“Necessity is the mother of invention” is a term used to mean new ways to do things are found or created when there is a strong and special need for them. For Paul Thompson, the founder and CEO of HelloScribe, the same speaks true. A need to pivot his business in the midst of the pandemic forced him to innovate in a way that he says will turbocharge the creative output of marketing, public relations, and advertising pros.

For starters, HelloScribe is an artificial intelligence (AI) software.

“What we do is we create what we call tools of the trade for marketing and PR professionals to do their best work 10 times faster, without compromising quality,” Thompson told the Jamaica Observer about the product.

With a background in marketing, having worked in the field for 15 years before migrating, Thompson said he knows the professionals in the area often feel overwhelmed by the need to create content of different kinds — whether it be for a campaign, press release or even an advertisement.

“The traditional processes that people normally use to do this are expensive and they’re slow, and existing tools that are in the market to do this are generally hard to use and hard to wrangle,” he points out.

HelloScribe, he said, solves this problem faster and with fewer resources.

“Our tools are built around the needs of professionals. They cater to specific-use cases to do things like writing a TV ad or a radio ad or a print ad or other things like a Facebook ad; a press release; generating a brand strategy; or to come up with a new product idea or to come up with a marketing campaign. And we’ve built over 80 such tools that work in over 40 languages.”

Thompson said the tool gives 99.9 per cent plagiarism-free content. He said it is able to capture any tone or style of writing and that the outputs are unlimited, “meaning you can get an unlimited number of ideas and then content to explain it”.

“When I just started out in marketing as a copywriter, a client would give us a brief and tell us to come up with a campaign around it and they would give us like four weeks to do so. Today that’s not practical because the demand of social media requires that people put out content regularly; it means that they have to be more nimble. They have to create unique ideas because they’re not only competing against other companies, they’re also competing against the worldwide web of creators and other professionals operating in this space and have to be more efficient.”

So how does HelloScribe work?

“I want you to imagine a robot that has read everything on the Internet and understood it better than possibly any human could imagine,” Thompson started by way of explanation. He continued, “And that robot is trained to understand language, trained to understand context. And whenever you feed it a context — like, for example, write a press release about the Observer‘s new digital marketing unit — usually for that process you would go and brief your colleague who would then ruminate on it a little and then it would take them three or four hours to write a press release. With HelloScribe you can write a press release in one minute.”

That he outlined is done through the training of the AI to use what is called a large language model.

He explained that a large language model is a library of text and images, and it has been trained thousands and thousands of times to understand and recognise patterns within language and data, which enables it to make a prediction based on your input.

“So if you say, ‘Write a press release’, or ‘Write an ad’ or ‘Create a tagline’, et cetera, it understands the context of the request that you’re making and it is able to give you a corresponding result that’s an original corresponding result.”

Thompson said he was driven to create HelloScribe after his marketing agency was devastated by the pandemic.

“When I moved to the US in 2018 I left my job as the director of professional services at an agency called the Marketing Counselors; in the United States I started my own agency a year later in October 2019. We got a lot of customers and some good customers on book but by 2020 the pandemic came and we lost 90 per cent of our business. I was just getting calls saying, ‘Pablo, we love the work that you do but we can’t afford you anymore.’ So, like most organisations at that time, we had to think about how we were going to pivot and build an organisation that could duplicate my efforts.”

Luckily, while working in Jamaica Thompson said he started to do research on the topic by his former boss and revived that interest doing new research and working on prototypes.

“It took us a lot of trial and error to figure out what was the best combination of what we call language models to use. And so we transitioned our agency from being an agency in the traditional sense into being a software company.”

After developing the software HelloScribe was launched in May 2022.

“We got some early feedback from professionals in the field — marketers and other kinds of people — and then we’re now at a stage where we think we’ve built a suite of professional tools that allow people who are in PR and marketing,or innovation for that matter, to be able to generate ideas and content at scale using artificial intelligence. We’ve had a long history in terms of learning about the marketing profession, learning about the needs of the professionals, and then evolving into this point where we can now replicate some of these tasks using artificial [intelligence].”

Thompson said the opportunities for the market are tremendous, with a value of over US$700 billion globally — and that’s just marketing services alone — and other components such as public relations and media have not even begun to enter the discussion as yet.

“It is useful for small businesses and freelancers as well as teams in large organisations. And so, because of the demand for marketing, the importance of marketing in this era — especially because of the hyper-competitive nature of the world that we live in today — we believe that the pivot was the right, we believe the timing was right, and we believe, based on evidence of what we’ve seen in the market, that there’s a lot of venture capital going into firms like ours, that we are sort of shaping up in the right way and we have made the right decision.

“Our goal is to create a seamless sort of creative workflow for professionals, but making the software easy to use. There’s no big learning curve to use it.

“What we need is the support from smart, brave venture capitalists who will support businesses like ours.

“The call centre business model as we know it today is going to be outdated in the next decade. And we know that artificial intelligence is going to replace, if not augment, many of the tasks that people do across every industry that you can think about, and Jamaica needs to be positioning itself as a high-tech hub for innovation in this field — from artificial intelligence to high-tech manufacturing and assembly. And we as a nation need to begin to pivot for the opportunities that are becoming available and to set up our young people for success through our curricular, et cetera, because this is here. It’s not going anywhere, and it is only gonna get bigger, and we need to position ourselves to take advantage of what’s about to come.”