How AI Is Transforming PDFs Into Interactive Experiences with Alex Shevelenko

Welcome to the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast, where we talk with entrepreneurs, founders, and leaders at B2B services, tech, and SaaS companies to learn the systems and processes they've used to create success for their business. We'll also learn from marketing and sales experts, uh, to provide insights to help you grow your business. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and the podcast is brought to you by Modern Revenue Strategies and their 10x ROI B2B Growth Guarantee. Schedule a free diagnostic call to learn the fastest path to double your B2B revenues in just 90 days. Hello and welcome to another episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. I'm your host, Mark Osborne, and today I'm very excited to welcome my guest, Alex Shevilenko. Now I'm gonna read Alex's bio to make sure I get this right. He's done a lot of stuff. He's the founder of RelateTo, which is the first AI experience platform transforming static documents and presentations into interactive, engaging experiences. He has a background as a cloud pioneer. He held leadership roles at SuccessFactors, which was actually acquired by SAP for $3.4 billion. And Salesforce.com. He's a Stanford MBA graduate and a speaker on the Idea Science Method. He hosts the Experience-Focused Leaders podcast, where he interviews business thought leaders from companies like DocuSign, Alteryx, CrowdStrike, and Eloqua. So Alex, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Mark. This is— what a great introduction. I'm gonna forward this to my mom. She'll be very impressed.

Well, I appreciate you taking some time to join us. You've obviously done a lot of stuff. Why don't you kind of tell us your story of, you know, how you got into doing what you're doing today and really what you do with RelateTo?

Well, it's amazing how life tends to run loops. So my very first gig as an undergrad was interning at Microsoft Office product management team.

Okay.

And we were looking at this thing called the PDF that came out and it was taking over online as the downloadable format instead of our Word and PowerPoint formats, which were pretty much the de facto standard of what was happening inside the office at the time.

Right, right.

And we were like, well, how do, how do we, who are these people? How, how come they're taking us over? What do we do with them? And obviously I failed and we failed at Microsoft to manage that expansion, right? The PDF came in at the world where you couldn't have these unformatted Word and PowerPoints. You needed to print stuff consistently and like share it online. And they became the de facto standard of business customer-facing communication.

Sure.

And then throughout my career, I saw these PDFs that flattened our Cool PowerPoints or what, or you know, InDesign files or whatever people created stuff in. They flatten them, and I was a consultant in PowerPoint, like in, and you know, obviously the product of consultants is a bunch of presentations and leave-behinds that were getting bored, lost somewhere, and getting dust all over them. And then a B2B marketer at places like you mentioned SuccessFactors, where we were. Selling the most innovative customer experience for employees, employee experiences, but how we were doing it, actually not in a very SaaS, not in a very cloud-friendly, pretty old-school way. And, and so this just kept hitting me and hitting me. And then I was running my own business and, and people started asking, hey, can you make our PowerPoint more engaging, more compelling, more delivering than the competition? And so we started an agency that has actually taken your PowerPoints and turned it into websites. And now I'm a very proud representative on an AI-first company, Relato, where AI does the legwork of an agency in turning your static content. And now it's more than just a PDF. It could be an MPEG-4 file into both interactive experiences as a standalone and then hubs. That are a lot more like Netflix than the traditional folder that take you on a full journey. So that's the backstory. It's an itch I wanted to scratch for myself, for my clients. And, and, and it's really humbling because the, back to that Microsoft beginning, right? The aha is that you don't need to create a whole new format from scratch. You can take a format that's a de facto standard that's out of date. And leverage that as your entry point. So, so, so, uh, PDF, Adobe didn't kill Word or PowerPoint, right? They just—

No.

Taken the format and, and, you know, created a, uh, a movement from that as the, as the de facto standard.

Same.

We are not, we don't have to kill the PDF. If you like, like your PDFs, you like people to download your stuff, you like the finality of that, you like to print stuff out sometimes. Great. We can take that experience that's familiar and turn it into having both the safety and eating your cake of the interactivity engagement and more digital web-like experience versus a static paper experience.

