The AI-Enabled Archivist and the End of Corporate Amnesia - with Jason Dressel

00:00
Daniel Nestle
Welcome or welcome back to the trending Communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. Every so often, there's like a new thing we're all supposed to be doing so we don't get left behind. Blogs, social media, content strategy, digital transformation, which never ends. Now, of course, we've got AI. Look, each one arrived with its own wave of urgency, its own consultants, its own experts, pitches, newsletters, spam, and more. But somewhere in there, we also apparently decided we needed podcasts. You know, which, okay, sure, get the irony here. I am. But the thing is, look, in the scramble toward all that shiny new stuff, we kept forgetting something important. We kept forgetting what we already knew. All that accumulated expertise, those hard won lessons, the institutional memory baked into the bones of an organization or individual.

01:02
Daniel Nestle
Maybe we just sort of left it in a box somewhere, labeled it archive, and moved on. Maybe that's fine. Or maybe that's actually the most expensive mistake enterprises are making right now. Especially as they race to stuff AI into everything. AI is only as good as what you feed it. Garbage in, garbage out. Everybody knows this. So what happens when you've spent 30 years letting your history rot in a filing cabinet? What does your AI actually know about who you are? Well, my guest today has spent the better part of three decades helping some of the world's most enduring enterprises answer exactly that question. Not as a philosophy exercise, but as a business imperative. He and his company just launched a first of its kind AI platform, purpose built to turn institutional memory into live citable, enterprise intelligence. Fortune 500s are already in beta.

01:57
Daniel Nestle
A rarity this day and age. He came up inside one single company, one employer. He learned the craft from its founder and eventually succeeded him. He runs his own podcast on business history, which means he spent years thinking about how the past explains the present and before AI made that a competitive necessity. We're going to dig into what organizations are actually throwing away in this AI sprint and what it really takes to make institutional memory work for you. Not someday, but now. So please welcome to the trending Communicator. For the first time, CEO of History Factory and my friend, Jason Dressel. Jason, how you doing? Dan, what's going on?

02:38
Jason Dressel
Great to see you, my friend. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here. Huge fan of this podcast and also congratulations. So in the spirit of history, hopefully one day, years from now, I'll be able to say that I was on a podcast with the great Dan Nestle the same week that he launched Lilypath with his co founders. So congratulations.

03:03
Daniel Nestle
Thank you very much.

03:04
Jason Dressel
And yes, it's a historic week for you and really psyched to be here.

03:10
Daniel Nestle
Thank you. You know, thank you. Listen, thank you, sir. I mean, listeners will. Will be actually kind of hearing that in somewhat of a historical context because this is going to probably air a few months from now.

03:20
Jason Dressel
That's right.

03:20
Daniel Nestle
So by the time they listen, Lilypath will be a household name, I am sure. However. Yeah, thank you very much. It has been incredible to. To be involved in a startup, to try to found my own thing. And it's all grows out of communications, out of where I started, the things I have done in communications, where I gravitated toward with communications plus AI. And it kind of almost happened organically where Lilypath is this kind of culmination of executive positioning meets AI. And it all starts on LinkedIn for now, but it makes a lot of sense to me. I hope it makes sense to everybody else out there who was willing to give it a shot and give us some good patronage.

04:06
Jason Dressel
Absolutely. No, it's exciting. It clearly fits a clear need in the market and wish all the luck.

04:13
Daniel Nestle
Well, thank you, man. I mean, and it. So it brings in mind. And there's a lot of stuff I want to ask you about. Well, everything. I mean, people are probably wondering. Not our friends, of course, and Paige and, you know, PRs, who. All the people who already know Jason Dressel. But a lot of people are probably wondering, History Factory. How's that? How's that? In the communication space. And, you know, will get there. It's clearly a comms company, or actually it's a lot more than that, but. But it's. It's very understandable. And also, you know, we've all kind of gotten to this weird place where we don't even know what our jobs are anymore because we're making it up as we. Not making it up as we go. We're sort of building the plane in mid flight.

04:59
Daniel Nestle
And I don't know if there's a accurate description of what a CEO does anymore, of what a comms guy does. And in my case, I mean, it's been brilliant. I love it. I like having a career identity crisis on purpose, but it's disconcerting for a lot of people. And it certainly is changing the way that we have to kind of approach the future. But your company, History Factory, or I should say History Factory, there's no the correct right.

05:33
Jason Dressel
There used to be a The. It was part of a rebrand that was. That was the conclusion of a. Of a very long exhaustive rebound process was we dropped the, to drop the.

05:45
Daniel Nestle
You know, it's a, the problem for real. Like it's, that's right. It's, you know, it's. But it's tempting because you know, we've been inculcated with the History Channel and the history this and that. But History Factory is doing some incredible things. But we're all in this kind of space where we're taking AI and communications and marketing, mushing them together and we're building. I like to say, hey, I'm building now. Making things. And you at History Factory are no different. So I want to start there in a way. I mean, kind of, I guess so, you know, History Factory, you say you start with the future and work back. Yeah, that's our future right now. That's your, that's your thing. It's, that's where we are now. We're starting with it.

06:36
Daniel Nestle
That's in a lot of ways that's what we do when we try to build things, build apps or do whatever we're doing. So you know, most people think of history as like a backward looking thing. So tell me how, tell me all about this. Start with the, you know, start with the future and work back because I get it. But I don't know if my listeners are do and I certainly want to hear you talk about it.

06:57
Jason Dressel
Sure. Well, I think first and foremost, History Factory, our vision is to empower the world's best enterprises to be able to get infinite use out of their history, to drive their missions forward. That's, that's our whole sort of purpose encompass north and we can't do that without starting with the future and working back. We have to understand who our clients are today and where they're going and start with the future and work back. Quite simply, you can think about it maybe in two different contexts. The first is literally how we think about how we revisit and reimagine their history, given who they are today and where they're going. Certainly for the clients that we work with, if you were to go back to the beginning, to your point, you would never get here. You would never be able to make it today's organization.

