AI’s Role In Modern Content Creation

[00:00:00] Tessa Burg: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Leader Generation, brought to you by Mod Op. I’m your host, Tessa Burg. And today, I am joined by Fabio Ranieri. He is head of AI content transformation at HP, and we are going to dive into all the things about the impact that AI is having on creativity, content, and content generation at scale. 

[00:00:23] Tessa Burg: Fabio, thank you so much for joining us.  

[00:00:25] Fabio Ranieri: Thank you. How are you doing? All good?  

[00:00:28] Tessa Burg: Yes, doing pretty well. The sun’s out here in Cleveland. Uh, where are you today?  

[00:00:33] Fabio Ranieri: I’m in Houston, although my hometown is Austin, Texas.  

[00:00:38] Tessa Burg: Oh, nice.  

[00:00:40] Fabio Ranieri: Mm-hmm.  

[00:00:40] Tessa Burg: I love Austin. Uh, we did a history and food tour there. It was so interesting. And then I’ve been there so many times for work, but you never really get to appreciate it until you’ve experienced the culinary side of the city. 

[00:00:54] Tessa Burg: Uh, so it was awesome.  

[00:00:56] Fabio Ranieri: Yeah.  

[00:00:56] Tessa Burg: But today, we’re getting into another one of my very favorite topics, which is content. You have had quite a career. Uh, you’ve started your own businesses, you’ve worked at other companies, always in this focus at this intersection of content and, and go to market and innovation. 

[00:01:14] Tessa Burg: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your role now today at HP.  

[00:01:19] Fabio Ranieri: So my role at HP right now, is, in a nutshell, to sell the right product to the right people at the right time, which is kind of the role of every single marketeer, if you think about it. But in my case, HP works everywhere. 

[00:01:33] Fabio Ranieri: It, it sells and offer its products everywhere. So how are we more relevant to people in Brazil or in India or in Japan or in the US with the content that makes sense for them? My whole journey was around, again, how do I sell? How do I create content? How do I offer products to different- locations, to different, uh, cultures, to different ethnicities. 

[00:02:04] Fabio Ranieri: Uh, throughout my, uh, journey, I’ve been, uh … I live in Brazil, where I’m was born, um, and I had that challenge there, that sometimes the content that was created for Finland or the content that was created for US was not a right fit for the local market. I’ve been responsible for Latin America. I’ve been, um, specifically working for Europe. 

[00:02:27] Fabio Ranieri: I’ve been specifically working for the US, and the challenge was always the same. It’s how do I guarantee that whatever we’re putting out resonates and it’s relevant to someone in a specific location, right? And again, the nice thing is that AI is allowing us to do so. Although people sometimes are a little bit concerned that it’s AI for everything, in the case of scalable content, it’s really what is helping us today. 

[00:02:57] Tessa Burg: So you hit … You said a word that has really been a challenge for most folks using AI. I think they are using it in a way where they’re learning more about their audiences, and they’re using chatbots or the equivalent of chats or ChatGPT, like a chat, to draft more content. But more content doesn’t necessarily mean better content, and it doesn’t necessarily mean scale. 

[00:03:27] Tessa Burg: So tell us a little bit, how do you … How have you peeled back that formula to achieve using AI to help you scale content creation that delivers high value?  

[00:03:39] Fabio Ranieri: Yeah. So just to give you an idea of how big is scale for HP. HP has active more than 200,000 SKUs right now. So imagine that we need to guarantee that you have content for all. 

[00:03:54] Fabio Ranieri: That’s the first problem, right? Not just that. We sell in more than 30 different languages, and most of the time people think, “Oh, it’s a simple translation.” No, it’s not a simple translation. There is so much more to it. But the biggest challenge is not the more content or covering all these SKUs or covering, um, a specific SKU in a specific location. 

[00:04:14] Fabio Ranieri: It’s really explaining the right thing about the product. It’s really answering the right questions. It’s really about how I’m more relevant to a customer in that specific scenario, right? So the way that we’re looking to scale for content at HP is much more in a scenario that I can guarantee that I have the right answers, that I’m basically able to understand what are the questions, that I’m talking to the right audience. 