So this sort of creates a really interesting, you know, sort of opportunity for folks. And you and I were chatting a little bit about, And you talked about it before, of the idea of you put so much time into creating a really powerful PowerPoint presentation or, you know, your pitch deck, or even if you're customizing it, you know, for a particular client, but then it just feels so static, you know, when it gets there. And a lot of companies hit this inflection point as they're trying to grow where the founder is so passionate about the product. They have such a broad expertise in the industry.

Yeah.

And then they wind up learning so much about the prospects in the process of, you know, sort of researching them. You get that founder in the room and it's lightning in a bottle. But when that founder then starts to try to scale, the way they do that is, well, let me turn my deck into a leave-behind and I'll send it to more people and I won't be in the room, But my new sales leader will, and that person isn't quite that lightning in the bottle. And so there's this, you know, sort of dampening of the effect. Yeah. But I think that there's an opportunity with, you know, technologies, you know, like this to, you know, sort of make more, you know, less of a monologue, more of a conversation in these presentations.

Yeah.

What are some of the challenges that you see companies You know, when they go from this very interactive founder to, let's just send off this kind of static brochure. What are some of the things that happen that they can't see, that they aren't even aware of that are blocking that progress?

Well, you kind of, you're getting there, right? So what the first item that I would say, got to remember is you're competing for attention, right? And so you're hitting this attention black hole when you're sending A PDF, which typically people ignore. If you're lucky, they skim it.

Right.

And the longer it is, the more it tells your full story, the more they're like, okay, I'll look at it sometime when I have time, which—

That's never.

Means, guys, they open this thing, they like, it looks like it's 50 pages with appendix and they're like, okay, thank you very much. So now it's still valuable. To know that there is this collection of wisdom. So in some ways, knowing that something is, it has substance underneath it versus some shallow TikTok-y stuff that's, uh, that we're all filled with, it's still valuable, but it, it, you know, you, you gotta get people to get to that value.

Right.

The second thing, and this is part that you don't notice there, is that Basically, when you hit send, you get zero feedback loop. So it's a dead end. You send them out, you don't know what really happened, which page was open, if any, where did they go on the page. If your pages were, had some call to action, which, you know, they should, many, most of them don't, you don't know if people hovered over it or clicked on it. So you need to know, just like, you know, you and I, we have digital body language right now. We're nodding and like, we could, we can, we need to know what's the feedback loop, where people are getting bored, where they're dropping off, where they're like, their, their eyes are lighting up, uh, with interest. That is super powerful insight. For example, just think of like, hey, somebody got to your case study, uh, page and they could, they could see, uh, you could see where, which of the case studies was most relevant to them. That's super powerful information. Yeah. The other piece which relates to broadly a theme, right? If you're in an innovation business, if you're a startup, scale-up, you name it, you are competing with larger, more established folks. So somehow you gotta feel fresh, you gotta feel innovative. You gotta punch above your weight class, right? You gotta, you, you, you, because you're, you don't have the incumbent advantage. So you need to look modern, right? And PDF is safe maybe, but certainly not effective and definitely not modern. It's been around since '93. So that's a problem. And then the last piece, and that relates to the sort of lack of monologues and, you know, like over like lecture, like who wants to lecture? You want to have something that people could personalize. So like, I have a problem with X. Oh, X is right there on the front page. You know, can I, can I jump to the section that's about X? That's going to keep me interested and excited. So bottom line, when you add all these things, right, when you add just, you know, conventional frictions, like what if I'm on my mobile to make everything worse, right?

Mm-hmm.

Can you create Uh, an experience that you can monitor, that allows you to, to com— be compelling from your brand perspective, compelling from the content perspective. That will, that will be the, the challenges that you need to overcome. And PDFs are not gonna get you there. It's sort of like, it, it's, it, it's a safe play. It's not a, uh, disruptor play or an attention-grabbing play.

