Innovating Leadership:
Co-Creating Our Future

Hosted by Maureen Metcalf

Conversations with global thought leaders on leadership, culture, and innovation—designed for executives navigating complexity and building resilient organizations.

How AI Preserves Humanity at Ancestry
Episode Description

AI is framed as a means to deepen human connection and reinforce organizational identity, rather than displace it, through the lens of leadership at Ancestry. The discussion emphasizes returning to core purpose, customer focus, and mission clarity while using AI to transform large-scale data into meaningful, human-centered insights. Leadership effectiveness is tied to aligning technological adoption with values, trust, and long-term organizational identity.

Key Takeaways
  • AI creates value when it strengthens, rather than dilutes, the organization’s core mission and identity.
  • Customer-centric leadership provides a stabilizing anchor amid rapid technological change.
  • Ethical AI requires intentional alignment between data use, transparency, and trust.
  • Technology adoption should enhance human connection, not replace it.
  • Strategic focus is a leadership discipline that becomes more critical as innovation accelerates.
Why This Episode Matters

It highlights how leadership decisions about AI shape not only performance outcomes but also whether organizations preserve trust, identity, and long-term relevance.

Featuring

Howard Hochhauser, CEO, Ancestry

Episode Topics

Podcast Air Date

May 26, 2026

Episode Duration

39min

Watch the episode

Season 12
Episode Number 21

Episode Content:

What Are You Trying to Preserve? The AI Question Few C-Suites Are Asking

When everything is evolving, Ancestry’s CEO says the most important leadership responsibility may be protecting the humanity at the center of your enterprise.

Data centers outlawed in several municipalities. At least three commencement speakers booed when touting AI. AI sentiment at an all-time low in the polls. And all that just this month!

The signs are abundantly clear: In the breakneck race to adopt AI, corporate leaders’ tunnel vision for using it to save costs and improve efficiency blinds them to the human element.

In the growing view of the public, leaders are doing nothing short of losing their souls.

Ancestry’s CEO, Howard Hochhauser, knows why. In this week’s podcast, Howard says his peers have forgotten perhaps the most important question in change management: What are we trying to preserve?

What Every (Responsible) Leader Must Start Thinking

Most executives approach AI primarily through the lens of efficiency: lower costs, higher productivity, and so on. Those are legitimate…but incomplete.

Also this month, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), focused entirely on artificial intelligence and the protection of human dignity in a technological age. His central argument is strikingly simple: AI must serve humanity rather than concentrate power and diminish human dignity.

AI, like any tech, is merely a tool. Whether it is good or bad depends on how a leader uses it. Howard says we must consider that technology is not the goal; human flourishing is.

In short, leaders must ensure innovation serves humanity rather than slowly eroding it.

Innovation’s Hidden Rapidity Risk

Most leaders understand the risk of moving too slowly. Far fewer recognize the risk of moving too fast in the wrong direction.

Howard realized this shortly after becoming CEO. Ancestry had drifted away from its core customers. In pursuing growth and innovation, it added features and capabilities that weren’t serving the people who loved the product most. Customer satisfaction declined. Growth flattened. Employees knew something was off.

The solution was not more innovation, but better innovation. Innovation aligned with mission, purpose, and customer needs. In other words, innovation without losing the soul of the organization.

Making Companies Unrecognizable

Ancestry has been extremely careful to implement AI using the Great Curse of Tech Bros: guardrails.

Ancestry uses AI to transform historical records into stories. A handwritten wartime account from a wounded soldier can be digitized, interpreted, and transformed into an accessible narrative. Revolutionary War pension records that sat largely undiscovered for centuries can become searchable and understandable. Family stories can be preserved before they disappear.

These are all hard facts…real documents and family lore. AI is absolutely not allowed to invent.

It must use authenticated source material. And all to ensure Ancestry does not lose its identity or its meaning to customers. To do otherwise risks the same fate as other companies we’re watching transform into unrecognizable creatures barely resembling their foundations.

For Ancestry, Howard’s tech mantra is “We’re not trying to make dead ancestors dance.”

That sentence contains an important lesson for leaders far beyond genealogy: Just because technology can do something does not mean it should.

The Soul of an Organization

Every organization has a soul.

Not in a religious sense, of course, but in a practical sense. It’s the mission employees believe in, the purpose that guides decisions, and the company culture. It’s the answer to the question, “Who are we?”