[00:04:39] Fabio Ranieri: Maybe the same product has a different audience in a different location, right? And it’s not just about translation. A lot of times people say, “Oh, but you translate that product into a different culture.” It’s not gonna work. And I’m gonna give an example on something that it’s kind of fun to say. Um, in US, we don’t use so much trains- But I would go and I would love to say for Europe, for example, you can use your laptop on a train, and it’s gonna last the whole train journey. 

[00:05:07] Fabio Ranieri: And right after that, you’re gonna get into a coffee shop, because that’s the experience that people are expecting, and you’re gonna be able to use it, right? If I say the same thing US, it does not work, right? It’s like if I say the same thing Brazil, because of different cultural scenarios, it will not work, right? 

[00:05:24] Fabio Ranieri: So these are the things that in the end we’re always trying to help people buy the right product, but they depend on completely different scenarios. They depend on completely, completely different audience. They, they com- depend on completely different insights in each, each one of these locations. So the biggest question for me on how do we deliver scale to content, it’s not on the content generation, but it’s on the input and insights that you bring to it. 

[00:05:50] Fabio Ranieri: AI is just allowing you now to go and have way more insights, way more ideas, and translate them into content that can be useful.  

[00:06:01] Tessa Burg: Yeah, and when you said it’s a, a lot more on the input and the insights, where does that live? Because the example you gave is for a specific product, so data about that product is somewhere. 

[00:06:16] Tessa Burg: The example, you gave included information about a specific market, so that information in that context is somewhere. And then you’re tying it to value and storytelling, which could hit other data inputs and other data sources. Like, how do you bring this all together so that, you know, to the user it’s a single story, but on the back end, you’re, you’re kind of orchestrating many different types of insights into a single touchpoint in that moment. 

[00:06:47] Fabio Ranieri: And I think that’s one of the reasons why I sit within MarTech.  

[00:06:51] Tessa Burg: Yeah.  

[00:06:51] Fabio Ranieri: Because it’s really a technology challenge. How do you source data from different locations? Where is this data sitting? Is that data with the right metadata to align that it’s what we need? Um, that’s one of the biggest challenges that we have. 

[00:07:06] Fabio Ranieri: It’s not so simple. It’s not something that we can basically say, um, just query a ChatGPT or just query a chatbot, and you’re gonna have the answer. Not that simple. So for example, let’s say that we’re gonna go and do the 30 different languages, and remember, one language can have more than one location. 

[00:07:26] Fabio Ranieri: If you do a gigantic prompt that is gonna try to tell you that, there’s gonna be a lot of hallucinations. So there are different ways for us to, today, use this kind of technology. There are not just, again, a simple prompt for a campaign that we’re gonna run in the US, for example. It’s a completely different process. 

[00:07:45] Fabio Ranieri: There are things that we call usually chaining. There are a lot on the workflow change that needs to happen, and really kind of each one of these, uh, requirements are creating its own pod for content creation. So it’s not that simple. It can relay from user-generated content. It can be coming from social listening. 

[00:08:07] Fabio Ranieri: It can be even tied to basically synthetic persona testing. It can come from our AB testing on the ETL side. So all these are important, but one of the thing for me that is amazing, and this is a discussion that we usually have, and people think that AI is just to basically reduce costs. It’s not. It’s also great insights coming from our marketeers, because they have more time for the insights itself, right? 

[00:08:36] Fabio Ranieri: It’s not just that I’m throwing data into a system, and what is gonna come out on the other side’s gonna be amazing. No, I’m throwing data into a system, getting something to our marketeers that is so much better as the first, I would say, insight that is digestible to a human, and asking them to iterate on top of it. 

[00:08:56] Fabio Ranieri: So it’s not just the technology. It is the technology enabling the marketeer to be supercharged, and also less concerned about the prompt, because people are usually super concerned about the prompt. Um, maybe I don’t need all marketeers to be prompt engineers. I can help them, and guarantee that what I get from them is the idea, is the insight, is the knowledge about that product, that audience, that it’s the most important thing on the content creation process itself. 

