Phrasee is an AI content platform that is trusted by enterprise brands to generate, curate, optimize and personalize content at scale. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Phrasee CEO Dan Head to learn more about the company.
Dan Head’s Background
Head has been operating in the high-growth software sector for three decades, with the last 12 years spent in the rapidly evolving martech space, most notably with Salesforce and Braze. Head said:
“The significant shifts in the technology landscape I witnessed gave me an understanding of the concerns and objectives of technical, data, and brand stakeholders.”
“As such, I will ensure Phrasee’s customers can benefit from the enormous opportunities and competitive advantages available during step-changes in technology development, such as what we are seeing in AI in 2023.”
“My role is to help brands and digital marketers understand and trust fit-for-purpose AI technology to deliver brand-safe outcomes and massive ROI at scale.”
“I, alongside my team, will grow, nurture, and share learnings from the Phrasee community of progressive and innovative customers and partners to accomplish this.”
“Phrasee will provide customers with innovative, proven, and scalable solutions that deliver rapid time-to-value, backed by enterprise-grade governance and controls.”
“Clients should expect to gain a competitive advantage as Phrasee leverages the latest AI technologies and delivers them cost-efficiently.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Head reflected:
“Phrasee has been successful at growing this far by delivering results to clients in a somewhat ‘black box’ capacity – i.e. high-performing campaign content without exposing the many layers of math, logic, control, and architecture that made it possible. However, the market is now saturated by AI content generators, and brand leaders are understandably confused as to what the differences are, what works, how, and why.”
“Phrasee can expose the layers of architecture that make it fit for the purpose of producing trusted enterprise brand content at scale. And, most importantly, brand leaders want to be educated on the technical fundamentals to make informed decisions. Defining why Phrasee is so brilliant in a way that is simple to understand has been tremendously rewarding as it marries Phrasee’s strengths with the needs of the market at exactly the time when marketers are seeking clarity.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Head explained:
“Phrasee provides marketers with the best-performing content for use across their digital marketing campaigns through an AI content platform with enterprise-grade controls. Phrasee’s AI platform enables enterprise marketers to create, curate, and optimize on-brand content that improves campaign results and the ability to scale across increasing numbers of channels, journeys, and experiments.”
“Core offerings are as follows:
-Generation: Generate and curate on-brand, performance-optimized marketing content at scale
-Integration: Integrate AI content across your channels and customer touchpoints
-Optimization: Optimize your content at scale for maximum engagement
-Personalization (coming soon): Personalize content at scale for a tailored customer experience”
Challenges Faced
Has Head faced any specific bottlenecks in his sector of work recently? Head acknowledged:
“The market for AI content is enormous, and Phrasee isn’t (yet)! We must scale our business to educate broadly while ensuring we can focus our time for client projects in a qualified manner.”
Evolution Of Phrasee’s Technology
How has the Phrasee evolved since launching? Head noted:
“Phrasee has operated successfully with its proprietary natural language generator (NLG) since its inception. Now, with many AI models available to augment content generation, Phrasee has been able to adapt its technology and services practices to embrace these inputs in an agnostic manner, without being dependent on them. This enormously benefits clients who want to access the value of modern tooling for creativity and innovation while navigating technical, legislative, and safety concerns.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Head cited:
“Private equity firm Capital D acquired Phrasee in March 2022. This was a key milestone as it began Phrasee’s transition from early stage startup to growth-centric. My arrival as CEO this past September was another step on that journey. Throughout Phrasee’s timeline there have been several pivotal moments from a micro/macro perspective. Delivering content via next-generation, channel-agnostic customer engagement platforms (like Braze, Iterable) was a major shift as it requires much more fluid, rapid architecture. And, of course, the immense surge of interest and opportunity that has come with Large Language Models (LLMs) has created a landscape where Phrasee is more relevant than ever, with more opportunities to innovate and deliver value to clients than ever before.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Head about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“With the meal kit industry booming in the past few years, Home Chef onboarded Phrasee to increase conversions and drive ROI by optimizing language for their acquisition and reactivation campaigns. As a result, Phrasee has continuously found the winning recipe for customers. Home Chef has seen a 29% average click rate uplift and a 21% average open rate uplift.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Head assessed:
“The TAM for Phrasee is massive and expanding as the number of channels/endpoints for short-form language is constantly growing. The CRM (email, SMS, push, web, in-app message, etc.) ecosystem is the current focus, but Phrasee will be moving into adjacent sectors such as social media and the creator economy.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Head affirmed:
“Phrasee is model-agnostic and channel-agnostic purpose-built architecture for AI-content generation. Its core processors include a proprietary Neural Network – empirically trained for marketing experiments – which knows what content will be high performing and what is necessary for ongoing performance and diversity. The architecture also includes symbolic-logic Natural Language Generation (NLG) that doesn’t hallucinate, which massively reduces content curation time. Phrasee is supported by teams such as Computational Linguists who help brands learn how to co-exist with these new machines and scale and trust its output. No other company in this space has the same attributes and proven ability to increase campaign success.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the Phrasee’s future company goals? Head pointed out:
“Phrasee is not shifting its vision or overarching strategy. It has been delivering brand-safe and high-performing content for nearly a decade.”
“However, the explosive growth of the current landscape caught many marketers and technologists off guard, putting Phrasee in a position to provide guidance to lead the category. As a result, Phrasee will evolve to meet the tremendous market potential.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you want to discuss? Head concluded:
“Modern email service providers (ESPs) and CEPs can deliver the right message on the right channel at the right time, but without high-performing, dynamically optimized, and personalized content, campaign outcomes will always be compromised. LLM-specific wrappers cannot meet this brief and may even pose risk and exposure as cost models and legislation change, which is happening at pace.”
“Phrasee solves for access (to the world of AI models), scale (of the massive volume of AI outputs into mature enterprises) and trust (in AI to perform and ensure brand safety). Individuals, teams, and businesses will gain huge personal and organizational competitive advantage by becoming AI-literate and learning how to co-exist with these new technologies. Phrasee is delighted to lead the way on this journey.”
