The content crisis with Debra Taylor
How do you stay relevant when AI becomes the interface?
As AI agents increasingly mediate customer experiences, the rules of engagement are changing. Debra Taylor, Partner at Deloitte, argues that brands must urgently rethink their approach to content. She shares why truth, structure and strategy are the new pillars of relevance and why governance is no longer a back-office function, but a frontline marketing imperative.
AI and governance in the content crisis
For years, organisations – even those who should know better - have published content without clear ownership, structure or purpose, resulting in bloated websites, conflicting messages, and inaccessible knowledge. This content debt is more than a nuisance: in an AI-first world, it’s a strategic liability. Governance, metadata and schema are essential tools for ensuring your brand remains the answer in an algorithmic landscape. “We’ve treated the web like a giant filing cabinet... If your content isn’t authoritative, AI won’t choose you,” said Debra. AI systems don’t browse, they answer. And if your content isn’t clean, credible and findable, your brand won’t be part of the conversation. Debra warned that brands must urgently audit, consolidate and optimise their digital assets to remain discoverable and trustworthy in a landscape dominated by answer engines.
Brands as trusted sources
“Brands must become curators, translators and protectors of their own knowledge... AI should help, not decide,” said Debra. In the age of AI, being the trusted source isn’t just a branding exercise, it’s existential. The answer is a human-led, AI-assisted model where marketers use intelligent tools to enhance creativity, not replace it. The goal is smarter, faster, and more accurate communication, without sacrificing authenticity or control. Organisations must treat their content like data: structured, centralised, and governed. This means building repositories of verified knowledge, cleansing legacy content, and preparing for a future where your audience might be an algorithm.
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This episode of The CMO Show was brought to you by host Mark Jones, producers Kate Zadel and Kirsten Bables and audio engineers Ed Cheng and Daniel Marr. This is an edited excerpt of the podcast transcript.
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Mark Jones
One thing we marketers love to do is create content. In fact, we're really good at creating lots of it across lots of different channels. But there is a problem. It starts to build up over time. We've got too much of it. Then comes the big question, what are you going to do with it?
Hello. Mark Jones here. Welcome to The CMO Show produced by Impact Institute in partnership with our friends at Adobe. Well, today we have a cracking episode. We're going to talk about a lot of things in one of my favourite areas, which is content, journalism, production systems, engaging audiences, AI. We're going to talk about customer experience and brand. It's really a bit of a complete wrap of where we're at, at the moment.
And the key thing that really excites me about this conversation is thinking about our pathway to a really interesting future where AI becomes an interface, if you like. We talk about agentic AI, but what if these systems that are coming start to be really, really helpful in ways that we haven't yet imagined? And by that I mean really useful at helping us create new markets, serve existing customers, and take away all the stress that tends to occupy much of our working lives when it comes to content production.
My guest today is Debra Taylor. She is a partner at Deloitte here in Sydney, and she has an incredible background in media, in journalism, in publishing. And these days she's working with corporates to help them understand how to make most of their content debt. That's a topic that we'll also touch on. So join me for a fascinating look at some of the big problems we're facing today when it comes to producing content and where it's going from now.
Debra Taylor, thanks for joining me.
Debra Taylor
Thanks for having me.
Mark Jones
Partner at Deloitte, it's always also great to speak to another journo.
Debra Taylor
Oh, thank you. It seems a long time ago, but as you know, you never stop being a journo.
Mark Jones
No. Once a journo, always.
Debra Taylor
It’s in your bones.
Mark Jones
Even though you've got other different roles and so on. So just firstly, Partner of Deloitte, head of Deloitte's longest running or longest serving content team.
Debra Taylor
Yes.
Mark Jones
10 years, you said?
Debra Taylor
Yes. When I started this journey, I happened to be an editorial director of a company that bought digital, a lot of digital sites, websites, but also a lot of magazines. And I was the editorial director and we were merrily, happily doing these magazines. And one day the global editorial director rang me and said, "You know those website things, you probably should... I think we should take those over. There might be some money in them."
So it wasn't easy to wrestle them from the young techies who were owning it at the time. So I thought about digital quite early on and I thought, "This is another revolution." If you're not in it, you can't influence it. And I thought that every brand would be a publisher. So I got out of publishing, even though I loved it. I loved media, I loved every moment of it. There's nothing that make me happier than doing a magazine cover. And then I went to... Well, it was two years. I called them the wilderness years because I had no work. So I had a lot of time to think about it in those two years. And then somehow Telstra found me and called me and asked me to be their first content strategist.
