The importance of storytelling and authenticity in the AI era: a conversation with Ryan Schulz of One North

Note: The video transcript has been edited to provide a more concise overview of the episode.

Eric: Hi, I'm Eric Stine, the CEO of Sitecore, and I am thrilled to be here today in my second hometown city, Chicago, with a beautiful view of the lake. I'm here with our customer and partner, Ryan Schulz, the Executive Director of One North. One North is a digital experience design firm. Ryan, thank you so much for joining me. Why don't you tell me a little bit about how you came to the world of brand strategy and digital experience?

Ryan: That's a fun story. So, I was trained as a writer in college. I was a fiction writer and poet and realized there wasn't a whole lot of market opportunity for fiction writing and poetry. I went to work for another agency here in Chicago and I got to work on some incredible brands, Harley-Davidson and Google, and a handful of others. That gave me a sense of what was possible. And from there, I ended up at One North, built a brand practice, built a content practice, and helped reshape the agency a little bit.

Eric: So let's go a little bit deeper into that. Art dealer. Brand strategist. What I'm hearing is how visual and art and copy all come together to tell a story. What inspires you when you're working with a client? What are the stories that you want to tell?

Ryan: Everyone talks about storytelling, right? But I do fundamentally believe, just from an anthropologic standpoint, stories are the thing that make us human and make us unique. And they pull cultures together. They hold businesses together, they create economies, they create relationships.

One North believes that relationships are at the core of our business. When we don't have healthy relationships, we don't have a great business, so we put a lot of time into building those relationships. Those are the things that inspire me because I think when we are in great relationships with our clients, they tend to bring us their most challenging problems and the things that they want to solve.

Eric: So much of that makes me think about the future. But before we go there, I want to take a brief detour into the past. Tell me about how One North started and how our partnership and our relationship evolved.

Ryan: One North started as a software company years ago, kind of early ‘.com’ days. And developed a custom CMS that was specifically targeted at the legal services industry. We were a company called Hubbard One and got acquired by Thomson Reuters. We built some other custom software and accidentally built an agency, sort of a services agency around those offerings. I mean, if you're building a CMS, you obviously need to design the experience. You need to create some user flows. You need to understand how customers are going to use that thing. And all of that is consulting and design services. There wasn't as much appetite to kind of build that part of the business. And so, our founders took an opportunity to take that part of the business and leave the licenses behind.

Eric: So you were saying you were founded just over 24 years ago, which is something that our companies have in common. We will turn 25 on April 26th. But over that course of time, I think one of the things we share from a values perspective is this belief in digital experiences being so powerful. They create real human connection. You talked about storytelling being something that holds people together, cultures together. So much of that is changing.

Now talk a little bit about how you see that unfolding in the future. Artificial intelligence has allowed for the propagation of content, the replication of content, and we live in a world where audiences are just fractured and fragmented, disrupted, distracted. What are the stories that break through the noise and how do you want to go tell them?

Ryan: I think the rate of change that technology has allowed us to operate at has kind of fundamentally sped up over time. Go back to the industrial revolution, you know, the impacts of that technological shift. It took decades and decades, hundreds of years to kind of really implant and put its thumbprint on society. But you fast forward to things like digital, social, mobile, like those other big leaps forward, and the window starts closing very, very quickly. And I think what we're seeing with AI is that technological shift, that move of the market, that kind of reshaping of the landscape is going happen in an even faster time period. And I think it presents an incredible opportunity for customers and for clients and for businesses to meet that moment. And it also is a huge challenge, right? So it's this weird double-edged sword. I think what I see personally is this fundamental reshaping of what a customer experience really looks like.

Eric: Both of us have experience working in theater, an art form, a form of storytelling that’s hundreds of years old. What makes a great story to go tell?

Ryan: Well, you think about whether you're talking about theater or you're talking about art, you think about that first impression, that initial moment, right? The idea has to be so simple. Clear. There has to be something that stands out and says, this is what you're about to experience. And then you need to subvert that experience with a deeper context or story – and I think that's a place where businesses often struggle to reach that high bar, that first impression. They think in terms of value proposition. Instead of brand proposition as an experience and how that's delivered.

Eric: AI also opens up so many more possibilities. Instead of talking about what's constant, can you talk about what's new, what are you excited about in terms of new ways to go tell a story?