When organizations lose sight of that answer, they begin chasing trends, technologies, and opportunities that dilute their identity rather than strengthen it. This points to the reason for successful transformations: Paradoxically, they are the most deeply rooted in their old “soul.”

For example, Howard did not create a new purpose for Ancestry. His success came from clarifying an existing one. He focused the mission statement on helping people discover, preserve, and share family stories. That focus became a filter for decisions, investments, acquisitions, and innovation.

Growth resulted.

The New Leadership Imperative

As Ancestry proves, AI has its role. But it’s most effective when leaders realize people have their roles, too. The balance is achieved by continually asking “What should remain distinctly human?” This can include:

  • What conversations require empathy?

  • What decisions require moral judgment?

  • What relationships require trust?

  • What values cannot be delegated?

Those questions are no longer philosophical luxuries. They are leadership responsibilities. 

The leaders who thrive in the coming decade will not simply be the fastest adopters of technology. They’ll also be the most thoughtful stewards of humanity who understand that innovation and human dignity are not competing priorities but complementary responsibilities.

In short, they will use technology to amplify what is most human rather than replace it.

Leadership has always involved balancing progress with purpose. While the tools have changed, the responsibility has not. AI will unquestionably change our organizations.

Do we have the discipline, wisdom, and courage to ensure those changes help us become more fully human?

Resources:

There’s a wealth of information on Howard’s company at https://www.ancestry.com/. You can also follow him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/howard-hochhauser-5791b810/.

Our host Maureen Metcalf posts a newsletter every week on LinkedIn. You can subscribe here.

Maureen’s latest book is Innovative Leadership & Followership in the Age of AI. You’ll find details about it at https://bit.ly/LeaderInAI, or check out the Kindle version at https://amzn.to/44buVz8. The audiobook version is now available at  https://amzn.to/4dTCleZ.

Her other 10 books are available on Amazon here.

Other episodes you’ll enjoy:

Guest(s):

Howard Hochhauser, CEO, Ancestry

Guest(s) Bio:

Howard Hochhauser was named President & CEO of Ancestry, the global leader in family history and consumer genomics, in February 2025. Howard joined Ancestry in 2009 as Chief Financial Officer and in February 2012 added the position of Chief Operating Officer. Howard also served as interim CEO of Ancestry from October 2017 to May 2018 while the Board conducted a comprehensive search for a permanent CEO.

During his tenure, Howard has helped lead the company’s initial 2009 public offering, its go-private transaction in 2012, multiple acquisitions, and all of its public equity and debt financings. He was part of the team that grew the company from approximately $200 million in revenue in 2008 to more than $1.3 billion in revenue in 2024, a compound annual growth rate of 12.5.

Prior to joining Ancestry, Howard served as Chief Financial Officer of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, and earlier in his career was a Vice President of Equity Research at Bear Stearns & Co. and a Staff Accountant at KPMG Peat Marwick.

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    Transcript
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    Maureen: [00:00:00] Welcome to Innovating Leadership co-Creating our Future, where we explore the practices, mindsets, and systems that help leaders navigate complexity and create sustainable impact. I’m your host, Maureen Metcalf, CEO, and founder of the Innovative Leadership Institute. Today I’m delighted to be joined by Howard Hochhauser, CEO of Ancestry.com, a company operating at a fascinating intersection of technology, identity, history, and human connection. Ancestry’s become a trusted steward of millions of families’ stories while leveraging advanced AI to deepen meaning not distance us from it. 

    So Howard, welcome. 

    Howard: I am glad to be here. Looking forward to it. 

    Maureen: I am as well. I wanna learn more about you. So you’ve held senior leadership roles across high growth and mission-driven organizations. Looking back, what experiences most shaped how you lead [00:01:00] today? 

    Howard: You are the sum total of your experiences. I’ve been fortunate. I’ve worked with some phenomenal leaders, and phenomenal entrepreneurs. I’ll start out with my dad actually, who started a business with his father in Brooklyn, New York. I’m from New York originally, and so he, like classic American success story didn’t go to college. I think he just graduated high school and went on to create and start with his father, a business in Brooklyn and expand it out to Long Island and grew up with that family business, the customers, everything, the urgency, the passion around the kitchen table. And so that, that really stayed with me. And then fast forward, went to college and after that, worked on Wall Street, worked with this guy, Ace Greenberg, who was one of the last true entrepreneurs, he was the CEO of Bear Stearns real legacy on Wall Street, sat on the trading desk and it was his culture that [00:02:00] drove Bear Stearns and made it what it is. 