08:05
Jason Dressel
It's too big, it's too complex. There's been too much change, there's been too much innovation. And our clients like nations in a sense, they're kind of like nation states in that they have these kind of sort of unifying myths. And those myths and stories have to be adapted and changed over time as the organization grows and changes. Right?

08:34
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

08:34
Jason Dressel
And so that's how we think about history in the context of starting with the future and working back. A great example of that is just an example of what that looks like would be Deloitte. I don't know how many people in business under the age of 40 think of Deloitte as an accounting firm.

08:54
Daniel Nestle
Right.

08:58
Jason Dressel
And Deloitte, you know, probably spent two decades changing that perception that they are a big accounting firm. And when you look at their founder, William Deloitte, an Englishman who founded the firm in, I think, 1845, and I hope I'm getting that right. He was the accountant.

09:20
Daniel Nestle
Sure, we'll find out.

09:21
Jason Dressel
He, he was, he was a very competent accountant and he was in fact, one of the leaders and creators of the field. So when we help Deloitte talk about William Deloitte as an example, we don't change the fact that he was an accountant, but we talk about how his impact on accountant helped improve the management of the companies that he worked on. We helped him talk about the diverse set of large organizations that he worked with. We talk about the impact he had in his community in England, which is now a community that has a large Southeast Asian population. So we're finding ways to broaden and reinterpret how we position the history in the context of obviously Deloitte now being the largest professional services firm in the world and a very broad platform of management and consulting and technology.

10:19
Jason Dressel
The other side of Start with the Future and Work Back is not only how we're approaching history itself, but how we're thinking about again, how we're thinking about using it. Right. And so if an organization is coming to us and they are thinking tactically about what they want to do with their history, we're challenging that thinking based on what they're trying to accomplish, who their audiences are, and what makes sense for their company and brand. This past year we had a really big traveling experience that we did with caterpillar for their 100th anniversary. And it went to something like 32 countries. And it was this really massive scale mobile experience of telling their story. And why did we do it that way? Well, it needed to be big, because Caterpillar is big and their products are big.

11:14
Jason Dressel
And it needed to be hands on and it needed to be in person. And so we wanted to have a solution that really made met, you know, the need of the brand, the culture and what they were trying to accomplish from a Business perspective. So that, in a small way, is what start with the future and work back looks like.

11:32
Daniel Nestle
I also, I also imagine that it's. It's not on. You know, it's not unlike having a. Starting with a theory, starting with a hypothesis, and then. And then kind of going and doing the research. Because if you think about it, you know, you work with a company like Deloitte, and I do remember Touche and Tomatsu, by the way. But. But you're working with a company like Deloitte, you've got, what is it, 150, like, 180 years of history, roughly? I mean, how many boxes is that? Like, how. How many archives is that? And you walk into a project and you think, okay, I'm gonna. I need to. I need to look at the history of this company to understand where we're going. With no further instruction. Where do you start? Like, how. How do you. How do you. I don't think you can.

12:21
Daniel Nestle
Like, that's why you need. You need that strategic vision. You need to understand where the company is now to kind of give you those guard rails.

12:30
Jason Dressel
There's no question it's. It's incredible how our team is able to find what we call the golden nuggets and to do the research to surface that it is. It is needles in a haystack at scale. And, you know, the ability to sift through that content is obviously a craft and it's a skill set, and it's the work that our archivists, our researchers, our historians do with our creative team to bring those kinds of stories to life. Not to dig into the Deloitte story too much, but just as an example of that, since you set it up so nicely, Dan, you know, one of the great discoveries of. Of working with Deloitte initially on that campaign was we actually found a partner agreement that was up for auction in an auction house in. In London. And so it was literally finding a rare document, a.

13:34
Jason Dressel
A document that was one of the original documents that literally was the origin of them being a partnership. And. And we found it outside of the organization. And so those kinds of things happen all the time.

13:49
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, it's astounding to me that companies, especially large organizations, that have a lot of history, as it were, that they don't dig into it more, that they don't go there. There's a. There's a. There's a blocker, I suppose, in the mind that it's okay, it's not valuable or it's a. Yeah, it would be n. But you know, I think about my Japanese, the companies, the Japanese companies I've worked with, they'll have a very keen sense of history. I don't, I would not say that they are using it in using their own assets, historical assets, in the ways that are future facing or in ways to support their current vision or their story or, you know, they're not searching for nuggets that are going to, that they can repurpose and so on. But they have the bones, right? They make museums.

14:46
Daniel Nestle
Big companies, they have museums all over. You go to Japan, you go to the Mitsubishi Heavy industries museum in 17 different cities or something like that. It's crazy, but that's where it ends. They're like, hey, we're taking care of our history. We recognize it. What is it that moves them from this kind of virtuous recognition of their own history to let's act on our history?

15:09
Jason Dressel
Well, not all organizations do, I think, to your point, but I think that there's a few different. There's not a single answer to that, both in terms of what they do, how they do it and why they do it. Yeah, but I'll answer the question as best I can.

15:27
Daniel Nestle
Maybe I could, maybe I'm happy to.

15:30
Jason Dressel
Answer and introduce some new ones just.

15:31
Daniel Nestle
A little bit like it's the same question. But yeah, think of it, think of in terms of like how does a CEO come around? Like, how does the executive come around to the point that, you know, we have two different things.

15:44
Jason Dressel
Well, interestingly enough, the CEO is typically the easiest who's already on board because unlike most other, really more so than anyone else in the organization, the CEO is thinking intergenerationally. They are typically, particularly in the large organizations we work with, they are thinking in the context of stewardship, they're thinking in the context typically of wanting to leave this organization stronger than they left it. Yes, there's a subtext that they may also be thinking about legacy. But CEOs and also CEOs are not thinking in the context of the day to day and teams and resources and budgets. So the CEO is not the hardest to have to make those business cases with because they understand strategically the value and understand the importance of the organization sort of staying tethered to its identity and what has enabled it to get to this point.