Ryan: I'll answer that maybe in two ways. I think that AI is another tool, there are lots of tools out there. It's an incredibly powerful tool. It might be one of the most powerful tools that humans have ever created. It also poses all sorts of risks. I think AI has the potential to get to those individualized experiences that I was talking about just so much faster. But it also creates this wide baseline of experiences that are going to look very similar. If you're not careful, if you're not taking an innovative approach to dealing with that tool set and thinking about it critically, and you're just using AI to pull the lever, and pump out content, you can do that. You're going to look like every other business. It's going to be very, very difficult to stand out and tie it intrinsically to your organization, using it as an accelerator to get the human involved, to be able to tell a story on top of it and use it.

I keep thinking about this. I've told this story so many times around the office and everyone laughs at me. But Andre 3000 at the Met Gala recently. He shows up with this piano on his back, right? What does it mean? What story is he trying to tell? What is he trying to do there? It's so absurd and so kind of silly, but also so perfect for him. And in that platform where everyone else is showing up in cutting edge couture, he decided to show up and make this different kind of statement.

Eric: I think that’s the trick. I use the tooling in myriad ways every day, but you begin to see the seams. I know when I run something through ChatGPT, I'm going to get a certain tone of voice. When I run it through Co-pilot, I'm going to get a different tone of voice, but it starts to become a marker. And it is that authenticity that breaks through that you still have to go back and do the work of humanizing what is still technology. One of the things we talk about is that domain expertise becomes the currency. In a world of wash and artificial intelligence, talk to me about what that means for digital experience agents.

Ryan: We have to baseline, to have enough experience about what the fundamentals of business are. That’s like table stakes, right? And then on top of that, you bring industry experience and the ins and outs of what an individual's specific space or lane, what constraints they're under. I think on top of that. Bringing out of industry experience has always been the challenge for brand firms going as far back as you can remember, right? Competitive analysis and comparative analysis was the thing. I think that's going to become even more of an important component. Not just looking at competitors, because that's what AI does. It will look at use cases that are similar to yours. You know the email example that you just gave? It'll write an email based on a million other emails that it's read some by you, some by other people. Then it'll start to kind of craft a message that sounds just like those things, but that doesn't help you cut through, right? It doesn't help you actually break through.

Eric: It's your Andre 3000 point, right? Which is, it was authentic to him. And so it immediately inspired that response of, what is he saying? Somebody else could not have pulled it off in the same way. And the trick will be how do we use it to preserve? How do we teach it? Our own authenticity. Because what makes a brand a brand is its specific authenticity.

Ryan: I think AI is the speed that gets us to that ability to figure out that it's a piano way faster. And to be able to ignore the seams so that people can't see those things. And that's the interesting part. I think we're going to see brands take bigger risks than what we're used to seeing. I think folks are, especially in the professional services space, used to seeing walls of blue imagery. That don’t tell any kind of unique story. I call it the ‘sea of sameness’. You go to one law firm site, it looks just like the next law firm site and trying to punch through that takes the organization collectively deciding, I want to take a risk here. I think that’s going to become even more so of the, the mandate of the day.

Eric: That's the thing I'm really excited about. To me, the possibility is that it opens up in terms of true personalization, right? As much teaching it our brand authenticity, helping our clients discover even more specific ways to hone their authenticity. The possibility to make your brand message more authentic and more specific is really unlocked. The other thing that's exciting to me is the ability to deliver a personalized experience so that your experience of the same brand and mine will and should be different. And for us, the ability to deliver that level of personalization to our clients, to really find every potential member of your audience for your brand and speak to them in the way they want to be spoken to, so that you're really heard is powerful.

Eric: I've said recently that, the technology has already changed the way my brain works. It's made me, at once, a worse writer and a better editor. How does that potentially change your business? your view of the market? your view of the industry? As more of us and our customers and their businesses involve more orchestration and less creation – what does that do to how we use content to create a digital experience?

Ryan: I think it raises the bar going back to your story, there's the could and should, right? I can sort of do this, I can use this tool to do all this stuff, and then how should these actually go out? You know, if you're sending a personal email to, a thousand people, 500 people, whatever the total number is, three or four of those people are going to talk about this personal email they just got from you, and they're going to be able to see like. It wasn't quite a personal email. That deflation is a moment where you could lose brand equity. This is that razor's edge between personalization, individualization, that customization of content.

You still have to get to that Andre 3000 moment where you're trying to create something that's truly unique. Clever and interesting and fun and engaging for this smaller pocket of people so that they feel special. And it doesn't feel like you're trying to make everyone feel special in the same way.