The promise of the web was that anyone could publish information instantly around the world. Yet today, a modern website can take weeks or even months to update a page.
Organizations today face technical hurdles, compliance and security concerns, and a constant fear of getting things wrong. They face ever-increasing risks (”what if this gets us sued”) and ever-increasing stakeholders (”we need five people need to sign off on this”).
This costs time and money, and its a thoroughly miserable experience for all concerned.
We believe it should be possible to publish information safely and quickly to the web. Creators should be freed from bureaucratic overhead, to focus on making their website better.
Technical complexity
The heights of knowledge required to make a modern website are vertigo-inducing.
Consider what goes into a website today: information architecture, wireframes, UX design, high-fidelity prototypes, markup, server-side programming, frontend programming, Content Management Systems, Continuous Integration, accessibility, SEO, advertising, security, analytics … this isn’t even a complete list.
Then you need to support an essentially infinite sea of devices, from petite mobiles to TV-sized desktops; users with different modalities and abilities; slow and fast connectivity; and more.
As the web has grown up it has grown complicated. And that complexity slows us down.
More people, more problems
The ever-increasing importance of websites, and their importance to every aspect of an organization, has led to an explosion of stakeholders.
They also face growing compliance requirements, including data privacy (e.g. GDPR) and accessibility (e.g. ADA).
Collectively this means web pages must be reviewed by an ever-increasing armada of people and policies. The review process is often manual, slow, and necessitates a back-and-forth between dozens of people.
Sign-off shouldn’t be so hard
In theory, a Content Management System could allow multiple people to view and sign off on a page. But in practice, from our experience, most large organizations rely on hacks like screenshots, PDFs, PowerPoint and email.
As part of our mission, we’re developing technologies to make sign-offs better. Think something like DocuSign, but for unpublished webpages.
The process should be entirely online, immediate, and as frictionless as possible. At any step before publication, we believe users should be able to share and collaborate on a webpage in realtime.
Quality control should be automatic
We also believe an increasing amount of quality control can be automated.
Of course, software to check webpages is already something we offer. But with the advent of modern AI we anticipate more tasks that currently require a human – such as style guides, legal requirements, or compliance reviews – can be largely automated away.
The only parts that should remain, are those where human discretion is valued and necessary. And that is but a small fraction of what people spend time doing today.
Routine content should be automated
A lot of content is, and should be, banal. If you’re writing a report on the weather, or traffic, or how to install a new software update, you don’t need world-class original writing. You need clear and consistent writing.
For routine tasks like these, we anticipate AI will be take over from people entirely. Raw information sources can be fed into AI, appropriate content generated, quality checked by AI, and automatically published.
Done correctly, this could dramatically reduce the time and effort to publish information.
How far can AI go?
An open question is how much of your website will AI be able to create or approve? Will be there be any room for humans in the loop at all?
No-one knows of course. But, some loosely-held predictions:
- There will be some threshold below which you delegate creation and approval to an AI, because the task is ‘safe’, AI is very fast, and it never gets bored.
- There is also likely to be important content which always requires human involvement. This mission statement, for example, is 90% human, because I’m the CEO and I need it to convey my unfiltered voice.
Between those two extremes, is a chasm of uncertainty. The answer will probably depend on the culture and beliefs of the organization using AI. For example, it is possible that AI content could sound overly homogenized, a
At least at the moment, AI has proven incapable of creating writing which most people would consider has artistic merit, like a bestselling novel, or a viral blog post. It is very good at helping people write, and spitting out average content. But we can only guess how good it will get.
The future that we want
We believe the gap between creation and publication to the web should be virtually zero.
Right now, the web is so complicated, and so fraught with risk, that it can take longer to publish a webpage about something than it takes to write it.
We will build technologies that drastically accelerate the sign-off process. And we will continue to automate more and more of website quality assurance.
Ultimately, we expect that much of the lowest value content will be automated.
Together, it should be possible to accelerate the rate at which content can be published, and free people to focus more on making their websites better.
