Bridget Shea: Driving AI-first Content Creation

Meet Bridget Shea, Chief Customer Officer of Typeface, a generative AI application that revolutionizes personalized content creation for businesses. At Typeface, Bridget partners with global enterprise customers to navigate and unlock meaningful Generative AI transformations. Bridget has been a driving force in scaling GTM teams while navigating numerous technology paradigm shifts at start-ups and top global tech companies. In her previous role as Dataiku’s Chief Customer Officer she led global customer success and professional services teams, ensuring the delivery of customer value to data science teams from AI infrastructure platforms. Bridget’s reputation as a leading customer success expert is also backed by her track record of notable acquisitions and IPOs. Bridget served as Chief Customer Officer of Datorama (acquired by Salesforce), where she collaborated closely with Fortune 500 CMOs and marketing teams. She served as Chief Revenue Officer at TellApart (Twitter’s largest acquisition in history) to then go on to lead global sales teams at Twitter. Bridget was a catalyst for growth in helping build Yext’s (IPO) global enterprise division, leading customer success. Bridget’s influence also extends to her roles as advisor to dbt Labs and Hex and as a Board Member of Xeneta and Aqdoq.

The Real Talk

Bridget’s leadership and mentorship style is best described as ‘real talk,’ a fearless blend of honesty and drive to help everyone around her optimize performance. Her contagious intellectual curiosity and commitment to providing immediate feedback and coaching to her team members have been instrumental in her success. This hands-on leadership approach, rooted in authenticity and trust, has not only resonated with her teams but also with the broader community that she mentors as a board member and advisor. Bridget’s DNA and mindset fosters an environment of continuous and relentless pursuit via quick cycle improvement across her teams.

Top talent and those looking to be classically trained join Bridget’s teams for what she calls the “slope of the line” approach to talent development. This method helps team members, managers, and in turn the company accelerate progress. This unique approach and style enables Bridget’s team to unlock these results through an operating rhythm that keeps a fast beat.

Bridget has played an integral part in building early-stage companies and achieving four successful exits and a fifth in progress. However, the most satisfying part of Bridget’s job is intentionally and thoughtfully investing in building the best alumni operators. She takes the most pride in seeing former team members move forward to build great companies themselves.

Tackling Challenges

Bridget’s most common learning thread is that the inertia of large-scale global enterprise companies is not to be underestimated. In her role as the catalyst to unlock enterprise innovation potential, she partners closely with customers on this journey to break new ground to realize high-impact gains, as well as education and enablement best practices for leaders and their teams around operational change. And it is this diversity of use cases across work with enterprises and big brands that attracts her to lead customer success service teams. She believes service teams can help customers unlock the value of new innovation inflection points like GenAI by drawing learnings and pattern matching from a variety of industries and customer profiles, while also going deep into specific needs. At Typeface, Bridget sees a big opportunity to build on and democratize these best practices to make the deep technical power of AI accessible and pervasive for many, fundamentally changing how they work. This mission energizes and motivates her daily to partner with Typeface’s customers on their innovation journeys.

The Ever Evolving Generative AI and Content Creation Industry

Bridget believes this is the perfect time to reset expectations with customers divided into two camps. One is searching for the magic AI button, the other is jumping on the negative bandwagon predicting the downfall of AI. However, the truth, says Bridget, lies in the middle. Customers who will reap the rewards are those who don’t just follow trends but create their own, recognizing that the technology is still in its early days and needs to be molded with a test and learn approach where gains are made in small iterative steps.

Like any new technology, GenAI also demands organizational shifts and effective change management. The potential for productivity gains is so significant that delaying the first step while waiting for the perfect long-term plan often means missing out on compounded benefits. Which means clients who embrace this technology early and adapt their tech stack to work with emerging GenAI platforms will start to quickly differentiate themselves as reaping the benefits as early adopters.

Integrating AI into the Content Creation Process

Bridget believes that AI has the potential to unlock various new frontiers of how we work with tools that will make it easy for anyone to express their creativity. However, she feels the most important part to get right is the change management, which starts with upskilling and reskilling employees.

She also asserts that AI cannot be just a side project; it needs to be integrated into the company’s fabric. It is also important to build trust early by setting a clear vision and sharing the benefits of early exploration with teams. Additionally, it’s extremely important to designate internal advocates and champions to share key pilot learnings. When implemented correctly, AI has the potential to free teams from the constraints of the past and truly reimagine the workflow of campaigns and content experiences from idea to activation.

The Differentiating Factor

Typeface provides white-glove partner support from onboarding to production on this journey. It closely partners with its customers early in campaigns, going deep to innovate together, identifying quick wins and long-term productivity gains.

• Multimodal and multi-model: With Typeface, organizations don’t need to use multiple, disconnected tools to generate text and images. Typeface believes in leveraging the best-in-class capabilities of large-scale language models and techniques, seamlessly integrating multiple modalities into one content generation workflow for text and images, and getting better with continuous training.
• Personalization at speed and scale: Bridget and her team know that no one size fits all. Typeface empowers every employee to create high-quality, on-brand content at speed and scale and ensure brand consistency across all teams, business lines, and global regions.
• Safety and Trust: Typeface has always and will continue to prioritize many layers of safety and trust, including data protection, brand governance, responsible AI practices in all that it does, upholding ethical AI principles, and actively prohibiting content that could lead to bias or harm.

Reimagining Storytelling and Campaign Building

Bridget is particularly excited about Typeface Arc, which reimagines storytelling and campaign-building experiences for marketers with AI-first workflows. This has been a pivotal moment for Bridget and her team on their GenAI journey, as they have received strong positive feedback from early enterprise customers.

As Bridget and her team look ahead to the next frontier for content, they believe AI’s true potential goes far beyond answering prompts with individual content moments and artifacts to curating interconnected stories across cross functional teams. They see it creating interconnected stories and reimagining the entire enterprise workflow, from idea to campaign activation.

Suggestions for Companies Looking to Leverage Generative AI

Bridget explains that crafting personalized stories has been limited to a privileged few with specialized tools and high costs for a long time. Now, for the first time, Typeface can teach AI to uniquely understand its client’s business, brand language, style, audiences, and data, unlocking and democratizing a new level of personalization at scale. This helps organizations reach more users with unique stories for each of their audiences on a global scale, making them more personal and connected. For example, a global financial services company or electronics brand can now reach exponentially more customers and tell its story in dozens of places instead of being limited to one market, website, or one-size-fits-all campaign.