Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happened in 2015?

Volker Smid: I decided to go back to my roots.

Sramana Mitra: Start another company?

Volker Smid: No, I was joining a company with very little revenue. It was the second largest SEO platform in the world called Searchmetrics. I became the CEO of Searchmetrics to get the company from small revenue to being successful outside Germany. We had to get rid of litigations that we had in the US which were cumbersome and expensive. It was another learning experience.

Sramana Mitra: Searchmetrics was a German company?

Volker Smid: It’s a Berlin-based company. They had an operation in the US and ended up in litigation with one of their competitors. It was before my time. I just needed to resolve it.

Sramana Mitra: What happened to the company?

Volker Smid: They got sold to a very nice company in the US called Conductor run by Seth. Seth is a great people leader. Conductor and Searchmetrics have a wonderful combination of people, product, and services.

Sramana Mitra: You were there till the end of transaction?

Volker Smid: No, I left four years ago to join Acrolinx. This is my current assignment.

Sramana Mitra: What is Acrolinx?

Volker Smid: When I worked for Searchmetrics, it was an SEO company. The whole objective of SEO is to make content successful. We call it search engine optimization. It’s basically to make content visible. What I learned at Searchmetrics was that today’s commerce and education is driven by existing content and mostly written content.

I assembled a lot of knowledge about the content supply chain and the content assembly line. That connected me to Acrolinx. Acrolinx can help an enterprise to focus on the quality of content in a very complex world. There are language aspects to it. The content must be clear and concise. Content must follow the defined language of an organization. You need to avoid certain languages. You must be inclusive by all means.

For that, you need a platform like Acrolinx that helps enterprises to establish a quality aspect around content and have enterprise start scoring their content. Establish a baseline and then improve the baseline.

The value of our platform is the use of AI. We use a lot of NLP. We were born as a spin-off of the German Association of Artificial Intelligence 20 years ago. This is our DNA. The platform is being used by the largest companies in the world. The more content a company has, the more is the need for a platform like Acrolinx to get their hands on content from an impact and risk avoidance perspective.

Sramana Mitra: Can you take me through a use case?

Volker Smid: I’ll take an interesting one. Imagine you run a domain. The subdomain holds seven million pieces of content in a complex structure. The subdomain has, every year, 1.2 billion visitors. The visitors spend about five minutes engaging. That gives you six billion minutes of content engagement every year. You start to wonder if the quality of the content is not good enough, the user experience is probably neutral or negative.

You need to connect quantitative metrics around content with qualitative metrics. Technical documentation needs to be read and understood. It needs to be clear and concise. It needs to speak the language of the user and not the language of the technology. It should also make sure that the pages align to the need of the user. It is basically the content that defines the interaction between your audience and what you have to offer. Improving quality is an absolute objective of every enterprise today. This is where we can help.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of a company is this? Is this a publishing company? Is user engagement the primary goal?

Volker Smid: No, it’s a technology company that has very complex technology to offer. The subdomain is a learning platform.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Extending Product Roadmaps with Generative AI: Acrolinx CEO Volker Smid
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