    And from Bear Stearns, then, I went to Martha Stewart. Another just like passionate founder, authentic entrepreneur, who really like her, ace, my dad, (had) deep passion for their customers. Deep passion for doing what’s right, passion for growth, growing their businesses, doing it profitably. And it stuck with me. It really stuck with me. So it was, yeah, really, just fortunate, blessed to have worked with all three of them. Obviously loved my dad, but Martha fantastic, and she’s still doing it today. 

    Maureen: All of them have a clear sense of purpose, as you’ve said. And so now let’s tie that to you. What is your core purpose that guides you when you have to make difficult decisions, which I assume you’re doing pretty consistently right now? 

    Howard: You have to make trade offs all the time. You can’t [00:03:00] make everybody happy. There are hard choices you need to make in service of moving the company forward. I remember, my dad, his customers were some of the neighbors that we grew up with. And you had to prioritize choices among your neighborhood, among your neighbors, and likewise today, right? We’re trying to grow the company and so there are trade-offs that we need to make. What I do is a North star, put my family as my mother as a customer, which she is. And think, what would my mother think if we do X, Y, or z, if we’re raising price, changing a package, adding a content collection, adding a new feature… ’cause it really is: it’s a consumer service. We have almost 4 million customers. Demographic is someone who tends to be female over 55. And so my mom, my family fits into the demo. So it’s easy just to make that my North star and make sure that I’m not gonna disappoint her. 

    Maureen: How cool. I’m just imagining a picture of your mother on your desk and you [00:04:00] imagining her having a conversation with you: 

    “Howard. What are you doing?!” 

    Howard: Yeah. I need to balance that picture with the picture of Blackstone who owns the company. And we’re trying to do both at the same time. And we’ve been successful in doing that; last year, we returned the business to growth, for the first time in four years, had a great year. Also, while we drove subscription revenue growth, we drove improvements in customer satisfaction, which had been declining for three years. We turned that around and now we put up 13 months of improvements in customer satisfaction — NPS — up 13% last year. So you can do both. Not always easy, but it’s possible. 

    Maureen: So tell us a little bit about what happened to make that possible. ‘Cause I think a lot of listeners are striving to do exactly that. 

    Howard: I believe we strayed away when the company sort of was eroding and profits and growth had flattened and NPS was going down. We stopped listening to our core customer. And we’re going off in a different direction of of we, of what we thought they would [00:05:00] want, we thought a different demographic would want. And frankly, one of the first things I did when I became CEO was just– I had been at the company, this is my 18th year at the company. I know our customers really well. I a customer I’m in our demo, my mom’s in the demo– really just listened to our customers. They want content ,they want better search, better hints. 

    So I went around and just listened to what our base wants. And started delivering it for them. Again, we did that (and) I would say our employees cheered louder than anybody. They loved that idea. And now put customers at the center of our culture statement. But we did that. And again, revenue turned around and so did NPS. 

    Maureen: What did that mean? Almost everyone says customers are at the center of their culture 

    Howard: Yeah. 

    Maureen: yet a lot of people don’t deliver on that. So what changed to be able to deliver on it and elevate your NPS and profitability at the same time? 

    Howard: Yeah. Fair question. I would say. They would try to boil the ocean; I wanna focus [00:06:00] on my 25-year-old customer, the 55, 75-year-old customer of all different demographics. Most of our customers are 55 and over, baby boomer demographic, which is the fastest growing demographic in the US. 

    And the disproportionate amount of the wealth in the US is tied up in that demo. So we focused in on a segment. Not the entire customer base, but on a segment of the customer base. And what they wanted was as I mentioned, better core functionality, which for us. Is ultimately surface the content in a more meaningful, faster, easier, more accurate way. And that’s what we did. And we also importantly took away some of the features that we had built over the past three years, which were just a distraction — were getting in the way of our customers. So when I told the engineering team we’re refocusing and take away all this stuff that we built, they were… frankly, they did it over a weekend, they were so excited about it.  

    Maureen: Why were they excited about taking away functionality? 

    Howard: They knew that [00:07:00] our base just didn’t like that what we were providing (to them), that we were trying to force our customers to go in a direction that they didn’t want to go. It wasn’t in service of our core mission. Which also one of the first things I did was change our mission statements. 

    Everybody knew the direction of the company, and so today the mission is we help everyone underscore, everyone, discover, preserve, and share their family stories. And so it made it about clear as day: It’s about family stories. It’s not just about finding my grandfather’s draft card. It’s about what’s the story around the draft card, what was his service like? 

