Building AI Content Systems That Actually Work with David Ebner of Content Workshop

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
You're listening to the CyberWire Network, powered by N2K. Welcome to the Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing podcast, where we explore the hottest topics in cyber marketing, interview experts, and help you become a better cybersecurity marketer.

**Gianna Whitver** (0:31)
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Breaking Through in Cybersecurity Marketing. I'm your host, Gianna Whitver, and today we have an amazing guest. You know him, you love him, you love to see him back. It's David Ebner, President of Content Workshop, friend and sponsor of the Cybersecurity Marketing Society.
I've known you now, David, for years. Wait, but don't interrupt because I have to tell your title, President of Content Workshop, which is a content creation studio, for security brands and also has recently expanded into AI development, which is so freaking cool. We're going to talk about that. Thanks for being on the show.

**David Ebner** (1:10)
Thanks for having me, Gianna. It's always a pleasure.

**Gianna Whitver** (1:12)
Yeah, we love having you on. This will be fun.
Before we jump into AI systems, which is the topic of today's conversation, that is more of a recent addition to what Content Workshop does. Tell me, what was the journey to launching this business unit at Content Workshop?

**David Ebner** (1:29)
You know, I feel like everything is with AI right now, right? Like, we take the banner from last year, now with AI, right? It's because it's kind of pervasive in everything that we do now, right? It's everywhere, right? It's being used in everything that's being developed. We've always been a brand storytelling agency, and wherever the best way or place to tell that story is, that's where we're going to go, right? We've been evolving for 13 years. So as AI started to actually, initially, when AI became more prominent, a lot of these chat functionalities were just the good quality of the content. It was just terrible. Not something you could use for a business purpose. Certainly not something you could use in cybersecurity marketing. It was incorrect. It had bad narrative flow.
Yeah. It was just, it was not great. So we didn't worry about it for a while. We didn't really infuse our systems with it. Then last year, the beginning of last year of 2025, we really started to see some changes in the systems. We started to see some major quality improvements, in accuracy, in the information gathering, and just being correct when it would spew stats.

**Gianna Whitver** (2:32)
It still can't count letters and words, but we don't really do that in our day-to-day.

**David Ebner** (2:37)
Exactly. That part not so good. But it was better at, I guess, updating its data sets based off of latest news and information. That's really what the big change was. So we started to use it in our own everyday processes, find ways to then do that for our clients as well too. So it's just the next evolution in how content is created. At some point in time, people put down their pencils and picked up their typewriters, and this is the time for us to move on from only having one way of doing content, which is manually towards a more AI-friendly ecosystem.

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That's interesting.
One of the things that we talked about in our pre-call is systems, right? Not just AI for generative content, which all of us I think are super aware of and to varying degrees of quality output, right, based on how we're prompting and how we're building things. But something that you all can do is build systems of AI. Can you talk about that and what does it mean to have an AI system?

**David Ebner** (4:17)
I'll actually take one step back so I can explain that in better detail. Systems all come down to, systems are just a series of processes connected together, right?
Those processes are developed in a lot of different ways and come to fruition a lot of different ways. The system itself is what connects all of them together, right? So to do this effectively, you have to have great SOPs, great standard operating procedures for everything you do as an organization, certainly how you create content. And many brains don't have that. So that's where you have to start. It stinks because you think this new tool is great and it's going to make my life easier. And the first thing you have to do is a super manual process of writing down steps of how something works. Like that's insane. But it's the only way to build an effective system. So when I say a system, I'm talking about the connectivity of processes. So you can take a blog development. Great. Simple, fairly simple everyday use of a content process.