17:02
Jason Dressel
I think with other leaders, the business case is more tactical. It is more around, you know, specific KPIs, around, you know, brand or culture or cost efficiencies or reduction of risk and history, heritage and archives, you know, can be aligned with any of those types of business cases. And it often is something that happens that is a unpleasant experience. It might be a litigation event in which they had a hard time finding evidence or were innocent, a litigation situation because they didn't have the supporting documentation that they needed around an IP matter. It might be a product launch. So it typically is an event that occurs where they see the need, understand why they needed it.

18:04
Jason Dressel
And then as I say, it's kind of, then afterwards like, you know, when were kids and you know, this is kind of a dark analogy, but, you know, it's like when were kids and they had the missing children on the milk box, if you remember that. And we, and that's kind of like how I would kind of say to the team, I'm like, well, unfortunately now we have to now kind of go back and show them the milk box and be like, we don't want this to happen again. We need to go back in and we need to make sure that you're preserving your history to preserve and so you're not in this situation again. And then sometimes it's a tough event, like someone passes away and they didn't capture institutional memory.

18:44
Jason Dressel
But then a lot of times it is a more sort of tactical, situational, you know, something that happens like a product launch. So there's a number of things that drive the need. But even when that need is driven, you know, one of the challenges though is they tend to be very kind of using it in the moment. And there's a distinction of using that history and heritage as a narrative device, as something that's ornamental, that's being supported, you know, in a campaign or to your point about companies in Japan versus really thinking about history and heritage as a driver of institutional memory data and you know, essentially operational infrastructure.

19:30
Daniel Nestle
It's almost so it sounds a lot like some of, sometimes it's compliance driven or a crisis driven or something like this. And you did mention event driven tactically, like anniversaries and so on, right? That, that's when they want to go and look in their, in their archives or find out what's in that old room they never go into. But like if so okay, so if it's driven that way and it starts that way with a company, right? They're, they're like, okay, fine, history factory. They're the people to call, they're going to come check out our archives.

20:06
Daniel Nestle
They're going to, they're going to pull out all the stories, the narratives, and a lot of other good stuff that are going to help us either fit either with this litigation or make a splash with the product or, you know, remind everybody why we've been around for 175 years, you know, whatever that, whatever the goal is. Where does that moment happen when they say when they make that kind of the, aha. That holy cow, we have so much rich material here, we can do something. I mean, it's unique to us. It's ours. We don't have to go higher. When do they make this decision?

20:55
Jason Dressel
It's a great question. It varies, obviously, from case to case, but more often than not, it does start with them going through that journey that you just described, Dan. And then it's a realization that they do have this repository of content that is completely unique to them. It is the inventory of their experience as we, as we call it. And it is fundamentally all the things that are the, you know, memories and content that they can use to drive all the things that make them different and explain who they were at any given time. And so more often than not, you know, most of the archival programs that we build and manage, most of the time they are programs that we built from the ground up, not all the time. We have helped organizations modernize existing, long standing archives programs.

21:58
Jason Dressel
It's interesting too, like, you know, people don't realize, but back when you look back in the, you know, 1950s, 60s, 70s, big companies had big archival departments. And the reason why, of course, was that the world was a lot more analog. Right. And so you had these archival, just like companies back then had full libraries. And so as the world went digital, there's been a bit of a disconnect on what archives is, why it matters, how it is different than, for example, records management or digital asset management or, you know, sort of a subtext of knowledge management. But all of these disciplines are essentially all rooted in the same work of helping organizations make sure that they're capturing, preserving, and enabling access to information.

22:56
Jason Dressel
And the value of archives is specifically holding on to the history and the materials that should have enduring value to an organization over their entire life cycle, Right?

23:10
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

23:11
Jason Dressel
And so once they go through that process and once they see the impact of that kind of experience and those kinds of campaigns or storytelling or, you know, whatever the experience may be, it gets a lot easier for them to understand why there's a lot of value in this. And certainly proportionally, it's, you know, a minimal investment.

23:37
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. Have you ever seen a company, and you don't have to give names, but have you ever seen a company that goes through an exercise, no matter how it begins, whether it begins for good reason or for save my ass reasons? Have you ever seen a company go, they're all legitimate reasons. Right. Have you ever seen them go through this process and go, holy crap, we're wrong about ourselves. We need to change our brand, our values, our mission, our vision. Does it ever get that far? Have you ever seen any kind of drastic change like this? Yeah.

24:13
Jason Dressel
Yes, and we have. And, and it's interesting because a lot of times, and this is a great kind of example of what we're talking about. Typically when we work with an organization for the first time, and we'll take your example of brand identity, they will often come to us after that work has been done. And what they're really looking for us to do now is to show the receipts they want us to now do the long show the long hand of the math and show that it all works out. And yes, we are this thing that we say that we are. And we've had experiences where we've had to say, you're not that. And I'll give an old example because it won't get me in any sort of trouble whatsoever, which was were brought in by Craftsman, the tool brand.

25:16
Daniel Nestle
The tool company.

25:17
Jason Dressel
Yeah, a long time ago when they.

25:19
Daniel Nestle
Were still part of Sears.

25:19
Jason Dressel
They were still with Sears, in fact. Yeah, it was a Sears created brand. And they wanted to position the. The. And I'll blame this on the ad agency in part, but they wanted to basically position Craftsman as this like, super kind of superior tool. And anyone who understands anything about the tool market knows the Craftsman is not. It's a, it's a, you know, it's a do it yourself home product. You know, no one's. No one's on. No. And they had like, campaigns of like, you know, astronauts on the moon with Craftsman tools and like, I don't think I hope NASA's not taking, you know, Craftsman to the moon or whatever. So that's an example of that kind of discordance. But often then what happens through that process and we've gone.

