Watch Anna discuss human-led AI or read the edited story below
Writer is the generative AI platform for enterprises. We empower your people — product, operations, support, marketing, HR, and more — to maximize creativity and 10x productivity by transforming the way they work. Our secure platform snaps easily into your business data sources and delivers accurate answers and content that are fine-tuned on your own data and follow your own AI guardrails.
Anna Griffin is the chief market officer of Commvault. She’s a leader who is drawn to innovation engines, consistently challenging the status quo to enable her companies to achieve their goals. Read how Anna and the teams at Commvault use Writer to reinvent how they work.
Why did you decide you needed a generative AI platform?
There’s nothing like the thought of a looming recession to say, “We’ve got to figure out how to work with what we’ve got, and work smarter.” And it just felt like it was the time. AI has advanced and it’s got great marketing use cases. It should be easy adoption for a marketing organization. And frankly, the ability to do so much more with fewer resources, it’s a no-brainer.
Commvault references their Knowledge Graph in Writer for business queries
It was our product marketing team, responsible for so much content and so much enablement, that discovered Writer. They were excited about Writer and started championing it. Then we put it into our entire marketing org: what other use cases could we find? And then we said, look, we might as well have sales on Writer, we might as well have engineering.
The Writer platform is spot-on for marketing, but if we’re going to do a platform play, let’s all use the same one, so we’re all executing the same strategy across all of our channels. I wanted everybody on a single platform. That’s how Writer came into play.
The Commvault homepage
How did you collaborate with your technology and operations teams to choose a platform?
At the end of the day, we’re a data protection company, so we care about security deeply. Being able to have a platform that works for marketing and that the CIO’s org and our business ops could feel comfortable clearing was key.
The number one mistake you can make when trying to implement generative AI is to go rogue. AI has so much risk. Making sure that you are implemented in a way that works across your security requirements is step one. Doing AI responsibly requires that IT partnership.
Writer is a platform that meets the highest level of security clearances, is done responsibly and done well, and really eliminates a lot of the potential risk of other apps that try to solve similar problems.
“Writer is a platform that meets the highest level of security clearance, is done responsibly and done well, and eliminates a lot of the potential risks.”
The first question for some people, is, “Wait a minute, that’s my job and if Writer does it, then what am I going to do?”
But that only lasts for a second, because what everyone realizes is Writer helps them do their job better, faster, and more efficiently. The actual skill of writing is really difficult for a lot of people. It’s not everybody’s first communication skill. With Writer, if it’s a sales email, it’s got a different type of voice than perhaps a support email or a piece of marketing or social collateral. We can be on-message. I don’t have to sit here and think for hours, did I do this correctly? Writer makes it easy.
We do a lot of customer and prospect interviews, and we’re usually waiting for the researcher to write the executive summary. And sometimes it’s like, no — I’ve got a board meeting tomorrow. Now I just go into Writer and two seconds later I can understand the gist of what we talked to 22 customers about this week.
Think about how hard it is to truly synthesize a ton of data and long form two-hour interviews down to a nugget of a paragraph summary.
So analysis and synthesizing has been my personal favorite thing that Writer does because I usually want to read everything and go through every transcript and make my highlights. With Writer, my team and I are freed up from having to do that. We’re getting to insights faster, and we’re executing them and putting them into the market faster.
Using recaps in Writer to summarize customer chats
What’s been the most surprising learning for you as you’ve rolled out generative AI?
It is delighting that absolutely everybody across the company wants to have every single [Writer] function. “How much deeper, further, faster can we go with AI?”
And it’s a remit — it’s at the board level, it’s at the executive team level, we’re all hungry for it and I love seeing it played out.
There’s the obvious places where you’d expect demand for Writer to come from, support and in marketing and in sales, but I love seeing it play out in security, data intelligence, and compliance.
What was the saying? 10 years ago, content was king. Well, content is king and the ability to use it and manipulate it and edit and synthesize and maneuver around it makes you king of the hill. Writer is the perfect platform for taking content to the next level.
“I never felt like I even had to prove the ROI on Writer because it’s instantaneous.”
Anna Griffin Chief Market Officer
What advice would you give to other leaders who want to enable their people with AI?
Do yourself a favor and start with a truly scalable platform that’s going to meet your security requirements and can support a ton of different use cases. If you go for generative AI in a silo or you do it rogue, it’ll take 18 months and it might all get undone because you will either get discovered or sales are spending more money and they’re going to double down on whatever platform they put in.
Making a selection of a enterprise-scale platform that will be a reliable way to enable use cases cross-functionally is critical. It’s saving you possible disappointment down the road. So the sooner you can get moving in a platform that’s going to work for you and the rest of the company, the faster you’re all going to move towards the goal.
You don’t have to prove the ROI with Writer. You use Writer one time and you know the ROI. I never felt like I even had to prove the ROI on this because it’s instantaneous. Anyone who touches it and uses it knows the ROI on this thing.
The whole Writer platform, the simplicity to get adoption fast, it’s just turnkey. But you also need really great customer success partners. And the Writer team was beside us, every step of the way, no matter how daunting it was.
![Prompt: I'm an email marketer at Commvault and I need to get more customers to register for this webinar: https://discover.commvault.com/Insights-from-Hacker-Hunter-Registration.html
Write an attention-grabbing, personal email asking customers to register for the webinar. Include 2 potential email subject lines. Write in a confident, approachable tone.
Response:
Subject Line 1: Accelerate Cyber Defense and Response with Commvault
Subject Line 2: Unprecedented Data Protection for the Hybrid Cloud
Dear [Name],
Are you prepared to take your data protection to the next level? With Commvault's Next-Generation Data Protection, you can ensure the security, defense, and rapid recovery of your data across clouds, SaaS, and on-premises.
Join us for a webinar to learn how to do just that! Our webinar will provide an inside look at the latest security solutions redefining enterprise data protection while meeting the performance and compliance needs of today's enterprise.
Commvault's Data Protection Platform rivals the competition with its hardened zero trust architecture and built-in security protocols, enabling you to defend against cyber threats and recover data faster. Plus, Commvault offers the lowest TCO, so you can rest assured that you're getting the most out of your investment.
We invite you to join us for our webinar and see for yourself how Commvault can help you protect and defend your data. Register today and see the difference Commvault can make for your business.](https://writer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/Ask-Writer.jpg)
