often tell people it starts with 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 a workshop with leaders as sort of pre-customer engagement, we often tell them look, you know, you spend so much of your time talking to your organization. This is a chance for you to open up and really reflect on your own experience. And so the first thing we tell every participant when we do a storytelling workshop or a seek session, as we call it, is be yourself. That means focus on you. This is not about us, or we or them, or my sister, or this is about me. The second is be courageous. You know everything you want is on the other side of fear, as the quote goes. So storytelling whether you've done it a thousand times or you like storytelling.

Speaker 2: 49:40

I don't tell stories you do Because, like you said, everybody has them in them and the only thing required to get it out is just a little bit of courage. I don't tell stories you do Because, like you said, everybody has them in them and the only thing required to get it out is just a little bit of courage. And we tell people. That doesn't mean you have to tell the most vulnerable, emotionally wrenching story. Just tell a story about something that's important to you and why you do it. And it allows people, even who don't think they're being emotionally expressive. They will almost always tell us wow, I had no idea that was in me. And then the last thing we tell them is be curious, ask yourself why that matters to you.

Speaker 2: 50:13

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 think about? That story jumped out at you. I mean, you know because such and such, or because we went here, or because when we did it it really it was just one of the best days of my life. Oh, so that's what matters to you, and so we often ask people to really reflect on those three things 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 charming framework and I think it's the right framework for the human evolution at least the part in which I choose to see the goodness of humans and the goodness in leaders. They're willing to step into that vulnerable space and tell their stories so that people connect with them and don't see them as some sort of demigod or whatever. And you know, force that they would never, you know, see themselves as Like. It puts leaders into the human space for people when they do share their stories that way. I think that's super-, that's absolutely right.

Speaker 2: 51:33

Yeah, it humanizes us and puts us back into connection and relationship with each other.

Speaker 1: 51:38

Yeah, awesome. If you could have any superpower, james, what would it be and why?

Speaker 2: 51:46

Well, I love superheroes and my favorite superhero has always been Superman. When I was a kid, when Superman 2 came out, I immediately knew that that sequel was the best movie that had ever been made, partly because I lived in New York, so watching Superman fly around New York or Metropolis really resonated with me. I guess if I could have Superman's powers of hearing and x-ray vision, that's what I would want, because that would match my curiosity, because more than anything, I love to be able to see and hear what people are really experiencing. But if I'm honest about it and I kind of zoom all the way out, ever since I was a little kid I have 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 same time because superman had that impact on me. I'll never forget watching those, those movies, with my dad, who was a big fan. Such a great story. I'm glad it has such a strong legacy. And two, yeah, two. Well, james, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for your time. Wish you and your company the best in telling your stories and telling other people's stories and getting the rich data that these businesses would thrive off of. They just have to listen to their folks, so thank you for putting that out there for them.

Speaker 2: 53:23

Thank you so much, Jason. I really appreciate this time to share our story and our experience with you All right Cheers.

Speaker 1: 53:30

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