[00:09:30] Tessa Burg: Yeah. So that was a very rich answer. I’m gonna try and break it apart, because you’re kind of demystifying what I think a lot of marketers think AI should be able to do, and it also hits on why they haven’t been able to scale their content development processes to date. And you said you started with the data, and then you looked at the workflows and the processes. 

[00:09:53] Tessa Burg: Like, that’s coordinating people first against those high-value use cases. So you know you had a vision of, “Here’s where we wanna go. We wanna deliver these types of insights to our marketeers.” What is it gonna take at that tech stack level- To connect and orchestrate. What other departments, what other people did you invite to the table to help you build out the infrastructure that has made content creation at scale possible? 

[00:10:21] Fabio Ranieri: So we have, again, the data insights team, it’s kind of right hand. Um, the data science team needs to be also our right hand. Um, we have, for example, hp.com, amazing place for us to get a lot of information on AB data, on how customers are reacting. This kind of direct to consumer delivers us an amount of data that is out of this world, important to what we’re doing, right? 

[00:10:45] Fabio Ranieri: These are the ones that I think are the, the kind of the real partners on this kind of data, uh, strategy. Also, once we go a little bit, I’m thinking if you think about all the data that you can also source from performance, we’re not looking specifically into that right now because our focus is a lot on the detail side. 

[00:11:06] Fabio Ranieri: But there is … The way that I see is, imagine if I could have a person right next to the marketeer that knows everything about every single data point available for a chat. That is how we are trying to give as an experience to that marketeer. Imagine if you have the most knowledgeable person about your customer that is on the other side, what they are looking for, what they like, what they don’t like, what kind of content they enjoy, what kind of content they don’t like, what kind of content they’re expecting for that specific part. 

[00:11:39] Fabio Ranieri: Imagine if I could ask as a marketeer today all that. And that’s not a answer that you get on the chatbot, because the answer that you’re gonna get on the chatbot, sometimes it would be more generic, will not be specific to that SKU that we’re talking about.  

[00:11:54] Tessa Burg: Mm-hmm.  

[00:11:54] Fabio Ranieri: The difference when using a really strong data structure is that you can have information about that specific need, right? 

[00:12:01] Fabio Ranieri: That specific audience, that specific product. So the way that I see that I need to guarantee that I give them back is that capability, is that … I’m not gonna say person, but the entity on the side that they can ask anything, that they can query questions, that they can interact on. Even say, “I believe that this customer might have a need on something,” how that customer perceives that need. 

[00:12:31] Fabio Ranieri: That’s the kind of conversation that I would love to see the marketeer having with the technology itself. But in a natural language scenario, not in a, I need to carry data, I need to go on a table, an Excel file, I need to look at 20 rows of any information that is coming. No, it’s, it’s much more, what if I could have the best data ana- analyst to my side? 

[00:12:55] Tessa Burg: Mm-hmm  

[00:12:56] Fabio Ranieri: That it’s superhuman because it, it would need to answer much more questions in a matter of seconds for a conversation than, again, what we usually do with data analysts once we need a specific information.  

[00:13:10] Tessa Burg: Yeah. That is, I mean, it’s truly very powerful. And then tell us a little bit, how do you tie that then to the… 

[00:13:15] Tessa Burg: We, we’ve seen on your LinkedIn you’ve mentioned about the e-tail initiative, the playbook. How does that power that the marketeer now have tie to generating that growth in revenue at scale for HP?  

[00:13:30] Fabio Ranieri: Yeah. So everything that we do, we’re doing based on the ROI that makes sense for the company, and it’s really generating value for the customer. 

[00:13:40] Fabio Ranieri: So everything that was tested, even the, what we call the global playbooks, they are done based on a lot of testing. So we usually have, um, kind of this idea that we know what is gonna work. We try to break that, and we test everything. We really test everything possible. So sometimes we are testing what is the font size, and we know that in some specific markets, the font size matter, that I can get from a font size change 1% more conversion. 

