In today's episode, we sit down with Ryan Heath, Head of Communications and PR at Robin AI, a company reshaping business deals with innovative AI solutions. Ryan shares his path to joining Robin AI and how the company’s compelling vision and leadership inspired him. He offers thoughtful insights on building effective communication strategies, the value of strong relationships, and how empathy and authenticity can shape workplace culture.
Below is just a snippet of the conversation. For more episodes, check out the Spotify channel to listen or the YouTube channel. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
“You don't want to just talk about what you're doing right now for a customer. You want to be able to explain how you're completely reshaping a market.” - Ryan Heath
Dan Gaynor: Let's talk about starting the comms function at [Robin AI,] a high-growth, well-funded AI startup. What has it been like to build that function from scratch? In what ways have you seen your role stretch to the core competencies of comms all the way through trying to generate business?
Ryan Heath: I really try to take big-picture views. Without saying, ‘I'm the grownup in the room,’ I am, at 44, one of the older people at the company. And so I always thought during the interview process, and when I arrived, my job is to help the company think ahead, sort of two or three years down the line about what it wants its footprint to be. How does it want to grow into sort of being this lasting, significant brand. I don't want to just think about tomorrow, and I don't want to just put out fires. I want to do things that will interest me in these longer-term outcomes.
That was one of the reasons why I joined in the first place. I joined this AI startup rather than another one because I could see that it was solving an actual problem in the market. As compared to say, one of these large language models, which are becoming more and more commoditized. Like ever since Meta released its Llama models out into the world for free, you saw this commoditization of the super powerful models. But those powerful models can't do it on their own. These highly specialized tasks, whether in financial services, legal services, or a bunch of other health-related things, require people who are building these specialized products and tools and applications on top of those foundation models. So I was choosing a company that could do that, trying to make that company see sort of exactly where it wants to go in the future.
So that means completely rethinking how it talks about itself. You don't want to just talk about what you're doing right now for a customer. You want to be able to explain how you're completely reshaping a market like you have to be able to talk about. What is the problem you're solving?
Let's say you have to convince people that you might not have the biggest number attached to you, like, okay, we are Raising money at a decent clip, but we're not raising a hundred million or five hundred million the way some companies do. But what we just did with this latest fundraising is we got 25 million dollars from our own customers who like the product so much that they decided to become investors. That's a whole other story to tell. Like, how many companies sort of have customers that love them so much that they want to, like, put skin in the game? I haven't heard of it. I mean, I'm sure it's happened before. But in that sense, it doesn't matter. Is it 5 million, 25 million, 50 million? The number matters less than this concept that, you know, there are ways to make money in AI without being The provider of the hugest model. We're going to a future where it is about what is the solution you're offering and what problem it relates to rather than how big your model is. And so being able to try and tell that story, it takes a while to get people to listen.
“I use my relationship with these bigger people to put our company into different conversations and elevate us from being these tiny people that you could ignore, to being part of something you have to focus on.” - Ryan Heath
DG: As every company now has an AI wrapper to it, there's this huge tidal wave, a sea of sameness that is rushing towards every possible industry. As a result, what I hear all the time from different big companies is it's really hard to differentiate the core AI companies, companies like yours, and Signal AI that really are grounded in real AI versus the other ones that are just using an open source model. Could you share any advice for folks who are working in AI and especially doing comms for AI companies or AI divisions? What would be some guiding principles in terms of differentiating your company, a real standalone tech player versus a chat GPT wrapper?
RH: Some of this gets to like the heart of the company, rather than just how you explain what the company is. You have to be an organization that's investing at some level in AI research and has a serious AI engineering team. If you don't have that, or you aren't developing that, you are at some level going to be putting lipstick on a pig. I can't help you with that part of the problem, but it's a lesson in sort of doing that research before you join one of those companies, if I can slightly get out of the question that way.
And then once you're there, I tried to look across the entire landscape. I was like, okay, we are a little player. Most publications don't care about us except maybe once a year, or when we do one of these fundraising stories. Otherwise, they don't know how to tell what is real about us and what's not.
There are a couple of ways you can really demonstrate how real you are. The first one is that your founders have to be able to tell a coherent story. So you have to put a lot of work into making sure those founders are maybe not on message but that they understand how critical their role is in telling the company's story.
The second one is to look across your partners. You know, if we're small, who is big in our kind of world and our ecosystem? We're partnering with Anthropic, who do the Claude chatbot. They're kind of like Lyft to OpenAI's Uber in that big model world. We also partner with Amazon through Amazon web services.
So I was like, my job is to stick like glue to Anthropic and AWS. And when they want something or need something, I say, "How high? Can I give it to you yesterday?" I use my relationship with these bigger people to put our company into different conversations and elevate us from being these tiny people that you could ignore to being part of something that you have to focus on.
"You're going to have to get a bit more creative about how you build those trusted relationships in 2025... Stay alert, and be open-minded about what could work." - Ryan Heath
DG: In this world of AI, it's all about volume and size, right? How many podcasts can you do? How big of a stage can you get on? But when it comes to the brass tacks of building relationships, it's about embracing a more inclusive ICP, a broader possible set of individuals. Of course, your founder and CEO is one of them, but then also facilitating more intimate relationships. And the Knicks game or a nice steakhouse dinner with 10 well-curated individuals might be magnificently more important to you than a Ted talk.
RH: It might take a long time to get those people to reply to your email or answer your call and to actually turn up. But we are also entering a world where half the country wants to live in a bunker because they can't believe what happened in the election. They're going to be tuning out a lot of the, maybe not broadcast, but a lot of the other forms of communication and advertising that you might be trying to reach people through.
So you're going to have to get a bit more creative about how you build those trusted relationships, I think, in 2025, and, you know, we feel like that's sort of Client hospitality, and if things are working for us, maybe it will have to change again in 2025. But I think the idea is to stay alert and be open-minded about what could work. Don't just use your old playbook again and again and again. And definitely don't keep doing it if you're not getting the results you want because that's the definition of crazy.
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Signal in the Noise is a podcast dedicated to helping today's business leaders navigate the complexities of decision-making by leveraging data and groundbreaking technology—first and foremost, artificial intelligence (AI). You can also watch the interview on our Signal AI YouTube channel here.