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Automated Content Won’t Take Your Job. It Will Make Your Job Better.

It’s a question that comes up as soon as people find out that the Wordsmith natural language generation platform automates the production of high-quality content: does Wordsmith take away jobs?The answer is no.We are not aware of a single person who has been replaced by our technology. Instead, Wordsmith adds new value by producing content that people aren’t making. It also frees people to do more interesting and impactful work.

Adding New Value With New Content

The Associated Press hadn’t covered any Minor League Baseball games since 2006. In 2016, Wordsmith allowed AP to cover every Minor League Baseball game played by Triple-A, Double-A and Class A teams.  That’s over 9,000 stories every year across 142 teams and 13 leagues – 9,000 stories that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

In cases where writers aren’t even an option, Wordsmith is a way for companies to communicate in plain language. Home automation company digitalSTROM uses Wordsmith to give every user a personalized narrative about their energy consumption data so they can make better decisions about their energy use. It simply wouldn’t make sense for the company to ask writers to produce that content by hand. It would cost too much and take too long.

Traditionally, humans write stories that they hope thousands or millions of people will read. Wordsmith can turn that model on its head, writing millions of stories for audiences as small as one.

We estimate the automation of earnings reports has freed up about 20 percent of the time that we had spread throughout the staff in producing earnings reports each quarter.

Associated Press

Fantasy football is another example. During the pro football season, Wordsmith produces millions of personalized articles per week about individual Yahoo! Fantasy Football matchups. It’s like having a sports reporter write about each fan’s unique experience – something that couldn’t happen without automation.

These examples just scratch the surface of what’s possible. Using Wordsmith’s API or its partnership with Zapier, businesses can produce new content for internal or external audiences whenever and wherever it is needed. You can also send Wordsmith-generated content to the Amazon Echo, allowing people to ask Alexa about their investments or what movie might be good to see tonight.

Letting People Focus on Better Work

The Orlando Magic used to ask its services team to call season ticket holders with specific talking points about how to utilize their tickets and options for games they can’t attend. Now, the Magic uses Wordsmith to automatically deliver those individualized messages, freeing its team members to focus on building relationships and adding value for their customers.

The Associated Press used to rely on its business journalists to compose quarterly corporate earnings stories. Now, Wordsmith not only automates most of those stories, it allows the AP to produce 12 times more than before, providing expanded financial news coverage to people who need it. Wordsmith didn’t eliminate any newsroom jobs. As the AP has explained, “the reaction has been positive from staff, largely because automation has freed up valuable reporting time and reduced the amount of data-processing type work they had been doing.”

How much staff time did the AP get back? “We estimate the automation of earnings reports has freed up about 20 percent of the time that we had spread throughout the staff in producing earnings reports each quarter.”

Just because Wordsmith automates corporate earnings stories doesn’t mean people aren’t involved when they want to be. Reporters sometimes add more context to Wordsmith’s output, as they did in this story. Automation doesn’t have to be about people or machines – it can be both.

In the end, Wordsmith is about adding value. You can request a demo today to see how it can help your own organization.

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