26:07
Jason Dressel
And this has become increasingly more common for us because we now have been around for nearly 50 years. Once a client goes through that experience with us, they get it and they say, I realize we did this completely bass awkward. We have to come to you first to understand the insights, understand where we've been, to help inform that. So it's a great question. And there has been that shift, but yeah, there's been a number of times where we've discovered that there's just a fundamental discordance between how they're positioning themselves and really who they are and who they've been like.

26:44
Daniel Nestle
It just seems to me that it would be almost a, it should be a prerequisite for a big change management exercise that the first thing you do is know who you are, know who you're going to be, who, what your company is going to change into. And is that a realistic change given who you've been, you know, there's no, it is a company, after all. There is nothing preventing a company from shedding their old skin and doing something completely different and reinventing.

27:13
Jason Dressel
Right.

27:15
Daniel Nestle
It's a lot harder, I think, than for larger companies and certainly, you know, it's never been an easy task. But for the vast majority of organizations, you know, people join your employees come on board, they're there for whatever reason they're there for. But generally speaking, they're on board with your, you'd hope they're on board with your mission, vision, values. They're on board with, you know, the, you know, what you represent. They're, they're not unhappy to carry your brand around on their LinkedIn profile or in, you know, or in their car, wherever they are. And, you know, even if it's a little blase, they're at least, they're not negative about it. So along comes the history factory looking at the archives and says, you know, you guys want to change. What do you do about the employees then?

28:07
Daniel Nestle
Because remember, they're all associated with this, who you are. And if you're having an identity crisis, what's the, what is the effect on them? So, you know, how closely are you working with, like working as an internal comms team with change management to make these changes happen?

28:27
Jason Dressel
Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And you're absolutely right. I mean, the first audience that is going to call BS on you is going to be your internal people because they know that it doesn't pass the sniff test. Right? And so that's exactly where it begins. And a lot of the work we'll do will start with engaging those groups and actually uncovering and unearthing their stories and perspectives for exactly that reason. It's interesting too, what you touch on, because, you know, I was thinking when you think about the big companies that we tend to work with and organize the kinds of organizations where you've spent some of your career. Dan, you know, they all go through these sort of moments of their life cycle, right? They have the founding era.

29:21
Jason Dressel
Sometimes the founding era results in explosive growth, but in many cases they have the founding era. And the founding era may last for 20 or 30 years. And then often it's the second generation that kind of builds on that infrastructure, you know, professionalizes. It builds in, you know, scale and systems and processes. And then, you know, there's that kind of hyper growth period. And then eventually what happens, right? They hit a period that is called stall out, right? They stop growth. And then what typically happens, right? They either, you know, stall out, they never return to the level of performance they had, or what generally happens. There's a moment of reflection. There's a moment of we've lost our way. Right? And that is kind of what this is about.

30:17
Jason Dressel
You know, two pieces of work that I talk about often are Bain's founders mentality, work that talks about the influence of founders and talks about why companies that are led by founders tend to outperform those that don't, and the attributes that those companies stay tethered to whether their founder is still there or not. And some new work that John Iwata, who we both of course know, he's done it at Yale, is called refounding. And he's talked about that in the context of some of the challenges that companies like Boeing and Nike and I believe Starbucks have had and how some of those organizations, obviously, in the case of Starbucks, they've had to bring their founder back a couple times now. Right.

31:05
Jason Dressel
And so this is all connected to what you're talking about in terms of staying tethered to what made you unique and important to society in the first place and not straying away from that.

31:18
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, I mean, the process of digging into all that, even in, you know, going through the archives or putting on your, you know, your library science hat or, you know, digging in and just kind of asking the right questions. Scoop Jackson style and talking to the right people. I know I'm dating myself there with Scoop Jackson. We're probably even dating before myself. I'm sorry, just came to mind. This came to mind. Jason Dressel in a, in a pork pie hat. You know, Scoop Dressel, I'd love to see that. But, you know, you go in there and you're talking to people, along comes, you know, technology. Right? So you have been around for 50 years. I mean, the company has history, Factory has history. Factory has a history.

32:03
Daniel Nestle
And you know, in that time you have seen your work move from like, I suppose, I'm guessing here, but I suppose it's from digging through boxes and microfiche and maybe you still do something all the way up through to the company. Archives are all on these three hard drives, you know, et cetera. Or, or more. Right. And now, of course, with all the public information that's been out on the Internet for 20, almost 30 years. Right. I mean, think of, in many cases, some of your archives are the first.

32:39
Jason Dressel
Corporate websites, basically all launched in 1995.

32:43
Daniel Nestle
That's all.

32:44
Jason Dressel
That's when they all launched. Yeah.

32:47
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. I tried to buy Nestle.com in 1996. Nestle, right.

32:55
Jason Dressel
Yeah.

32:56
Daniel Nestle
I was going up against the big boys.

32:58
Jason Dressel
Yeah.

32:58
Daniel Nestle
Back in those days when you thought that buying a domain was your surefire way to get billions of dollars in ari. But I digress. So they all, they, you know, they've been on the web now for 30 years. So if they've been around for 30 years, then there is an external archive that's been built that they're not in control of necessarily. There's a lot of information. You know what I'm going to say, because every episode has something about this, but I'm going to just put up those two little letters. AI most certainly changes the game here.

33:32
Jason Dressel
Yeah.

33:33
Daniel Nestle
So you've got this capability now for somebody to do research on a company and believe that they get the whole picture because they got 30 years of stuff out there on them.

33:43
Jason Dressel
Right.

