Pepper founders Anirudh Singla and Rishabh Shekhar
“The future is not human or artificial intelligence; it’s human plus artificial intelligence,” stresses Anirudh Singla, co-founder and CEO of Pepper Content. The content management specialist believes the rapid rise of generative AI will help companies like his, rather than replace them.
Founded six years ago, Pepper Content connects businesses in need of content with experienced and knowledgeable creators who can help them develop it. Working with approximately 150,000 creators, it has helped more than 2,500 companies develop content, including blue-chip clients such as Amazon, Google, and Adobe.
Importantly, Pepper Content identifies the leading voices in a particular content segment, so customers work with creators who have real expertise in what they’re writing about. The company already uses AI to support creators – the technology is based on the increasingly ubiquitous OpenAI GPT-3 – but also offers a range of tools to help marketers determine what content they need and analyze the impact of the final output.
The next phase in the development of the fast-growing company is the rollout of what Singlela describes as the industry’s first end-to-end content marketing platform. “This is category making,” he claims. “We believe every business is now a content business, but if that’s the case, every business needs an efficient way to scale their content creation.”
The big idea of Pepper Content is that just as customer relationship management (CRM) platforms have become a must-have for companies looking to professionalize their interactions with customers, content management platforms will become vital for the growing number of companies looking to boost sales and engagement. stimulate. through content.
In fact, the goal is to industrialize content creation. Companies that once employed a handful of writers to create small numbers of content are now trying to generate thousands or hundreds of thousands of output, Singla explains. Operating on that scale requires both new technology and human interaction.
To that end, Pepper Content’s platform attempts to automate and centralize much of the content creation work. It will conduct keyword research, identify expert creators, manage the creation process, and use data analysis tools to assess how the final piece lands. That insight can then be fed back into the next content creation process. “Each piece you publish should be more intelligent than the last,” argues Singla.
In other words, its pitch is that the platform will manage content every step of the way – something generative AI can’t match. “The platform allows building SEO content strategy, content operations, content analytics and distribution,” argues Singlela. “It solves three main goals that most marketers struggle with when it comes to content: growing organic traffic, scaling content efficiently, and providing content return on investment.”
By building generative AI at the center of the platform, where the creator is tasked with writing the content, Pepper Content recognizes the disruptive power of this new technology. But Singlela is convinced that the added value that the platform’s tools provide, on top of that technology, will be a unique selling point for the platform.
One benefit of the company is that it has been able to build the solution based on feedback from its existing customers, with more than 200 CMOs and marketing leaders providing feedback on what they would like from such a platform.
Singlela is also excited about the potential to expand the original offering. The platform will initially generate traditional written content, but new functionality that provides multimedia content is imminent – the ability to generate video, for example, should be available in a few months.
The company believes that such an end-to-end content solution, which incorporates generative AI rather than competing with it, will appeal to customers, especially enterprises looking to quickly scale their content creation. “The future of content marketing is all about the right technology, people and processes.” emphasizes Rishabh Shekhar, co-founder and COO of Pepper Content. “This is a way for marketers to be much more efficient.”
For their part, content creators will also hope that the company’s diagnosis proves correct amid predictions that the creator economy will simply be replaced by generative AI solutions. It must be acknowledged that the jury will not go into that.
