for college and career readiness. Generative AI is helping.
A conversation with Lead Content Experience Designer Catherine Gerow
AT A GLANCE
3
regional style guides implemented
66%
faster time to market
4M
Xello users
WATCH THE CLIPS
LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW
Xello
 headquarters
Toronto, Ontario
Industry
Technology
Department
Marketing Product & UX
Key features used
Ask Writer Style guide AI apps
Listen to the Xello 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.
Catherine Gerow is the Lead Content Experience Designer at Xello, a college and career readiness provider for over 4 million users across Canada, the US, and the UK. Catherine has worked on the content team at Xello for 20 years, helping students around the world create a successful futures through the exploration and planning of school and career options.
Read or listen to the story of how Catherine and the Xello team are using Writer to speed up their time to market, onboard new team members quicker, and focus on higher-level work.
I am the Lead Content Experience Designer at Xello, and I’ve been here for about 20 years.
Xello is a college and career readiness platform, and we help students plan their successful futures. Students can go into Xello and learn about themselves, look at post-secondary school options like college, careers, or other pathways, and they can make plans to create those successful futures. Currently, we have about 4 million active users across Canada, the US, and the UK.
The Xello homepage
What are some of the top initiatives for your team right now?
The content team is responsible for creating and maintaining career and school profiles. We create lessons for students to learn about different topics around the world of work.
The team of designers at Xello is constantly working on new features and projects. For example, we recently created a new feature where educators can go in and create surveys for their students. And we’re frequently creating new lessons for students on Xello.
What sparked your initial interest in pursuing an AI strategy?
We’ve been using Writer since the spring of 2022. When we first started, we were looking for a solution to help us standardize our language and terminology across the product.
Then after about a year, our leadership at Xello asked us to start looking into generative AI and how that could help us on the content team. That’s when we started experimenting with Writer to see how we could use generative AI in our workflow, which is now a crucial tool for us.
“Using Writer has helped us write, edit, and onboard new team members quicker.”
Catherine Gerow Lead Content Experience Designer
What prompted your team to ultimately select Writer?
Our initial aim was to standardize our content and language across the product, so we looked at a few solutions, but we preferred the outputs we were getting from Writer. We also like the security and privacy that Writer offers, in addition to the great customer support experience.
What teams are using Writer, and what are your top use cases?
At Xello, all the members of the content department use Writer, including our content experience designers and technical writers. One of the main projects we’ve accomplished with Writer has been creating a single source of truth with a style guide.
We had a style guide before, but it wasn’t hosted in one place. With Writer, we’ve been able to centrally host and build out that style guide, and now everyone in the company can refer to it anytime. It’s been a big help in getting our language consistent across the product.
We serve students across the UK, the US, and Canada — three very different regions, and we have to make sure that we get the spelling and terminology right across all of them. We set up three different teams within Write for each region. If I’m working one day on some UK content, I can use the Writer UK setting and make sure I’m getting that terminology and spelling correct. If I’m working on US content the next day, I can switch to the US team and also get that spelling and terminology correct.
For example, the word “enrollment,” or “enroll,” is spelled differently in Canada and the US, and it’s hard to remember which one is which. Another common example is that we say “grade eight” in Canada, and in the US we say “eighth grade,” then in the UK we say “year eight.” Having a style guide set up in Writer to flag these terms right away has been really helpful in making sure that we’re consistent across the company and the different regions that we work in.
Additionally, we write at a grade six level at Xello to make sure that it’s easy for all students to understand. Writer has been helpful in making sure that we stick to that grade level and not have to manually check every time.
“Having a style guide set up in Writer to flag these terms right away has been really helpful in making sure that we’re consistent across the company and the different regions that we work in.”
Some other features we use on the content team are the tooltip shortener app and error message app to generate quick ideas of what different UI copy could be. It really helps us if we’re stuck on ideas or we need some different suggestions.
We’ve also been using ‌generative AI in other ways. Right now, we’re experimenting with using AI to help us create new career and college profiles. We’re always writing different profiles about new careers that are emerging in the workforce across Canada, the US, and the UK, and it’s easier if we can have Writer generate those first drafts for us.
We do a lot of research on each profile and then we use Writer to generate a first draft for us. Then we can go in and polish that draft as we need. It is a lot easier to edit something than to write from scratch, and it’s significantly sped up that process for us.
We’ve also used Writer to help us with a recent project that was really successful. We have about 630 career profiles in our database, and they each have a summary section that explains what people do in that career in six to seven paragraphs. We wanted to create brief summaries for students so that they could quickly read what the career is all about.
We worked with our customer success manager to create a prompt for Ask Writer with really strict parameters, like making the sentences short and concise, a character count limit, and keeping it to a grade six reading level. With these prompts in Ask Writer, we were able to create short summaries that we could polish up and use.
“We looked at other solutions, but we preferred the outputs we were getting from Writer. We also like the security and privacy that Writer offers, in addition to the great customer support.”
The time savings were huge — we originally estimated that without generative AI, it would have taken about 60 days, but we were able to do more than 130 summaries in only 20 days.
It took us about one-third of the amount of time to do this project than it would have without AI. It was a really successful project, and demonstrated the value of how we could use AI to speed things up going forward.
Due to these time savings, we’ve been able to be more productive on other projects. We’re bringing forward our start date to work on our next project, and we’ve had time to work on other projects that have been placed on the backburner.
What does success look like for you with generative AI?
In terms of success with generative AI, we want to create a lot of time savings across the team in terms of both creating and editing content. One thing we’ll be keeping an eye on this year is the number of career and school profiles we’re able to produce. Compared to last year, when we were writing everything from scratch, I think the output will go up quite a bit this year.
“The time savings were huge — we originally estimated that without generative AI, it would have taken about 60 days, but with Writer, it took us about one-third of that.”
Increasing the number of profiles we create is important because we want to make sure that we’re keeping up with emerging jobs in the job market, like social media or AI careers. That’s really engaging for our students because those are the careers that they’re looking at, and want to help them make realistic plans for themselves. Being able to create these career profiles quicker will help us meet those demands from our users and keep them more engaged.
We want to make sure that we have consistency across our products and terminology, and we’ve seen a big impact with that already. For example, if we put an old career profile into Writer and we run it, we can see those words and phrases that we weren’t using consistently in the past, and we can easily make those changes.
Besides generative AI helping us to move quicker, the style guide and suggestions help us make sure we’re achieving consistency across our product, which has been a big project in the past few years.
“We are excited about applying generative AI to more projects going forward. We’ve seen how it can help us individually and as a team, and how that allows us to do higher-level work.”
Catherine Gerow Lead Content Experience Designer
What advice do you have for other AI leaders who are earlier in their AI journey?
We’re still learning and experimenting with AI, and there’s still a lot for us to learn. But my advice for others is to get in there, to experiment, to see how AI can help you and improve your workflows and outputs. Also, make sure that you’re getting your team members involved in those experiments so they can see how it can help with their day-to-day tasks and to be more productive.
With AI in general, it seemed like it popped up out of nowhere and suddenly everyone was being asked to use it. For content creators, there was a bit of hesitancy, but once we could embrace the fact that AI is going to make our jobs easier in terms of writing and editing more quickly, we’ve been able to be more comfortable. The more we use Writer, the more comfortable we are with it. The more we experiment with generative AI, the more comfortable we are with it.
With the success of the career profile summary project, we are excited about applying generative AI to a lot more of our projects going forward. We’ve seen how it can help us individually and as a team get through our tasks quicker, and how that allows us to do higher-level work.
AT A GLANCE 