33:44
Daniel Nestle
And that's a lot of context. That's a lot of context for any of the LLMs now, especially with the way they are to parse through and come up with some really reasonable and interesting kind of conclusions. But those AI or the LLMs don't have the access to the internal stuff. A lot of, a lot of it's not digitized. But even if it's digitized, it's not out there for training material. So here comes History Factory and you have a very interesting solution to all this. I promised I would hold back a little bit on it. But I want to say I love Chronicle. I think it's, I think your concept is amazing. And let me just wax a little bit here because. And it's Chronicle for.

34:32
Daniel Nestle
First of all, I like the way you spelled it with Q, like C H, R O, N, I, Q, L, E, Chronicle. Right. Did I get that right? C H, R O, N, I, Q, L, E. Yes, there you go. I, I like it so much because my listeners know that I've been focused on essentially doing something similar for an individual for like, you know, getting into the intellectual archaeology you have to do to dig into your past and then like, you know, scoop that all into a very, into a certain types of AI governed closed systems so that you are able to then mine that information, which is your information, which is not like manufactured, made up by some AI, but you can proudly use it and claim it because it is yours. Use that for your current and present and future content.

35:27
Daniel Nestle
Very simple. That's the simple way of saying it all. Here you come. And I was explaining this to you before you told me about Chronicle, and you're just like, I think I'm working on something that's a little bit similar, but for a brand and for a company and for something with history. So I love Chronicle, love the ideas that I love the way that you are implementing it. Why don't we start off? Tell, tell us about, like, why you went this direction. Not that, not that we haven't already covered a little bit, but sure. Where. What it's all about where we're going with it and so on.

35:59
Jason Dressel
Yeah, well, first, thank you. And it is, it's an incredibly exciting new chapter of History Factory, and we are incredibly excited about the platform and its potential. I'll take a. Because after all, I am representing History Factory in history. I'll take a little bit of a meandering route on this, which is, I'll come back to. Our vision is to make history infinitely useful for our clients. And this is really, interestingly enough, and you and I talked about this a bit on our podcast, the History Factory podcast. We talked about this kind of in the sort of context of the history of disruptive technologies. And so, as you noted, I've been at History Factory a long time. I joined history factory in 1999 when the Internet was still very much sort of solidifying as a disruptive technology.

37:01
Jason Dressel
And I certainly learned a lot from that process. And the way our team came together around this was very consistent with how we have embraced previous technologies. And essentially, you know, to your point, the challenges with AI are it is, as you said before a while ago, it's kind of garbage in and garbage out. And I think we're all learning the incredible power of what AI can offer, but we're also pretty quickly learning the shortcomings. Right?

37:38
Daniel Nestle
Yeah.

37:39
Jason Dressel
And again, when you kind of compare it to the early era of the Internet, there was this excitement about the World Wide Web and people getting websites posted up and listservs. And then pretty quickly organizations said, wait, we can't do this. We have to leverage and deploy this technology. But we need to wield it in different ways that serve our purposes, one of which was we need security, we need privacy. And so that created the concept of an intranet. Right. And I think we're seeing a very similar dynamic now, obviously with AI. You know, we very quickly went from how people are using these LLMs in a external environment to now how organizations and individuals are essentially now embracing and creating more closed loop solutions.

38:33
Jason Dressel
And so the way we're looking at that is a few different things, and there's a few different layers to your question and the points you raise. First and foremost, there is the issue that AI is inherently biased based on what is represented on the web. And so that bias is, it can be cultural, it can be geographic, it can be ethnicity, and it can certainly be time. And so from a historical perspective, the Internet is inherently biased toward content that's digital. And so it is essentially scraping information that is available on the Internet.

39:21
Daniel Nestle
Right.

39:23
Jason Dressel
The second piece of that, and to your point, companies do not have all of their archival or historical information or data writ large externally. They have it internally. So AI is not going to be accessing that. I think the second piece of that is that the data itself is not easily readable. And so that's where you're seeing all these issues with hallucination confabulation. The accuracy issues that we're seeing with AI is not just a inability for it to access the scope and breadth of information that it should be accessing because it's not available. It's also because the technology is not that, not yet there, where it can actually effectively read data that is in those kinds of formats. And so essentially what Chronicle is solving for are those barriers.

40:19
Jason Dressel
It is a platform that is leveraging the power and speed that we all love about AI. And it's solving for the lack of trust and the concerns about inaccuracy and hallucination and confabulation by essentially a very defined creation process of the actual information that we are putting into the platform, but also the process we're using to do that. So it is not at all a parallel to, you know, just an organization that has like an internal chat GPT or Gemini or Claude. And then you're just like setting up, you know, specific custom, you know, GPTs or agents. It's a process for literally how we're structuring the data from this information and breaking it down and feeding it into the AI platform so that it's clean data. And you know, I'm back to the idea of kind of garbage in and garbage out.

41:26
Jason Dressel
You know, we're putting in really clean, verified, accurate content. And we've also essentially trained it to function like a consultant and a historian to some degree. So it is able to essentially provide more context. Which I think is another issue that we're all seeing with AI is it's not great at context, very few technologies are. And so we've also trained it through essentially broader research bases of content, of history, of information at our disposal. So it's a platform that is really functioning like nothing else we've seen in the market, both in terms of the data that it's pulling from, how it's able to read that information, and how it's been trained to perform.

42:18
Daniel Nestle
If you're a communicator marketer inside one of these companies, like what are the use cases for Chronicle, what would you be using it for?

42:28
Jason Dressel
Well, you can use it for anything as simple and as tactical as social media campaigns. You know, great. It's, it's March, it's Women's History Month. And we need to quickly pull together some insights and research on women from the history of our organization and from our local communities and regions where we operate that we want to be able to celebrate. And it can do all the things that incredible AI can do. Give me that content of people from 1980, give me people from 1970. I could break down that information and slice it and dice it in all the ways you can use it for much more sort of strategic initiatives around, you know, evaluating, you know, when you've gone into different markets, what were the drivers of that? How has your product evolved over time?