Mark Jones
What does a content strategist do?
Debra Taylor
Well, I think it's one of those nebulous terms that you sort of define it. Each person might define it differently. I think content strategy in a marketing sense is literally what content are we doing? Where is it going? How are we measuring it per channel. So for Deloitte, I defined content strategy as content operations. How do you run governance, process workflows? Who does what? And so I defined it that way. So there was content operations, content design and content optimisation. How do you optimise what you've already got. So for me that was my definition of content strategy and that's what I do and my team does as content strategists at Deloitte.
Mark Jones
So in the work that you're doing with clients in external environments, what's the demand? What are people looking for when they say content?
Debra Taylor
I think often people say content and they mean content marketing. I've always taken the position that content is in every part of everybody's business. And I divide it into content, to marketing content, but also business critical content. So if you do all your marketing, you get people there, you have to have content about your products, about compliance, about legal content. Your contact centre scripts, your emails. All of these things need to work in concert. And I think they probably both go under the knowledge, the institutional knowledge of an organisation.
So my team has really often looked more at that, the unsexy stuff that nobody else wanted to look at to be honest, which was all of that content on your website that people are engaging with when you get there. And when people get there, you've spent all your money on your marketing, people get there and then it's conflicting information. It doesn't make sense. Two pieces of content say slightly different things. The email that was sent doesn't really match the page you were sent to.
We work a lot with our clients trying to help them make sense of this ecosystem. I talk a lot about content debt. So every organisation has too much content. We've literally treated the web like a massive filing cabinet that we've just kept putting stuff in and going, "It'll be fine."
Mark Jones
That sounds like my inbox. You just keep filling it up.
Debra Taylor
You just go, "It be fine. It's infinite."
Mark Jones
Well, you can keep searching and find it, can't you?
Debra Taylor
I'll find it again one day and then you can't, right? So everyone is treated like that and this content debt has grown and grown and grown. And that is a problem anyway because you can't, you've made your own content unfindable. We do a lot of information architecture, for example, on websites, trying to make content findable. That problem only is going to be a huge risk in an AI world because you've suddenly exposed to AI bots and AI that's going to find content that it believes is the authority. And if your knowledge, if your content is not authoritative, structured in a certain way, findable, then you're not going to be the answer when I say, "Hey, who's the best, blah, blah?"
Mark Jones
Now in tech, we've talked about a lot of these issues in a similar way with structured and unstructured data and being able to find things, being able to access things. It strikes me that you are helping create a bit of, if you like, organisation and simplicity out of what could be content chaos. So it seems to me you're really tapping into a very big growing problem. And would it be fair to say most organisations don't really know what to do?
I think organisations for a long time as we were talking to clients, I don't think they really did get the problem. I don't think they did get, why is it a problem if we've got all this content? I think now they're certainly starting to go, "Uh-oh, we've got all this content and it's being found in ways that we don't want it to be found and used."
Mark Jones
What's the business problem that's driving them to be interested in speaking to you? Because there's got to be a dollar figure behind it, right?
Debra Taylor
I guess it started out as like what's the experience? The experience is bad, then you'll go somewhere else. You'll kind of not trust that brand. I think it's become slowly clients have evolved in their thinking. You've got a problem around productivity. You've got a problem around how much this is actually costing you to do. So we've got clients that've got 20 teams creating content. They're probably all creating similar content.
And they're doing that without having the time and space to add value rather than just be creating content. So we've looked at... quite a few years ago and so this will probably be worse now, a government department. And we do this quite often where you go, if we look at all the people who have to actually approve this content, it can be up to 60 people. It's insane. So one piece of content going on a website, and we worked out. And this is quite a time ago, this government department. It was nine grand. I was like, "I'll do it for four and a half." Because if you think how many times one piece of content is created, a big government department and goes through 60 people, it's a huge amount of money.
Mark Jones
And it's not sustainable.
Debra Taylor
And it's not sustainable. And also the content comes out completely unreadable and incomprehensible to most humans. So it's an utter terrible waste of money especially where taxpayers are paying for it.
Mark Jones
With the advent of AI and agents, the interesting thing I imagine for you would be seeing how that's starting to play out with some of your customers. What are they looking for? Is it still at this sort of stage of maybe having the agent do a lot of that orchestration?
