Gemma Craven 0:47

Yeah, great to be here Jordan. Thanks for having me. So, yeah, at Scribd I am CMO. And I work across that means working across four products. Scribd.com, SlideShare, Everand, and Fable. We are the four products are connected because they help people move from discovery to deep understanding. I can tell you a bit more about that. And I think the best way to do that is to think about the day in the life of say somebody in the PR or marketing. You know, as you know in the PR space, you might be starting your day with your research mode and going into discovery mode on a new client because you need to write a presentation later that day.

So, you turn to scribd.com which is home to over 350 million documents on every topic imaginable uploaded by our community. And you might find a paper written by another PR pro on AI roll out within a comms department or a technical paper written by an engineer at a new your new client. And so, you do your research and develop understanding on scribd.com, and then turn to writing a presentation to meet the client. Whilst writing that presentation, you hit an inspiration bump in the road, so you fire up SlideShare, which is home to 25 million presentations, shared by subject matter experts globally.

And there you find some inspiration that helps you create that deck. You finish the deck, you ship it, and have a successful client meeting. Later that day, you want to decompress, unwind at home, and turn to a book. So, you open Everand, which is our reading app, home to millions of audiobooks, ebooks, and podcasts. I'm currently listening to Bonfire of the Murdochs on Everand, which I thoroughly recommend to anybody who still misses Succession like I do. And finally, if you want to talk about that book or connect with other readers, that's where Fable comes in, which is the fourth brand in our portfolio.

Fable is a social reading community, home to hundreds of thousands of book clubs, a place to discuss, find new books, as well as track your reading activity. So, the four products, a spectrum from understanding to, from inspiration to understanding, depending on where you are kind of in your journey.

Gemma Craven 4:17

Great question. So, we separate them out into two parts of the universe. So, if you're a scribd.com user, you also get access to SlideShare, given it's that kind of research understanding mode. And then on the reading side, Everand and Scribd, we have a bundled subscription for those two. So, it's, you know, two sides of the business, depending on which mode that you're in.

Gemma Craven 5:18

Yeah. So, our brand belief at Scribd is that thinking is worth saving. And this comes from a company whose mission is to advance human understanding. So, it's about providing the source materials, the ability for human users to develop their understanding, to do the research, to continue their own learning journey. And you know, as I was saying, scribd.com is an applied knowledge platform that's home to over 350 million documents of all types and the thinking was you know really like we're sitting on this corpus this the brand is the product and the product is the brand and that was really important for us to protect and build into the rebrand.

And to be clear, the problem is not with AI itself. We use AI extensively internally and to build an intelligent layer into our products, but it's more around skipping the thinking stage and making sure that you know we stand for protecting human thought and the research and understanding piece. And I think that's really the difference between researching deeply and asking for quick answers. And that was really the genesis behind that rebrand.

Gemma Craven 6:59

The State of Reading report comes from our reading products, Everand and Fable. And as you rightly say, it's something we conduct annually to really understand how, why, when people are reading given the importance it plays in all of our lives. And what we found this year is that people are reading more in multiple formats and they're reading to escape the stress of daily life. They're reading to relax and they're reading to disconnect. I think that was one of the That was a very big finding and the second was really that how they're discovering what to read next.

And they're turning to other people. So, other people's recommendations over bestseller lists, over recommendation lists in their favorite apps. So, it's really what the others around them are reading. I think the key here is to think about to what we learned what which was it's how that happens at scale. So, they're turning to other people, say in a reading community, in a book club, to really sort of connect and learn and engage. And it's so it's the technology layer here is connecting with other people and doing that at scale. And just thinking about the piece you asked around relationships and what that means in terms of sort of technology trust.

People aren't rejecting technology. Our research showed us they're actually renegotiating their relationship with it. So, technology to help them find others, talk, connect, engage, and consume the book that they might be reading. But, it's really thinking about the role that it plays in their life in a world where there's a lot of noise, there's a lot of content, and sort of the moments that technology use is right for them and the moments that it's not.

Gemma Craven 9:10

Yeah, we use AI quite extensively, you know, internally, operationally, as well as within our platforms to help build an intelligent layer on top of content. So, whether that's giving you on scribd.com an intelligent summary of a document that might help you understand whether you want to go deeper, download that, and apply more of your own research to that to an assistant that might help you discover your next book. So, it's tools to help with the consumption experience rather than replace that deep that the need for human thoughts.

Gemma Craven 11:03

Yeah, so, after an initial tool roll out, first of all, and allowing the time and space for your teams to experiment and see where, you know, AI fits into their day and the room to understand and learn with it. It's first of all, you know, understanding where they're at once they've been through that from that initial uptake moment. So, we actually ran surveys internally to understand where teams were at and what you know, what we needed to hear from them so we could understand what came next. And actually, we found that there'd been a lot of adoption and people were using tools, but there was a there was some need for clarification in terms of role and what their roles were becoming and where the AI fits into their daily lives.