43:32
Jason Dressel
And because it's connected in some cases with our clients archives, and it's important to note Chronicle is a tool that you don't have to have an archives to actually be able to use, but if you do have an actual archives, it can access those materials. So one of the really great things about it is you can actually also access imagery directly in the tool. So one of our clients who's in beta, one of the things they were really excited about, they are in the midst of launching their next five year strategic plan. As part of that process, a question came up with their senior leadership and they said, when did we start doing this? When did we start the process of having A five year strategic plan.

44:19
Jason Dressel
It feels like we've always done this, but surely we, there was a start to this and no one knew. And we have their archives. They checked the archives. We actually even using the archival tools at our disposal, were not easily able to find that information. But then we used Chronicle, or I should say the client used Chronicle. And, and they were able to find that and they were actually able to confirm that their five year strategic planning process started in 1971 and they were able to go back and then they were able to trace it and find the evolution of their strategic planning. And then they found some things from the strategic planning process early on that they wanted to pull forward and implement and integrate into how they do it now.

45:03
Jason Dressel
So there's infinite examples of how you can use it, just like there's infinite examples of how you can use any AI tool.

45:13
Daniel Nestle
It's a chatbot, right? I mean it is like the interface wise.

45:18
Jason Dressel
Yeah, I mean its interface is functioning exactly like we designed it so that it's very intuitive for folks who know how to use an AI tool, an LLM. So it's really cool. We're really excited about it and it's especially good because of the things I mentioned at being able to read data that's coming out of complex data structures. So for instance, pulling content out of annual reports, infographics, legal materials, board minutes, company newsletters, employee magazines, all those kinds of sort of narrative text rich documents that sort of out of the box AI is not great at being able to accurately decipher. That's really where it's performing at a very high level.

46:17
Daniel Nestle
I think if I had, if I had it handy for some of the companies I worked for, I'd be like, I need you to create a simulacrum, a avatar as it were. Not a, not a deep fake, but I want you to, or a Persona per se. But take all the CEOs of this company from here until history and just create like a Betty Crocker, like your Amalgamated CEO. Right. And now I'm going to bounce ideas for our strategic direction and say does the Amalgamated CEO think this is a good idea or a bad idea? Does he love doing. I do that stuff all the time with the non historical or the, you know, the regular tools that are out there for people.

47:02
Daniel Nestle
But it's just like I just keep thinking of ways that I would love to have access to like such a massive data, like store of data for the companies that I've been at and Just find out. So what was the c. Like, what were the decisions that were made at this particular time when, you know, such and such a factory blew up or, you know, these interesting kind of instances that could teach us a lot about what we can do now when, yeah, hopefully, you know, different things happen or when, you know, you're faced with different challenges.

47:45
Jason Dressel
I mean, well, you take that same concept and you think about it through the context of risk, you know, risk mitigation in legal, you know, something, you know, more proactive than reactive. Maybe one of the great examples I always like to turn to and talk about is, you know, it's its efficacy as a sales tool. So, you know, if you're a, you know, construction or engineering company or a management consulting company like Deloitte, who were talking about, and you're wanting to quickly be able to understand your history of work in a specific market, specific region, and then, you know, being able to pull that content together quickly, you know, suddenly, you know, you can create that into an executive summary as part of a proposal. So again, think of it as it is a.

48:34
Jason Dressel
It is a AI enabled time machine that is able to essentially go through the history of your entire organization based on what it knows and give you that information and manipulate it into the kind of content that we all create and build coming out of AI, any agent. That's why it's called Chronicle, because it is like a time machine.

49:00
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, I mean, it's brilliant. Are there any agentic developments coming in the product roadmap horizon? If you're able to say, I don't know.

49:08
Jason Dressel
Yeah, I mean, it's happening so quickly. Right. Like I mentioned the image one as an example. That's something that just came online in the last few weeks and probably by the time this podcast airs, there will be new ones. So certainly anyone interested? I'm sure we'll drop the link in the show notes. But if you go to historyfactory.com, you can see all about it.

49:30
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, you know, it's. I think it just opens up so much to brands to understand, you know, the value of storytelling, if nothing else. I mean, okay, I get the legal things. If you have your archive set up properly or if you have all this data available where you can go back and see, you go through all of the contracts, all of the decisions made, all of the clauses and heretofores and whereafters and whatevers and see where there was a, A T that wasn't Crossed. Wonderful. So you've got your. Your compliance side. Okay. To me, the dream is the. Is the content. Like, it's. Oh, yeah, it's just like. So it's impact on storytelling and on. Okay. All the basic comm. Stuff that people are stuck with, like writing fact sheets. Okay. That's an easy one.

50:23
Daniel Nestle
Or, you know, coming up with whatever proof points for this and that. But, you know, imagine like really getting into the heart of narrative with it.

50:32
Jason Dressel
Well, and also its ability to, for instance, if you're talking about again, you know, connecting it to also the. The archaeological history. So you can ask it chronicle, what's your favorite object in this collection? You know, so as you think about things like product development or nostalgia marketing or experiential marketing, all those kinds of things, it's like, tell me, you know, tell me the 10 coolest things in your archive, you know, from the 1960s, you know. You know, again, it's a time machine. It's a time machine.

51:11
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. Really handy when, like, you know, different, like design trends cycle in and out. Imagine going back to your art deco phase or your. Your postmodernist phase or whatever. Different Bauhaus you've got. You've gotten out there. I'm just. Just spewing things right now. But yeah, it is. You know, we had this at my last company at Lixel. We had a. We had the heritage of American Standard, which had been around forever. And there was a great kind of 1930s era image, right? And you can think of the 1930s, the U.S. you can imagine it's, you know, borderline socialist, communist type stuff, right?