[00:14:14] Fabio Ranieri: And people, we are usually like, “But you were changing just the font size.” Yeah, but a font size that I’m changing here, it’s helping some specific customers understand better the asset that I’m creating, and it’s driving 1% more conversion, which is driving 1% more conversion in the volume of HP is something gigantic. 

[00:14:32] Tessa Burg: Mm-hmm.  

[00:14:33] Fabio Ranieri: So it’s, it’s about breaking, I will not call the rules, but breaking what was usually the common knowledge, right, by testing like crazy. But also, at the same time, guarantee that whatever we’re putting out can be scalable. Sometimes you are making some design decisions are just meant for scalability, or they are not meant just because we like. 

[00:15:01] Fabio Ranieri: It’s because we need to test something that can be scale in the future.  

[00:15:06] Tessa Burg: And when we talk about scale, and I think sometimes folks in especially creative fields or even in writing, they don’t like that word because it means templates, it means sort of, like, sameness, but where is the room for that creativity? 

[00:15:24] Tessa Burg: Like you said, they’re having… They have access to these insights that they’ve never had before. What kinds of problems are they solving, and what kinds of decisions are being made in this new, modern way of creating content?  

[00:15:36] Fabio Ranieri: I think it’s a negotiation. So yes, being there- So we had the conversations on, on templates. 

[00:15:42] Fabio Ranieri: I’m too tied if I go on templates. I think Gen AI now allows where template needs to be used will be used, but you don’t need to go templates every time. There are ways that you can do, for example, in some specific, uh, technology, something called a structured edit, and you can really edit a pixel on a image, right? 

[00:16:04] Fabio Ranieri: It needs to be easy. I think what we’re trying to do, um, and I’m saying trying to do because we test everything, even anything that we’re promoting to our marketeers, um, is to guarantee that it’s usable by everyone. It’s… You don’t have to have 300 to make your idea come to life. You don’t need 300 people to do that. 

[00:16:29] Fabio Ranieri: As you know, there is the telephone game, which is a terrible game to play because you have an idea, in your mind it’s perfect. You know exactly what you want. And after you pass through the third, fourth step on pushing different teams to go and deliver that idea to you, it’s not what you planned. It’s not what you envisioned first, right? 

[00:16:48] Fabio Ranieri: So what we’re working is to basically say, this is… It will need to be more fixed and you might need to go on a template, but I’m also allowing you to do these 300 other things that you always wanted to do that now do not need a template. So it’s, I’m using templates where I believe that amazing creativity will not generate so much value, but giving time for the amazing creativity to flourish because you don’t have to spend so much time on this side that it can live with templates for a little bit more. 

[00:17:24] Fabio Ranieri: So it’s, it gives time back by deciding where to invest the big ideas, deciding where to invest the full generation capabilities. It give times to invest, uh, a- and gives even not just time, but flex. We are allowing marketeers to flex more because their capabilities and their budget, let’s say, is stretched. 

[00:17:49] Fabio Ranieri: So it’s, it’s… That conversation is happening everywhere. We have that conversation. We are all leaning to AI, and that conversation happens over here. The definition for me or the decision that needs to basically be a handshake is, where do we focus our biggest ideas, and what should be really a little bit more scalable from a, let’s say, scalable-esque template, and where we can use the new technology to create a scale, but for things that were almost impossible at a 200,000 scale level before. 

[00:18:27] Tessa Burg: Yeah. Yeah, that number is, like, absolutely dizzying, and in… I like that you position it as a negotiation Because you’re also saying you’re listening to the other side. You’re hearing where they want to invest their energy, but guiding them to say, “Think about that impact that we can have.” And, uh, when we think about that shift, where do you see overall the future of creativity going, uh, in the future? 

[00:19:00] Fabio Ranieri: Um, one thing for me is AI is gonna be a baseline. So everyone that is saying, “Oh, but I have AI. I implemented AI into my process,” and et cetera, if you don’t, you are even out of the baseline. What I really wanna give our marketeers more, it’s time for them to think about the big ideas, and we are being able to do that. 