So, I'd first of all recommend that kind of taking a pulse check of teams and understanding their comfort level and the areas we need to really focus on. You know, from that, but understanding that the shape of work is really changing. Increasingly AI is handling that middle layer, the execution layer, which means the human level on top of it is really about judgment, strategic thinking, and curation. And so, understanding that evolution in terms of roles and that then ties back to working with teams to think about what the roles are becoming, even going so far as thinking about like what is the actual, the journey that we're looking at with our teams, our employees as they move through different roles and what those roles are becoming.

So, thinking about how work is changing. This is a transformational moment. It's more than the tool roll out as, you know, we've seen in the past with big technological changes. This comes with changes to how we do our job. I'll give you some examples of within kind of PR and marketing within my teams. For example, we automated a whole editorial content operations layer for our editorial team who write for our blog and across our newsletters. It doesn't mean we've outsourced the written work to the AI. It's a that actually the behind the scenes work it takes to concept and produce, say a blog post is now fully automated where it used to take days and now the team can work on the creative thinking and the writing and the actual kind of community engagement, for example, that happens certainly on our Fable blog.

From a PR perspective, again the supporting work, so measurement, briefing sheets, research, so kind of the background material that and operational components that allow a PR team to then focus on the human part, which is media relations, understanding kind of the ebbs and flows of stories, trends, really being the voice the eyes and voice of a company. So again it allows those teams to focus where their strengths are. AI is changing management. You know, I talked about the what we're seeing in terms of it now so executing in the middle.

And so what it takes to actually manage, you know, something that we didn't account for or noticing is AI slop is entering the workplace, too. So a manager may now need to spend time working through what is a machine output that hasn't been well governed or is actually a genuine point of view. And so managing that and understanding that what you put into a tool is essentially what you get out and it can't be used as an outsourcing option for like that strategic thought and understanding. So it does actually amplify where there are issues that you may need to sort of solve or work on with a member of a team if they're you know, do see that the AI outputs you can instantly recognize when something's not had much proactive thought or strategic work done there.

And then I'd also say recommending to teams, if we're looking at tasks and it's a moment of like, oh, let's just stop and think about how can this be automated? How can I build this into a skill that means we can automate this in the future? The point then that looking at now, the advice is how can you make that into a skill that your team can then use and how can this be shared? And how can the layer underneath the data underneath stay up to date so that your agents aren't working on an outdated data set because you know, as we know, AI can confidently share information that can be wrong.

And so, having that kind of data set that a team would work through like, who are we? How do we work? If there's a brand voice, has that built out. So, that becomes like that golden data set underneath all work that's being carried out. So, thinking about this as a bigger organizational transformation versus a tool rollout. Talking to teams, understanding where they're at, helping reshape jobs from the title down to roles and responsibilities. And seeing the moments where there are touch points that you need to focus on like I mentioned the AI slop. AI slop entering the workplace as well as in the internet around us.

Gemma Craven 17:23

Yes, a skill is a repeatable set of instructions that can be applied to a task to automate it to ensure consistency. For example, review this brand briefing document and make sure that the scribd.com brand voice is applied throughout. You know, you can to your point these are in Claude [audio unclear], I'm talking about them given that's the tool that we're using the most widely. And the good thing about a skill is it helps to automate the task, it helps to ensure consistency, and it can be updated to keep in sync with changing instructions.

We are building these out both at the company level and at the team level. So, we're a product based company, large engineering product design organization, and their skills are very much tied to the products coding and building and shipping products. Whereas on a PR and marketing team, our skills are more tied to brand building, program development, measurement, anywhere where there's a repeatable task that we can make that faster and easier for our team members to execute on consistently. So, you know, how they're being stored, there's a central skills library organizationally and then at the team level, too.

And as you'd imagine, you know, the PR the marketing team our skills are very different than those say in the HR team or in the finance team. So, there's a need for them to be sort of stored at the team level as well as like a larger repository that is available company-wide. It's a large transformational moment, you know, this what we're seeing is really interesting. There's been all these news reports around companies letting people go because of, you know, AI usage. And actually, the pendulum has swung back in the other direction because to adopt and roll out and use AI effectively, you actually need more people rather than less.

And you do need various layers of I'd say an AI council as well as executors and so subject matter experts within teams to really help, you know, folks adapt to using AI both within their knowledge set and, you know, through the rhythms of the company.

Gemma Craven 20:31

My prediction for 2027 is that by next year, your most important customer won't necessarily be human. And so, to think about externally the importance of reputation because before a person has come across you, your brand, your company, then that has been determined by AI, which has read your consumer reviews, it's read your press releases, it's read your Wikipedia entries, it's read every single touch point and made a judgment. And that reputation is going to have a monetary value that needs to be reported at the board level. And so, I predict that this is moving very quickly and that reputational scores are going to be something that we're all going to be looking at and there'll be a monetary value assigned to it that we look at across other business metrics, too.

Gemma Craven 21:33

Thanks, Jordan. So, you can find me on LinkedIn at Gemma Craven and I look forward to connecting with listeners.