51:52
Jason Dressel
Where.

51:53
Daniel Nestle
Where it's like, you know, work. You could see, like the. The title could be Workers Unite, but it's not. Or Plumbers Unite, but that's not what it is. It's. It's this, like, the strength of the nation is the. Plumbers are the strength of a nation. I think he's asking what it said. Plumbing. Plumbers are the strength of a nation. You had this, like, you know, like, picture perfect ideal, whatever that might be at the time. Plumber with a, you know, with a plunger on his shoulder.

52:21
Jason Dressel
Yeah, very.

52:22
Daniel Nestle
Looks like he's ready to leave.

52:23
Jason Dressel
Plumber. Yeah.

52:24
Daniel Nestle
Whole tongue. Right. So, you know, when. When we started thinking about anniversary when I was there, were talking about remaking that image in a, you know, in a. In a 20, 21, 22, whatever style. And at that time, you know, AI. AI image generators were really starting to take off, and you could take the image and you know, manipulate it, say, okay, now do. Redo this in this with accept. Now make the plumber female. Make the plumber of indeterminate ancestry and ethnicity. Give me 14 different versions and so on. Right. So you can come up with some very interesting modernized campaign ideas. That was really advanced. Just even trying that and trying to get people to. I thought it, I thought it was a really great way to get people used to AI as well, just to give, like to do it.

53:19
Daniel Nestle
A user generated content campaign internally where, you know, you'd submit photos or images of, you know, the plumbers or the safeguard the health of the nation or whatever it was. Now if I had Chronicle, right, I had Chronicles bring up all the artwork from different years and different ages and boy, would that have been a much more, I don't know, it would have been a lot more fun and probably a lot more viable as an external facing campaign.

53:49
Jason Dressel
Yeah, yeah, you. Absolutely, absolutely.

53:55
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. Well, so where's it going then? So what you said, you know, your, your philosophy as History Factory, you know, start with the future, work back. So we've been talking about Chronicle and I mean that feels like the now, what's the future that you are working back from for History Factory so that you can get there. It's so interesting to think of it like a loop of some kind.

54:23
Jason Dressel
Yeah, well, We have a saying of nothing looks older, faster than the future. So I don't know exactly what the future is going to look like, but I do think that what we're seeing right now with this explosion of technologies and scale and speed, I don't think it's going to look like the way people are predicting it. I'm pretty bullish that. I'm pretty bullish that we're all still going to have jobs in 10 years. I think that the way we work is going to be really different. Just like the way we work now is really different than it was 20 years ago and really different than the way we worked 20 years before that.

55:16
Jason Dressel
But I do think that one of the things that is kind of an interesting paradigm is that with all of these organizations and now increasingly, whether even you're a big, small, whether you're a big company or a small company, we're all kind of using and adopting a lot of the same technologies and tools. And I see a trend of the more intelligent and data rich we get, the more illiterate we become. And I think that we are about to go through a potential sort of Hyper scaled sort of phase of like sameness and commoditization at scale.

56:11
Daniel Nestle
Is that a cognitive offload type of a thing where we're just delegating thinking?

56:17
Jason Dressel
Yeah, well, I think it's already been happening right where we are producing so much content and so much data that what we're starting to really lose is context. And that I think is going to become a more understood challenge that technology can't solve for in terms of data analytics. It doesn't give us the context of where we've been, why we are where we are. And I think that the organizations that are going to continue to win are going to not only be the ones who understand how to deploy these tools in the most effective way, but they're going to be the organizations that, as I alluded to before, don't lose sight of understanding really who they are, why they exist, what's made them successful, what mistakes they've made in the past and don't become untethered to that.

57:24
Jason Dressel
And I think when we started our conversation, you talked about how different things are. But I think in a lot of ways the organizations that are going to be the most successful are going to be the ones that don't get so distracted by how things are different and just really stay even keeled and understand that this is just the latest in a, you know, trend that's been going on for, you know, hundreds and thousands of years, which is, you know, progress and innovation. And you know, take my company as an example. You know, we're not going to reinvent, you know, what we do and why we do it for our clients just because of this amazing technology and this amazing change that's happening. We're going to change how we do it and what that means for our clients.

58:15
Jason Dressel
But I think that's going to be one of the really big challenges and opportunities for organizations. I think the organizations that are going to, and you and I talked about this on our podcast, I think a couple of weeks ago was like, you know, the organizations that think they're going to dramatically remove expertise and institutional knowledge and replace it with machines, I think it's going to be incredibly short sighted.

58:44
Daniel Nestle
Yeah, I think I call that the big oopsie is coming, you know.

58:48
Jason Dressel
Yeah. And so I, I, I agree with you on that. So, you know, rules are going to change as they always do. But I think that, I think that context piece and really staying tethered to who you are and where you've been is going to be more important than ever.

59:04
Daniel Nestle
There's some ideas that just keep cycling back into our. Into our discussions and into our vernacular, I suppose, as marketers and communicators. And context is one of them. Context. You know, I think it was content is king and content is whatever. For a long time, then it was. No, it's not content.

59:21
Jason Dressel
Context is queen.

59:23
Daniel Nestle
Context is queen. You know, I think Matt Sweezy wrote a book a couple years back called the Context Revolution. Or Don, the Incoming. The Coming Context Revolution. And I admit that it was so. It was so high level. Like, not high level as in. As in. As in it covered things from 30,000ft. I mean, intellectually, very challenging to read because it was so smart. I mean, it was so. You had. You had to really think it through. And I think that he might have been ahead of his time a little bit. He was talking mostly within the context of Web3 at the time. Right. So you can think about that. But I wonder if context is currency, then. And I think it is. I think context is currency because so much of it is out there available to anybody at the push of a.