Debra Taylor
I think there's two things internally. I think they're looking at automation and is there a part of this that an agent could do is the way we can sort of accelerate. I think there's a lot of pressure to use AI. I'm sure every client we have, there's a boss going, "Use AI." Sometimes it's better to really go slower, to go smarter with such a powerful piece of technology as AI. So I think that's, "What can we automate? What can we do faster?" But from clients, from a... How is it impacting their relationship with their customers? I think they're starting to realise that the content debt is finally going to have to be paid off and sorted out.
Mark Jones
Interesting.
Debra Taylor
And I think that's being driven partly at the moment by AEO. So, we all remember SEO, still relevant, search engine optimization. AEO is answer engine optimization. So, if you Google and you'll know you'll get the snippets, the no-click answer, I don't know about you, but I'm already too lazy to click on something. Humans learn really, really quickly. And you're like, "Oh, no." If it doesn't come up, you're like, "Oh, now I've got to click."
Because you think we'd learn as humans to use the web, but it wasn't really intuitive to do so. Whereas question and answer, it's very intuitive. It's conversation. And increasingly I think the world will be that you have a kind of ChatGPT type experience where you're going, "Hey, blah, blah, blah." And it gives you the answer. And it is going out and finding the answer and coming back. I think once that can be transactional, once it can be, "Hey, I want a pair of shoes." And it goes, "Right, I know you Deb. I know normally lace-ups. It's black shoes probably." You bought them from here before and it just goes, "Here's some shoes."
You go, "Is there anybody doing a deal?" Yeah, they're doing it." So that is going to become the experience we start to have and it's really interesting. And the challenge for brands, because how do you market to me, if there's an agent in between us?
Mark Jones
Yeah. And maybe how do you programme the agent for want of a better term so that it has your tone of voice, for example.
Debra Taylor
Exactly. How do I know.
Mark Jones
Your brand guidelines.
Debra Taylor
But how do you insert yourself in that conversation?
Mark Jones
Yes.
Debra Taylor
It's really interesting. And I don't know the answer.
Mark Jones
Maybe you don't.
Debra Taylor
Maybe you don't, right? Maybe you don't because actually your marketing to the agent who is filtering based on my intent. So I go “I want to go to Melbourne, I need a flight and hotel.” So it's only responding to that, my intention to do something.
Mark Jones
Well, a quick question would be is it whose agent is it are we talking about here?
Debra Taylor
I think everybody... Like I say, predicting the future is a fool’s game. But I think I'll have... Everyone will have a kind of personal agent, personal assistant. Sam Altman from OpenAI and Jon Ives who did all of the Apple stuff as you may know, have done a massive deal. And what Sam Altman wants to create is the new era of computing, a new computer, a new way of interacting with computer.
It sounds like what that means is that we have an assistant. We're interacting in different ways and we're talking to it. And we're talking across different modes. So I might start on my phone, then I get home and it's on a voice. My voice, Google Home or whatever. So it suddenly becomes this... I mean in my head it's the computer on the Starship Enterprise. Eventually it'll give you martinis.
Mark Jones
And a robot on wheels will come in.
Debra Taylor
Or it'd be like HAL in 2001 Space Odyssey, and it'll kill us all.
Mark Jones
Or the Terminator. I love all these references. To connect a couple of dots here, you’re talking about a future, which I tend to agree with is that the web browser goes away as an abstraction. It's not really the main game anymore. We're engaging with these agents. The customer experience that we think a lot about in marketing is how your either existing or future customers think about your brand, your products, your services and the experience you are hoping to create for them.
And all of that has your traditional brand, tone and style that we were referring to earlier. So there's a lot going on there where we are hoping that we can still influence the way people feel through these systems. You’re speaking about if you're like a mediator, this agentic AI world is a mediator. What's your advice to CMOs who are probably having their heads exploding at this point?
Debra Taylor
I think that now is the time. The brands that start to prepare for this now, I think will thrive in that environment. So marketing won't go away. It will adapt to this world. But what you're going to have to be is the answer. So you're going to have to be the authority. The thing about this is it’s moving so fast. Literally. It's moving so fast.
Mark Jones
The future could be next year.
Debra Taylor
Yeah, yeah. It's moving at a pace that has never happened in any other sort of industrial digital revolution.
Mark Jones
A slightly awkward question then what happens to these content supply chains? This whole system we've been talking about?
Debra Taylor
Well, you’ll still need to create content and you still want that to be efficient and you want it to be streamlined and you want it to be good and quality, and structured in a way , you know it needs to be structured in a way.
Mark Jones
None of those problems go away.
Debra Taylor
They don't go away. What you really need is creativity. Humans are still going to be creative. You need the expert. So obviously we still know. I think ChatGPT sort of 3.0. They still hallucinate. You still have to be the person and go, "That's wrong.” This is one of the problems.