So you're hinting at some things that sound really interesting and exciting, and I'll wager that a lot of the folks that are listening aren't sort of aware of like what's even possible. Like, you know, where has this gone in the world? And a lot of folks, you know, they sort of see PDF as that standard, or, you know, maybe they're doing a video or a Loom video to walk people through the PDF. But, you know, as someone that's such an expert in the cutting edge on this space, like, what are the things that are possible? What are— so give us some inspiration on the types of things that you could be doing and how that impacts the recipient of that information in the way that they engage.

Well, let's start with the end. Like, what are you trying to accomplish, right? Like, you're trying to basically get more mindshare. And a personalized tour of your content. And it could be when you're in the room together and you're just kind of not— like, you could have a presentation that's truly interactive, or like you said, it's a leave-behind, or it's effectively a website, right? And what we found was relate to clients that have done studies of what happens with the content that they go and transform. And there could be other ways of doing it, but—

Yeah.

On the whole, it outperforms an average B2B website visit. A single document outperforms a website visit because you're not creating these artificial barriers like fill out this form before you even know what's this all about, right? The form could come in a little bit later, right? Or you kind of don't, you, if you have a table of contents, it feels like it's clickable and, and really obviously interactive. So effectively you could create a, the, the, the experience that combines what PDFs are good for, like, hey, this is a, you know, publication. This is a serious piece of work. This is credible with the lightness of a web, well-designed web experience. And so that's, that's what the customer, we've been very fortunate that customers have run tests on this. We've also been fortunate to have amazing customers like Salesforce using the product. And, you know, some, some, in some situations they get 7x of interaction and engagement with the content relative to standard PDF. And that, that is the outcome, right? You want people, you know, buying or at least getting convinced and persuaded without you forcing them because they're interested and you've, you've removed the friction from them getting into your worldview. As a company, right? So that's, that's the big, the big idea behind it. How do you do it? We could get into a lot of tactics, right? But that's the why, right?

Yeah.

Can you, like, is this, this is an efficient way to get your audience on the hook without feeling forced, right? Like monologue is forcing, and this is where they're being asked to lean in, but in a very intelligent way where you could almost plan the journeys that they could take, right? And, and so you're, you are not, it's not a free-for-all, right? It's not like Wikipedia where you just go off and, you know, go on tangents, right? You're creating an experience where they could go depending on their interests and, you know, get a, that personal journey that they would have with the founder.

Yeah, that's, so that's really interesting and But what you're describing starts to sound like overwhelming. And, but you alluded to something up front that I want to double-click into a little bit. And what you referenced is that this is sort of AI-enabled, that AI does a lot of this heavy lifting. And so like that starts to have a promise of, I'm not gonna, you know, the last time I did a website project, it was a lot of, creating content and then thinking about how to organize it and all those things. And, you know, it became a small career in and of itself. How are you using AI or some of the tools that are built into the platform to keep this from becoming such a heavy lift?

Yeah, this is a great question. So actually, you couldn't afford this experience, you know, a few years ago because we were an agency and really like, That's right. I would've had Richie, Richie, and then you would've had to hire us. And then we had rich teams and we had like a SaaS tool, but we were predominantly operating it. And so it was like high stakes, big deals or high stakes, big marketing projects.

Right.

Um, that were, that were used. And then the, the, as the SaaS platform becomes much easier and then the AI kicks in, effectively you're able to drag and drop your PDF. And assuming it's designed in a decent way, doesn't have to be perfect, but in a decent way where you have some white space and it's not like 7-size font and there's some breathing room for the audience, it becomes effectively an interactive site. And, you know, we would— AI could automatically build out things like navigation. There would be an intelligent chat that only addresses your document and adjacent. Documents that you've shared or, or, or videos that you've shared. And, um, if you have things in there like links to YouTube, right? Like if you imagine in the old days when you have a link to a YouTube in your PDF, which sometimes people wanna share a case study or story. Well, I, I put it in a, I put it in a PDF. Great. Somebody clicks on it. Great. They go, you know, they see an ad. Then they maybe see, they last pass the ad, they see this thing, and then if they see it right there, then the next thing is whatever is Trump doing right now in the—

Right.