01:00:20
Daniel Nestle
At the, at the urging of a prompt. But if it is currency, then I think my final question to you before we close it out, and maybe there's a good way to close out, is do you think companies with history, like organizations that have a rich legacy and a rich history, you know, we've been saying that the smaller companies, the nimble companies, are going to come and eat their lunch, and for some reasons they might. But do you think that they have a really big advantage now? Or there's a hidden advantage to having so much, what somebody might uncharitably call baggage, but what we'll call, you know, content archives stuff.

01:01:12
Jason Dressel
I don't, I don't think it's that monolithic. I think that, you know. You know, I don't think that ne. I mean, the reality is that when you look at the Fortune 500 as an example. Right. The reality is the dominant. Many of the companies now, the Fortune 500, over the last 25 years has dramatically dropped in terms of the average lifespan of those companies.

01:01:45
Daniel Nestle
Yeah. And it used to be 75 years, and now it's.

01:01:48
Jason Dressel
Yeah. Exact numbers. But 25 years ago, it was like something like that.

01:01:52
Daniel Nestle
Now it's 30 months, you know.

01:01:54
Jason Dressel
Yeah, it's like the average Fortune 500, I think 25 years ago was something like 85. Right. And it was, you know,.

01:02:01
Daniel Nestle
GE and IBM and the blue chips.

01:02:04
Jason Dressel
Right. And so now that number skews way younger. It's like, it's like 35 or something. And so, but there's other issues. And the S and P obviously is dominated by seven companies that are much younger than that. So I don't look at it necessarily that way, but I also look at it in the context of like, even companies that are quote unquote younger, they're still 25, they're still 30, they're, they still have a lot of institutional memory. I think of it less in the context of years and more in the context of where are they in their life cycle. And I think what's more kind of critical to consider is where are they in the context of their leadership. So these organizations are so big that it takes decades for sometimes you to know how they are going to endure.

01:02:55
Jason Dressel
I mean, if you look at a company like Hewlett Packard, it took decades for that company to unravel based on what their founders had built over decades. You know, if, if Apple loses its way, we still, we, Apple still, we still won't know. You know, and so what I see, and I don't know if I'm directly answering your question the way you asked it, Dan, but I think that with a lot of the dominant companies right now in our economy, they haven't yet proven that they're truly built to last generationally. And that I think is not something we're going to know for a long time.

01:03:37
Jason Dressel
But what I do know is whether you're 5 or 10 or 150, you want to be able to stay connected to who you are and you know, a line I use all the time because the word history unto itself is kind of, I guess in a business context, it's controversial. It feels inherently, yeah, backward looking. And the reality though is if you replace the word history with experience, it's interpreted in a completely different context. And that's really what we're talking about, right, is organizations that are able to continue to access their memory, their experience, whatever word you want to call it.

01:04:19
Jason Dressel
And I don't think any reasonable executive would say that they don't want to be able to access and harness that collective history, experience, data archives, memory, you know, all those words are essentially all kind of connected to the same concept of what makes you and how do you communicate that and wield that and leverage that to differentiate and obviously continue to execute in the market.

01:04:52
Daniel Nestle
It's the same thing for individuals, same thing for people. Guys out there, you have domain expertise, you know, you have, whatever, however long you've been doing what you're doing, you have stuff in your head, maybe on your PC, nobody else has ever seen or that they know about it that they remember. But it's uniquely originally stuff that you have done that you know about. And who doesn't want to tap into that? Right. I mean, people, I think folks forget that there's a lot of value there. Instead of thinking, oh, they have to always think of something new. And, you know, it's, it writ large for companies doesn't, it doesn't seem to be much different, you know. Right.

01:05:31
Jason Dressel
And I think that when you look at that in the context of technology and AI, specifically, the individuals and the companies that are going to build and execute the best AI are going to be the individuals and the organizations that are the experts in their domain. So just as a history factory, I believe, I know we have created a technology and a solution and a capability that is being enabled by the technology that's been made available to us and the technical talent that we have been fortunate to invest in that have understood how to leverage that technology. But the way we're leveraging it is rooted in the collective expertise and experience and history of our talented team over decades. Right. And we're a small example of that. But you're going to see that happen over and over again.

01:06:33
Jason Dressel
Whether it's a big Fortune 10 company or, you know, a midsize company like us, it's going to be organizations that understand how to leverage that technology in the context of their expertise.

01:06:48
Daniel Nestle
Couldn't have said it better myself. In fact, I, I try sometimes and to say exactly what you just said, or at least get there, I think domain expertise is the thing, and experience, shall we say, wisdom earned from experience. And just the fact that you have so much stuff that you've forgotten about that is truly remarkable. You know, I mean, I, I'm maybe being generous with some people, but for the most part, those of you, those of us who have been in the world for a certain amount of time, there's some good stuff out there and you have to find it. And I think that's a much lighter version of what companies need to do. But I am thrilled to have had you on the show, Jason. And I know we've been talking about this for years. I'm glad that we finally did it.

01:07:44
Daniel Nestle
Thank you so much for being here. Anybody wants to reach Jace, go to historyfactory.com, not thehistoryfactory.com historyfactory.com to learn more about the business and his company. To learn more about Chronicle, check out Jason on LinkedIn. He does a is it weekly or bi weekly newsletter? It's been as often as you guys.

01:08:04
Jason Dressel
Can it's been bi weekly but now our PR firms want me to cool that so we can work on some other earned media. But look me up on LinkedIn.

01:08:13
Daniel Nestle
On LinkedIn Jason Dressel on LinkedIn. Yeah, his name will be spelled properly in the episode title. So Jason, thanks for being here man. Appreciate it.

01:08:23
Jason Dressel
My pleasure.

01:08:30
Daniel Nestle
Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred. It's your call. Have ideas for future guests want to be on the show? Let me know@dantrendingcommunicator.com thanks again for listening to the trending Communicator.