Caidya achieves higher-order thinking with generative AI
A conversation with Heather Varela, VP of Global Marketing and Communications
AT A GLANCE
66%
faster time to market
Minutes
to complete work that took hours
44%
increase in social followers
WATCH THE CLIPS
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW
Caidya headquarters
Morrisville, NC
Industry
Biotechnology
Department
Marketing Sales HR
Key features used
Ask Writer Recaps Style guide AI apps
Listen to the Caidya story or read the edited story below
Writer is the full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises. We make it easy for organizations to adopt AI apps and workflows that deliver quantifiable ROI quickly.
Writer helps organizations build highly-customized AI apps that compress entire business processes, support complex use cases, and infuse work with company intelligence. Our enterprise-grade platform can be deployed flexibly, keeps your data private, and adheres to global privacy laws and security standards. Leading enterprises choose Writer, including Vanguard, Intuit, L’Oréal, Accenture, and Kenvue.
Heather Varela is the VP of Global Marketing and Communications at Caidya, where she is responsible for developing and implementing strategic marketing initiatives to drive business growth and enhance brand visibility. She relies on her extensive industry knowledge to create impactful marketing campaigns and enable sales teams to achieve their targets.
Read or listen to the story of how Heather and the team at Caidya are using Writer to increase productivity, focus on higher-value work, and inspire company-wide use cases.
I am the Vice President of Global Marketing and Communications at Caidya, a 1,500-person clinical research organization, and I’m responsible for all of our external and internal communications. We are focused on helping the biotech industry bring their drugs in development through the regulatory process and hopefully to life in the marketplace to help patients with diseases that don’t currently have treatments or new alternative treatments for patients who may not have tolerance for existing treatments.
The members of my team will handle everything from events, trade shows, social media, public relations, all of our sales support marketing campaigns, as well as all of the internal and executive communications for the company. We’re also responsible for website content and any thought leadership content.
In October of 2022, we launched the Caidya brand. About a year and a half prior, the company had two previous legacy brand names that merged. There were a number of assets that needed to be rebranded, and we originally started looking at Writer to help update and rewrite materials in our new brand.
The style guide Writer offers is a great opportunity for us to be able to input terminology, phrases, and our particular Caidya voice, and ensure that any outputs met those same style requirements.
Writing is certainly a skillset, and some people are more comfortable writing than others. We have team members where English is not a first language, and so having a way for them to check grammar, spelling, and syntax is helpful. We started looking into how we could help the team with a style guide, but I was interested in how we could produce more work as a small team, which led me to look at generative AI solutions.
“Writer frees up a lot of time to do higher-order thinking and more strategic work.”
Heather Varela VP of Global Marketing and Communications
We use Writer to start us off for pretty much everything that we work on as a team. My social media manager uses Writer every day to work on social media posts. I frequently use Ask Writer, the chat-like interface, like I’m talking to a friend. I will describe to Writer the style and tone of message that I want to send. I will put a few details in there and then Writer will give me a full draft, which I then go back and iterate within the tool itself and say, “Hey, this is great, but can you add more about this? Or can you summarize this a little bit more succinctly?”
There are two use cases that we have used Writer for related to thought leadership. On the marketing side, we will often host webinars and we love to be able to produce articles that summarize the content and create social media posts, etc. With Writer, we’re able to upload those webinar recordings and Writer then will give us a summary, transcript, and pull out key points and quotes that were made, and list of participants so it’s easy to create these article summaries, rather than having to do it all manually. Just upload the file, and Writer will do the rest.
“Writer has helped my non-native English-speaking marketers increase their confidence in their writing.”
Heather Varela VP of Global Marketing and Communications
Creating outlines for different trainings, even summarizing different trainings and putting transcripts together as a multilingual company, it’s often helpful to have a transcript or summary of a meeting or an event that is written so that people, as they’re listening to it in English, can follow along with the written word and it makes it more understandable.
Another of our thought leadership use cases is our sales team has loved using Writer for their outbound emails to clients. They look at scientific articles that are relevant to a particular client, and it’s pretty time-consuming to read 12- to 15-page articles and pull out relevant information. Now, they upload those articles to Writer, which helps summarize and pull out key points.
We’ve been able to increase productivity enormously. For example, we were able to double the amount of LinkedIn posts that we created from last year to this year, and we’re looking to increase that even more in 2024. With the same number of people, the same amount of hours in the day, and the same amount of activities and tasks on our plate, we’re able to produce that much more content. That’s a huge testament to having the power of generative AI on our side.
I have really embraced Writer in those need-to-be-done tasks, which, if you looked at the matrix of what has the highest value for the time that you’re spending on it, would be all the tasks that are in that lower quadrant of taking a lot of time, but they don’t have a huge amount of value in terms of impact on your overall sales for your organization.
“Human interaction will always be part of the generative AI process, because only we know what it is that we actually want to say.”
Heather Varela VP of Global Marketing and Communications
Are there use cases Caidya is looking to explore in the future?
Our proposal team has been looking to generate executive summaries with Writer, so once proposals are completed, we can upload those and then have Writer create them in a particular style.
The visual uploads will also be an important component for other teams where Writer can analyze visual formats and images, and create written summaries or other information depending on what you’re asking.
Using Recaps in Writer to summarize a webinar
What advice do you have for other AI leaders early in the adoption process?
One of the key opportunities for organizations is to really open up your thinking about how you can use generative AI. A lot of people think, “I can just say ‘Write a specific thing.’” But there are really innumerable use cases. I encourage our teams to think about it openly and question, “What is the problem I’m trying to solve? How could I use AI to help me solve it?” Our customer success team at Writer is excellent at helping us brainstorm how we could use the tool to solve various problems.
What I wish I would have known sooner is how valuable this tool is in increasing productivity and being such a time saver. I would encourage people who are starting to dip their toe in the generative AI pool to think about some of the ways that they are spending their time currently and what of that work could you offload. Look at all your writing tasks and think about which ones you could delegate, and then think of Writer as the individual you can delegate to.
“Our customer success team at Writer is excellent at helping us brainstorm how to solve our problems.”
Heather Varela VP of Global Marketing and Communications
Human interaction will always be part of the generative AI process, because only we know what it is that we actually want to say. If you’re having a hard time creating that prompt for what you’re working on, then you probably need to go back and think about what you’re trying to produce. What is the strategy behind it? What is the audience that you’re looking to talk to? What is it that you’re trying to sell? What behavior are you trying to motivate? If you’re struggling with writing the prompt, then you probably don’t have a fully formed concept yet. You need to go back and work on it because it’s not the AI that’s going to fix that for you. It’s the thinking part that needs to be fixed.
The best way to bring your organization along is to use it successfully yourself for some things, and then start to share with others and say, “I can take care of that for you. I’ll just put it in Writer.”
It’s important to remember that generative AI is a tool, just like a calculator. I call it my first draft tool because nothing’s going out into the market without me touching it and making some edits, but having a first draft in seconds that I can iterate on, and then within a half an hour I have completed something and that might have taken me three four hours in the past. So I am a huge proponent of just getting in there and playing with the tool and bringing people along slowly.
AT A GLANCE 