[00:19:22] Fabio Ranieri: We’re really being able to give them more insights. Uh, we’re being able to give them kind of the what is the next step? So by the end of the meeting, I have a discussion with our head of creative, which is, “What is our next step? What, what can we do that we could never?” Right? Yeah. Not that we could never because it was not a one-off. 

[00:19:43] Fabio Ranieri: Everyone can do a one, a one-off, but everything that we think needs to think on these 200,000 SKUs that are hanging over there, right? So I think the future of creativity is that your competition will have AI. Your competition will have the baseline. These kind of scalable content solutions will be there. 

[00:20:06] Fabio Ranieri: But then their marketeers will have more time to think on the big ideas, and if you’re ready to transform those big ideas because you have now the machine capable of, they’re gonna outpace you.  

[00:20:18] Tessa Burg: Mm-hmm.  

[00:20:19] Fabio Ranieri: That’s my… The future of creativity for me is being more creative, and I don’t think that the future of being more creative is just because AI is there. 

[00:20:28] Fabio Ranieri: No, it’s because people have more access to data. The marketeers will be able to iterate more with the information that they have. They’re gonna be able to know more about their customers, right? They’re gonna be able to basically iterate their ideas in a matter of minutes. If that marketeer can do that, the one that gives the marketeer the time and the capabilities will outpace the competitor. 

[00:20:54] Tessa Burg: Yeah, and you hit on something else that I think is really important. You have the right data. You have the right tools. But also, it’s a challenge to marketeers to test what they think they know, and can they step outside? And that takes a ton of creative muscle to look back at the results and say, “What does this mean I can do now? 

[00:21:17] Tessa Burg: What doors is this opening?” Uh, and there are still a lot of folks who are trying to solve the problems for today, and what you’re challenging is, what are the challenges, what are the problems gonna be tomorrow? And are you willing to test today to see if you can reach that far to open up new opportunities? 

[00:21:38] Fabio Ranieri: I think curiosity will play a big role.  

[00:21:41] Tessa Burg: Mm-hmm.  

[00:21:42] Fabio Ranieri: And I love that a lot of the marketeers that I speak, they’re curious on what AI can do, and we speak a lot about, “Hey, what are you doing? What are the new things? What is happening?” But what if I could do that capability, I can give that capability to everyone, to every single marketeer at HP, to every single one. 

[00:22:01] Fabio Ranieri: Let’s say I have a vision of a, a video, and I can have them iterate on that video to a level that then we’re gonna send into production, then you’re gonna have something kind of Hollywood level, but you get from a better point. You get out of the idea that you are just creating a brief. You might be creating much more than a brief. 

[00:22:24] Tessa Burg: Mm-hmm. I love that.  

[00:22:26] Fabio Ranieri: You, you are gonna be transforming your idea that is in your head to life faster, right? But for me, still, it’s the age of the idea, right? The difference now is that you can take your idea to life without a lot of people that might not be aligned with your idea or might not be able to understand your idea from day zero. 

[00:22:50] Fabio Ranieri: So that’s what I see a lot on this. We always speak data, we always speaks audience, how AI is creating content. I think we’re past the idea of, oh, AI created a image. No, I’m trying to understand how can I give the marketeers the capability to create their vision, not a image … or a video or something like that. 

[00:23:11] Tessa Burg: Yeah. There is a lot of time and conversation spent on, you know, was this created by AI? W- what can I trust? What can’t I trust? What… How do you keep people focused on solving the bigger challenges, and, and what types of guardrails do you put in place to ensure the quality, um, of the output and w- that differentiating of, like, what’s ownable and what’s not, what’s just showing, like, the, the scape of an idea? 

[00:23:36] Fabio Ranieri: So for me, it’s less about, for example, uh, the problem of the six fingers, right?  

[00:23:43] Tessa Burg: Mm.  

[00:23:43] Fabio Ranieri: AI one time show up with six fingers. That became the problem. I think the technology will get better and better, and we are seeing that already, where people cannot differentiate, right? Um, I believe, and this is my personal belief, that it’s gonna be all about the idea. 

