CX Heroes Podcast #53: AI Can Write the First Draft. The Revision Is Still Your Job.
Elise Jeanmaire has spent eighteen years building and scaling support teams at Sonos, Reebok, Nestle, SeatGeek, and Dutchie. Today she runs customer experience, loyalty technology, and retention at SimpliSafe, and she holds a COPC certification. She also writes fiction. That last detail shaped the most useful part of our conversation on CX Heroes.
We talked about AI in the support workflow. Most of that conversation goes straight to speed and ticket volume. Elise took it somewhere more interesting. She talked about voice.
The problem she sees every day
AI can produce a knowledge base article, a customer reply, or an executive summary in about a second. Many teams take that output and ship it as is. Elise can tell which content was handled that way. It reads flat and generic, and sometimes the facts are wrong.
Here is how she framed the risk:
"If we have AI writing all of our stories for our business, then it's no longer what we believe. It's kind of like what this tool believes."
That is the quiet cost of shipping the first draft. Your help center, your replies, and your knowledge base carry your company's voice. Hand all of it to a model and you slowly hand over the voice too.
Her fix comes from fiction
Elise treats AI the way a novelist treats a first draft. The first draft is always a mess, whether a person wrote it or a model did. The work happens in the revision.
"The hard work always as a writer is the revisions, the continual revisions. As long as you trust AI to provide you something that you can start to sculpt down, great."
So she lets AI write the messy first version, then edits it down to what she actually means. The model gives her raw material to work with, and she supplies the judgment.
Revision is how you learn your business
This is the insight worth keeping. Elise does not treat editing as a chore that slows her down. She treats it as the moment she learns the most.
"I find that I'm learning so much about my business by rereading and by revising, by just going through that work."
When she rereads an AI draft of an executive summary or a test-and-learn report, she catches the places where it drifts off theme, surfaces something she would not say, or gets a detail wrong. Fixing those is how she stays close to her customers and her data. Skip the revision and you skip the learning.
Why this matches how we think about AI support
At Helpfeel, we build AI customer support with a managed service around it, and Elise's point is close to why. Good AI support is only as good as the content behind it and the people keeping that content honest. Helpfeel answers up to 70 percent of incoming questions and returns a relevant answer to 98 percent of searches, across more than 800 sites. Those numbers hold up because a human editor tunes the answers against what customers actually ask, using the voice of the customer. The AI drafts and answers at scale. People keep it accurate and keep it sounding like you. That is the same balance Elise describes, built into the product.
Her episode is a good reminder for any team leaning on AI to write support content this year. Let it draft. Then revise it, and keep the voice that makes the business yours.