AI Exec Comms Agency Starts Small, Dreams Big

I opened my call last week with chief marketing officer Caitlin Bigelow by telling her I didn’t know if the conversation should result in my asking the start-up she works for, called Blazel, to sponsor one of our events … or warning my the exec comms/speechwriting community about the danger she and her company represent to our collective livelihood.

She laughed, and we dove in.

Blazel has bigger plans for the future, but for now, they use AI to help mostly founders of mostly early-stage companies, and also venture capital folks, establish a substantive presence on LinkedIn. How?

Pretty simple, actually: Once they engage with a client, they feed everything written and said by the founder (and sometimes several other leaders, but let’s keep it simple) into a large language model. Even their AI Notetaker stuff, with permission, so they can know how the leader talks in meetings.

Then a human “seasoned content strategist,” as the website describes him or her, interviews the leader once a month to find out what’s on their mind, what they want to talk about that month, gathering personal stories and expressions the leader might use to get the stuff across. And then feeds that transcript into the LLM, which spits out a number of possible LI posts. The content strategist winnows those ideas down and uses AI to write them up, before polishing them personally and submitting them to the client for approval.

Blazel serves about 75 clients in that way right now, Bigelow said. Next steps are to start helping these folks beyond LinkedIn, helping them create X posts, long-term blogs, podcasts and videos. Blaze is also developing an analytics dashboard, to tell clients how their posts are being received, and by whom.

Then Bigelow shared the company’s “long-term play,” which could get interesting for some members of our crowd:

The idea is to create a platform to license internally to Fortune 500 exec comms groups who want to use the Blazel method to expand leadership communication support beyond the handful of C-suite execs they typically serve. Bigelow imagines a corporate exec comms team could create an internal mini-Blazel, perhaps to aid in the thought leadership of dozens of in the organization. Thus potentially expanding the impact—even the definition—of executive communications.

That’s what Bigelow and Blazel potentially mean to the exec comms community.

What might we mean to them? After asking me a little bit about speechwriters and exec comms folks, Bigelow quickly ascertained: Speechwriters are the sorts of people she’d like to hire to pair with clients. (She said a writers-wanted LinkedIn post she issued went viral and drew 900 applications; she knows writers, as both her parents were journalists, her father a Pulitzer Prize-winner at the San Diego Union-Tribune.) And exec comms pros are the ones she might like to market Blazel’s enterprise platform someday.

Yep, that’s about the size of it.

We’ll keep in touch.