Mark Jones
That's the governance bit.
Debra Taylor
So you need to be an expert and able to go, "Yeah, that's a good idea or that's completely wrong." So there's still going to be this a need for the supply chain for your content to be up-to-date, to protect it. We'll go from content, certainly knowledge in your institutional knowledge on multiple, multiple platforms. So it's on SharePoint and it's on Adobe Edge, and it's on your desktop, in an Excel. Some stuff's only known by the man at the water cooler. He's been here for 30 years.
So all of that needs to be cleansed really in the way that you cleanse data, find the source of truth about each of the domains you own, and then put it in a dam or a repository. And it's structured in a way that AI will be able to just pull out information. So you need to make it accessible.
Mark Jones
So there's a mindset shift going on here, which is either corporate, the organisation. Am I publisher of content where I'm pushing it out to audiences? And I think that's probably going to continue for a while across different channels. But I'm also making it available, which I think is a-
Debra Taylor
Available to a different audience, so to the AI.
Mark Jones
I'm making it available to AI.
Debra Taylor
And I think that brands will become curators of information, of knowledge, interpreters, translators, librarians almost protecting. They've got to protect. Because if you're not protecting your information that belongs just to you, that you can credibly and authentically own as a brand. Someone else is.
Mark Jones
I do like that.
Debra Taylor
The other answer will... Someone else will come up with an answer.
Mark Jones
It's a trust story.
Debra Taylor
Yeah, absolute trust.
Mark Jones
If I was to put a little bit of a bow on our conversation is there a best bit of advice you could give to marketers and CMOs who are thinking about the steps that they need to take. One of the things that I come across all the time is this sense of how do I keep up? You need to be in this stream. You can't just be sort of watching it.
Debra Taylor
Yeah, for sure. I think you need to start thinking about the source of truth and bringing that content debt down. It's going to be a risk, an increasing risk, and it'll get in the way of you being the answer. And then a lot of clients we have are going to the cloud or changing platform, updating platform. Start creating content as answers now, structuring it, schema, metadata, backlinks, all of these things to start really making sure you're going to be the answer in this conversation and you'll be in the conversation.
Mark Jones
And just to jump in there using AI to create the content being consumed by AI, because now we're getting into this virtual move, right?
Debra Taylor
Yeah. Whether I'm just clinging to my journalism roots, I don't know.
Mark Jones
I still think we should be making our own content. It's got to come from somewhere.
Debra Taylor
That too. I mean, the example I had of the research being done and then writing it, but you've got to know that research is correct. Right?
Mark Jones
Right.
Debra Taylor
So I've played with tools to help you write and it always takes longer to prompt them than it does to actually just write it. But we're professional writers and journos. But I think-
Mark Jones
Not everybody is.
Debra Taylor
No. I think fact-checking, helping you do a first draft, but you've got to have a human there to make sure that content is correct. So I think there's still roles for humans. And to be creative and use that time that you free up using these tools. I was listening to a podcast actually with Sam Altman, and his COO, and they were saying they see AI as you wake up in the morning and it's gone through all of your emails that you get overnight. Presumably they get quite a few emails overnight, I imagine.
Mark Jones
One would imagine.
Debra Taylor
Yeah, one would think. You filter them and made responses and replied. But even Sam Altman said, "Oh, I don't want it to decide to reply for me. I want to go through it and go, "Yeah, that one can go. Oh no, I want to edit that. No, that can go. I want to edit that." So it's an aid and an assistant rather than making decisions for you.
Mark Jones
Yeah and I think that's a great point to end it, which is to be part of the conversation, still be aware of where do I need to make the call.
Debra Taylor
Yes, exactly.
Mark Jones
Right? This question of control. So trust, control, governance, they're some of the golden words here.
Debra Taylor
Yeah. Brilliant.
Mark Jones
Debra, thanks for your time.
Debra Taylor
No, thank you very much.
Mark Jones
I hope you enjoyed the conversation. A parting thought for me was this concept of truth, which of course gets bandied around a lot when it comes to journalists and the media and publishers. The onus is also of course on organisations of all shapes and sizes, which is how well do you govern the content that you have within your systems and all the platforms that you use? And by that I mean as we discussed, is it real? Is it true? Is it representing your brand? And there's this governance layer that becomes so critical because that is your brand. It represents who you are. And so we need to be thinking about as marketers, what does that mean in this emerging world of AI? So some really great ideas there. Thanks again for joining us on The CMO Show. Until next time.