How Xello uses AI for college & career readiness - WRITER

Xello is owning the narrative

for college and career readiness. Generative AI is helping.

A conversation with Lead Content Experience Designer Catherine Gerow

AT A GLANCE

Listen to the Xello story or read the edited story below

WRITER is the full-stack generative AI platform for enterprises. We make it easy for organizations to adopt AI apps and workflows that deliver quantifiable ROI quickly.

Catherine Gerow is the Lead Content Experience Designer at Xello, a college and career readiness provider for over 4 million users across Canada, the US, and the UK. Catherine has worked on the content team at Xello for 20 years, helping students around the world create a successful futures through the exploration and planning of school and career options.

Tell us about yourself and what you do at Xello.

I am the Lead Content Experience Designer at Xello, and I’ve been here for about 20 years. Xello is a college and career readiness platform, and we help students plan their successful futures. Students can go into Xello and learn about themselves, look at post-secondary school options like college, careers, or other pathways, and they can make plans to create those successful futures. Currently, we have about 4 million active users across Canada, the US, and the UK.

What are some of the top initiatives for your team right now?

The content team is responsible for creating and maintaining career and school profiles. We create lessons for students to learn about different topics around the world of work.

The team of designers at Xello is constantly working on new features and projects. For example, we recently created a new feature where educators can go in and create surveys for their students. And we’re frequently creating new lessons for students on Xello.

What sparked your initial interest in pursuing an AI strategy?

We’ve been using WRITER since the spring of 2022. When we first started, we were looking for a solution to help us standardize our language and terminology across the product. Then after about a year, our leadership at Xello asked us to start looking into generative AI and how that could help us on the content team. That’s when we started experimenting with WRITER to see how we could use generative AI in our workflow, which is now a crucial tool for us.

“Using WRITER has helped us write, edit, and onboard new team members quicker.”

Catherine Gerow

Lead Content Experience Designer

What prompted your team to ultimately select WRITER?

Our initial aim was to standardize our content and language across the product, so we looked at a few solutions, but we preferred the outputs we were getting from WRITER. We also like the security and privacy that WRITER offers, in addition to the great customer support experience.

What teams are using WRITER, and what are your top use cases?

At Xello, all the members of the content department use WRITER, including our content experience designers and technical writers. One of the main projects we’ve accomplished with WRITER has been creating a single source of truth with a style guide.

We had a style guide before, but it wasn’t hosted in one place. With WRITER, we’ve been able to centrally host and build out that style guide, and now everyone in the company can refer to it anytime. It’s been a big help in getting our language consistent across the product.

Using WRITER has helped us write, edit, and onboard new team members quicker since we no longer have to refer to a bunch of different style guides.

We serve students across the UK, the US, and Canada — three very different regions, and we have to make sure that we get the spelling and terminology right across all of them. We set up three different teams within WRITER for each region. If I’m working one day on some UK content, I can use the WRITER UK setting and make sure I’m getting that terminology and spelling correct. If I’m working on US content the next day, I can switch to the US team and also get that spelling and terminology correct.

For example, the word “enrollment,” or “enroll,” is spelled differently in Canada and the US,

and it’s hard to remember which one is which. Another common example is that we say “grade eight” in Canada, and in the US we say “eighth grade,” then in the UK we say “year eight.” Having a style guide set up in WRITER to flag these terms right away has been really helpful in making sure that we’re consistent across the company and the different regions that we work in.