Whatever, whatever, something that has nothing to do with your brand and actually is quite, um, problematic likely for your brand. But for sure, if they do click on that thing, they're not coming back. That's because you were in a file somewhere and now you're in the browser and the browser has 500 tabs open on an average one of our knowledge workers, right? And so you're gone. And so that is the other kind of benefit is that you could turn that experience and just, hey, it becomes immersive. So anything that can be presented immersively keeps you inside this journey that you've created. Right. And you don't have to do anything, right? It's just the automatic platform transforms it. And then if you do want to be the agency mode or you're a little bit more on the creative side or you aspire to be a marketer with a little design savvy, you basically could treat that PDF as a, I would say, canvas on which you can add additional AI-powered features like videos on the COVID page. That take your text. They don't cover up your text. They kind of fit in under your text, but they could be on brand with your company's name. And so instead of getting a flat on the first page when somebody loads something, instead of getting a flat same old PDF, they get a video that creates excitement, movement that doesn't feel like your granddad put this together in a basement, you know, 10 years ago and sharing right now. It looks like it's a modern. Uh, modern website, right? And so that, that there's little things like that that you could add in there. So, um, and the beauty is the AI is doing the legwork, so you don't have to be a superstar anymore in, in terms of even thinking about content. You just have to follow some basic best practices. We share a lot of templates for free, whether you use us or not, they'll probably help your content be more digestible. And, but I think they're designed to start get, to get you thinking of this less as a monologue, but as a choice architecture where people could say, hey, I want to go there. I want to go here. And then you have this very seamless, smooth ability to jump to the right section of your document, but not have it feel like you're in the book. Have it feel like you're inside a website.

Right. Which then gets them obviously more engaged, but also feeling like they're part of the story instead of—

You're creating your own story. Yeah.

Right.

The, like, we don't force you, you know, it, we, it's like the, it's kind of ridiculous, right? That this still is around, but it sort of assumes that people read the same way they read in—

Sure.

When, uh, printing press came out, right? We had fundamentally, except for on a screen, which was not designed for it. Right. But we read different. Like we, we are, we have you know, YouTube Shorts and TikToks and we wanna snack things, but we, but, but, but then the, the short content is not filling.

That's right.

It, it creates this sort of, you know, junky feeling at the end, right? Like that too. Like it, like it doesn't, it, it, you, you know, you move on to the next thing. And so that's—

Like a dinner made of hors d'oeuvres versus an actual meal.

Yeah. Like, like, like the, you know, let's talk about the French, right? They really, you want to have some hors d'oeuvres, right? You want to get started, you want to whet the appetite, but then you know that there is a substantive, right? Not overwhelming, right? Like not like, you know, this size portion, but like— A substantial course.

Yeah.

But there's a main course and then there is like a sweetener in the end and you want to complete the journey and you feel fulfilled and you feel like you've, you've like had an experience. And I think unfortunately the, the more important the idea, the more complex the topic, the less it is like an experience today.

Yeah.

The more it is like torture. Uh, you know that, and so I think it works for people that are super motivated, right? That are like, hey, I have to read this, right? You know, you sent it to me only.

Yeah.

You know, you're my boss. Yes. In that case, uh, you know, if you're the boss and you're sending it to one person who has to read it to keep their job. You don't need to work super hard, but if you're sending this to your partners, to a larger population, uh, to prospective customers, to existing customers, you know, you've got to create an experience for them, right?

Well, and the other thing that we see so often in the B2B space is, you know, you're not presenting to one person, you're presenting to a buying committee. That buying committee's got, you know, different stakeholders with different points of view and perspectives. There's often a technical influencer and they want to get deep into how interoperable will this be with our other software. And so you have to address that question. But if you address that upfront, you bore the main decision maker.