[00:24:02] Fabio Ranieri: It’s gonna be all about the concept. It’s gonna be all about the relevance to a specific, uh… And it’s gonna be pretty much aligned to what we’ve seen on CG in the past, right? Once CG started, everyone was like, “Oh, this is not true. This is computer-generated,” and et cetera, and everyone was against. Now it’s mostly computer-generated, and people are okay with that. 

[00:24:24] Fabio Ranieri: I think there is gonna be a path towards that, the same way that we saw with CG, and I’m dating myself to say that, right? Um, but it’s… I think it’s normal. It’s any new technology will come with that burden. The same thing happened to social. Social will not be a big channel. That’s not important. Look what happened. 

[00:24:43] Fabio Ranieri: The same thing happened to mobile. The same thing happened to the internet, by the way. It was also at the beginning of the internet, which is quite dating myself on that, but it was always the same. It always start as a slow curve. Uh, in this case, one thing that I’m amazed about AI is adoption is being quite good. 

[00:25:03] Fabio Ranieri: I think it was one of the first technologies that although you have this discussion, because I think you are getting to the creativity scenario, and the creativity comes with the art side of the house, and there is, uh, also that idea that art is made by hands and et cetera. It’s still gonna be made by hands. 

[00:25:19] Fabio Ranieri: It’s still for me, it’s still about the idea, right? But it’s the first time that I’m seeing that it’s not happening the same thing that happened with social, where everyone was like, “Oh, is that one person on the office that knows a little bit? That’s not important.” Everyone is trying to jump on it because I think people already realize that that allows your idea to become so much bigger,  

[00:25:41] Tessa Burg: right? 

[00:25:41] Tessa Burg: Mm-hmm.  

[00:25:42] Fabio Ranieri: So I think from a is it delivered by AI or not, that discussion will fade out over time. I think there are still gonna be the highly manual scenario. People still like to listen to vinyls, and it’s okay. It’s a trend-  

[00:25:58] Tessa Burg: Mm-hmm  

[00:25:58] Fabio Ranieri: … and it works, and it’s amazing. But there’s space for all technologies, the same way there is space for CG and no CG. 

[00:26:06] Fabio Ranieri: There’s gonna be space for no CG, CG, and AI.  

[00:26:09] Tessa Burg: Yeah.  

[00:26:09] Fabio Ranieri: That’s my two cents.  

[00:26:12] Tessa Burg: Yeah. Yeah. I agree, and the biggest reason, as you highlighted, is because there’s a clear path to value. CG was accepted because it was valued by the audience. It brought the entertainment. It brought… It allowed things that were not possible before in the same way that AI is doing now. 

[00:26:32] Tessa Burg: Uh, and I love this. You know, it’s the age of the idea, and the more people focus their creative power on that, then it’s not a loss of something. It’s an unlock to things that weren’t possible before.  

[00:26:45] Fabio Ranieri: And the idea for me is I’ve seen some really good stuff with low technology AI that was about the idea of showing that was low technology, and it was kind of making fun of the concept of low technology, right? 

[00:26:59] Fabio Ranieri: But the important thing was the idea, right? It was not at all the, the, the capability of that technology at that time which, by the way, today could have been done perfect, and people would not see the value of that thing. So- That’s my two cents. I think the technology is evolving. We cannot say no to it because otherwise once that becomes the baseline, the same way that CG became the baseline, you’re not gonna be there. 

[00:27:26] Fabio Ranieri: So…  

[00:27:28] Tessa Burg: yep. Well, this has been an amazing conversation. Fabio, thank you so much for joining us today. If folks wanna reach out and have more questions, where can they find you?  

[00:27:41] Fabio Ranieri: Uh, they can find me on LinkedIn, Fabio Ranieri, 

[00:27:44] Tessa Burg: if you wanna hear more episodes of Leader Generation, you can find them at our website, and we will have this podcast there, as well as all of our other conversations from marketing leaders from across marketing ops, sales, sales enablement, AI transformation, or just search Leader Generation wherever you listen to podcasts. 

[00:28:04] Tessa Burg: Again, Fabio, we’ll be catching up again soon. Thanks so much for joining us.  

[00:28:07] Fabio Ranieri: Perfect. Thanks so much. Thanks for the opportunity.