You're like, check, thank you very much.

Yeah. Doesn't care at all.

Yeah. Why would the CEO buyer need to know about like the SOC 2 compliance?

Exactly. Well, he won't sign off until his technical person says, yeah, it's going to work for us. And so you got to include that. But this gives you a really, you know, sort of elegant way to do that. Likewise, the end user might get forwarded the PDF brochure, but if the PDF brochure is just aligned to, you know, the ultimate buyer decision maker who's operating at a high level, the end user is like, oh, this isn't going to work for me. They're missing all this content that I would need for it to do. But you could have that sort of separate experience all within this one really well-packaged.

Yeah.

Uh, experiences.

Yeah. And I think this is, this is brilliant. You're teeing up the evolution of Relato. So we started by going like, what's the building block of business communications? It's the PDF. You know, it's kind of, if you figure out how to do that, you could handle all sorts of static content, all sorts of stuff that becomes a PDF. Right. So we've nailed that. I think we're very fortunate to be on the bleeding edge of turning that with AI into modern experiences.

Yeah.

But then what you're describing, this is the, this is, you can't even put together one PDF that covers everything.

Right.

Exactly. You could like pull out your hair, uh, even your beautiful hair would be gone, you know? But when, uh, when, uh, when you, by the time you're done with that, so, so how do people solve that? Well, they have these sort of try to put together a WordPress site that has like everything for everyone. And that's always a nightmare. You could never kind of adapt that quickly. It always requires some, some technical coding to tweak up. Some people, you know, tried to use, you know, like data rooms, but those look also like '90s are calling you back oftentimes that like there's a folder structure there that's like easy to follow, but not exciting. Not, not as easy to just discover stuff. So we looked at like, what's, what's an example of a rich content experience that's really intuitive, that everyone knows how it works, that doesn't suck. And, uh, and we, we know you and I, and probably everyone listening to this is guilty of a pleasure of getting stuck in exploring Netflix or, or Prime Video, whatever is your, your, your choice. For quite a bit. And it's intuitive because you could scroll down to your categories, scroll across, and you could find the one thing you really feel like digging into. And yet you don't feel lost. You kind of know there's a structure. It's not just a random of like, you know, node files, right? Like an asset. So imagine you could do that not just for videos, but it could be for your documents. for your PDFs, so to speak, for presentations, for videos increasingly, right? That may be standalone videos. They're in there for webpages, even links, you know, Airtable or other tools that you may be using. So that's what we call a hub. And, you know, the best way I describe it is like Netflix and a folder are having a baby. And that, you know, and it's kind of a modern folder because it's— So it could contain not just files, but anything that you would want to be consuming, right? Even that TikTok video, if it's the right one, that could be included in, into that experience. So that, that allows you to find yourself, right? Because there could be an IT sub— subsection inside there, which has all the materials for IT. But if you're, if you're, if you're the CEO, you could have like CEO value proposition. You just get to that, right? And so you could, you could discover yourself. And then once you get into, let's say, the CEO experience, that's that interactive, what used to be a PDF that still is feel credible, that is still downloadable, right? But it, it, it's suited to you.

Right.

And you're not stuck there. You could, you kind of, kind of, you could go in the journey further. And so what we're seeing is once you land somebody inside one of these experiences inside a hub, guess what? The likelihood that they'll continue to another experience Inside this hub is, is, uh, through the roof, right? So basically you're retaining their attention, right? And, and it's conversation continues. It's never having an island.

Talk about, yeah, the value that you get of knowing where they engage, uh, and where they, uh, because there's so much, it's table stakes now, right?

Like that's sort of silly, silly. I don't know, like the civilization has moved on, but we are still doing some cave painting shit. With these things that like get no, you have to go to the cave painting, right? And nobody knows if you've been there, right? Like, what are you like? So like, like just tracking, right? They, the provided it's irrespective of GDPR policies, whatnot. But for, for B2B stuff, it's secure content. Sometimes, you know, you could get people's emails and, and track them, you know, easily. You could anonymize it if you wanted, but you really start getting that feedback loop. Right. Of what's working, what's not, what's relevant for this particular deal. And the beauty is this is living content. So if something's not working, you could, uh, fix it up. That's right. And when we talk about, um, what's next, I'd love to, to share again about how we see the future.

'Cause I think— Yes, please do.

That, that, well, I, I think right now you're fixing it up, right? But imagine, um, the content regenerates based on the user user consumption and sort of says, hey, you know, the recommended journey would be very different based on what we've seen your users do with this. And you can do this manually, but yeah, you can do it with AI.

Yeah, you can take insight from across all of the other, you know, businesses like yours that are sharing content. What does the journey look like so that you don't have to just be dependent on what your users do, but what other users are Exactly right.

Because, you know, we, we like, we, we, we think like as you start narrowing down to some particular use cases, right, you could be like, you could have a pattern of what, what is it like an ebook or white paper consumption should look like, right? And you could have a pattern of what's maybe top of the funnel content should look like, what's like proposal consumption should look like. And so you could start adapting, you could, you could really have much more. Prescriptive and AI-generated way to bring that content back to life. So we call it regenerative AI. So people talk about generative AI.

Right, right.

And obviously everybody should be thinking about that, right? Like, this is a good thing for creators because we can put more stuff out there. But the problem with generative AI is It never sees the light of customer interaction.

That's right.

Right? It typically is something inside your ChatGPT and you take it out and then you put it somewhere else.

Yeah.

And then you never, you, you realize that, you know, well, Google discounts that SEO or people don't read that, you know, PDF or whatnot, whatever you put it in. And so the experience becomes the message and the interactions from experiences, the data that you need to feed back in. Hey, how do we restructure the journey? What needs to be updated? And that's sort of the big vision of this content. The content regenerates itself into something that serves you better and better.

Wow. Very exciting stuff. So you've painted a really inspiring vision of how companies can leverage the latest in technology to take what they're doing today and really uplevel it, which allows them to stand out more and have more powerful Uh, interactions with whomever their stakeholders are, whether they're pitching something or even just trying to communicate ideas more effectively. So super interesting for our audience that's listening and thinking, I need a little bit of this. What's the best way for them to engage with you and RelateTo?

Well, you can go to relateto.com. Okay. And, um, on relateto.com, you can, uh, sign up, uh, for a demo. If you, if you're more of an enterprise and you'd like to really dig in, Into this. And, and if you're a designer or, or kind of marketer or kind of the person that likes to try things yourself, there is a, there's a plan, like a range of plans that you could go sign up to trial it and see for yourself, you know, get your, get, see how, what you can do with a PDF that we recommend. Like that's one that's kind of optimized or upload one of yours and, you know, get started, right? Like I think the, the future is is waiting for this. So like, so there's no reason to wait around and think about it too hard. It's one of those things that's obvious. I think the, the reason it hasn't been deployed is the PDF is a monster of a format to do something interesting with. So people have been technologically stuck in terms of like transforming that. We were fortunate enough to have, um, figured that out. And so, you know, Check it out, check, see how you could take the old formats and transform them or create these new hubs, right? That are, that are really more of a destination that, that kind of completes an entire journey.

Fantastic. Well, Alex, thank you so much for coming on and sharing some really inspiring visions of what's possible within the space. You bet.

Thanks, Mark. All right, talk to you soon.

Thank you for joining this episode of the B2B Growth Blueprint podcast. We hope you've gained insights to grow your business. If you enjoyed this discussion, please rate, comment, like on your favorite platform, and share to others who will find it useful. Do you know a CEO, founder, or leader at an early-stage B2B services, tech, or SaaS company who would like to be a guest and share their story? Send us a note. Let's schedule a conversation.