    When did he get shipped overseas? Where did he serve? Who did he serve with? Was he wounded? Did he get a medal? So it’s really about, all the stories that surround, just that first record, just that draft card. Prior to that our mission statement was, “We empower journeys of personal discovery.” You could have that for a yoga studio, you could have that [00:08:00] for a health company, and yes, you could have that for a family history company. It goes into this, magic word called focus, right? By focusing the mission, we focused the company, focused on our customer. And now we’re very focused on family stories. 

    Maureen: And so how do you help people? I’m just thinking: When my father was alive, he was an Ancestry customer, and as he was declining in his capability, I would sit down sit down with him and go through what was on Ancestry. I found my marriage certificate. I got divorced 25 years ago. I don’t even have a copy of that marriage certificate, and he talked about going to cemeteries, going to the Library of Congress to track some of these people down, and now he was able to find more through Ancestry and to your point, we sat together and talked about who was in, who wasn’t in why he made those [00:09:00] choices based on cemeteries and Library of Congress in conjunction with your records. My side mirrors what you say the vision is. What from a business side happened to get there? You landed on something really important that does epitomize what is unique about ancestry? 

    Howard: First sounds like I need to get you to subscribe to Ancestry. I can’t let all that just lapse with your dad. And then importantly what you said there is the product vision. All the stories that you and your father talked about, that natural interaction. All those stories in the coming years, I want preserved on Ancestry to fulfill our mission. When there was a photo put in front of you and he started telling you about who’s in the photo — all of that rich content we want preserved and stored and shared and discoverable by other people on Ancestry, but this is a great example of the way that we did the [00:10:00] mission the way the prior mission was developed. So prior mission was developed by hiring an agency in San Francisco, paying them a two comma fee to interview employees, workshops, spend time. And gosh, we came up with that mission statement that meant nothing, right? THIS one internally, 30 days. Somebody on the executive team who I work with and knows me well, I said, “Hey, let’s do this quick. Let’s do this internally. Let’s get a half a dozen people together and let’s workshop it and let’s lock it up.” And people loved doing it. So it’s organic. People naturally felt passionate about it. The week we rolled it out, everybody just was like, yeah I thought that was our mission for the past 40 years. It was just so obvious and so organic that everybody rallied behind it. And now it is the focus of the company. (When) we [00:11:00] do M&A, we use the mission statement as the first screen for evaluating the company. When we think around our product roadmap: How does it fit within the mission statement? And we do take an elastic view of it, but gosh, that is the driving force, the center of gravity as we drive the company forward, I. 

    Maureen: So let’s now shift slightly as you drive the company forward. AI is everywhere. So Ancestry used AI to enhance human understanding rather than replace it. So thinking me sitting with my dad. How do you think about embedding it ethically and strategically from the outset? 

    Howard: we use AI to take all the stories that you just talked about with you and your dad. What we wanna do is preserve that. Then you can imagine a world with using AI; we could create, if you want [00:12:00] a 60 second podcast, if you want a 30 minute long form video; incorporate all the documents that y’all referenced; and turn that into something that’s meaningful, like your, your highly personalized Maureen TV show. It’s too expensive. But we could do that today. And so we are using AI to make our mission statement come to life and deliver for our customers. And so, we’ve been using it to digitize records for years. 

    1940 census took us, gosh, nine months. I forget how many hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. The 1950 census, nine days: AI, just amazing. 

    amazing. so we have billions billions of records, most of which is exclusive. 65% of it’s exclusive to us, and we’re using AI to –give you the story I started with: take the drafts card and turn that into a story that incorporates a picture of the war buddies, the picture [00:13:00] of serving overseas and all the context about my grandfather– put that into one story. 

    Maureen: So that was your grandfather: the draft card… 

    Howard: i. 

    Maureen: …image.  

    Howard: that’s, 

    Actually what got me to move from New York to Utah, is that I found my gra- (grandfather).. I had been living in lower Manhattan, and I found his draft card and as it turned out, he too was living in lower Manhattan. I was like, gosh I never knew this about him. I grew up with him. It’s about finding out, more context this tapestry of who we are and finding out more about people. 

    So I’ve now found more records. I just found a record record around an uncle who served in World War II and I found his firsthand account. He was wounded in World War II. He was on patrol in Germany or in France rather, wounded in action. I found his firsthand account from that action that got him his purple heart. 

    Maureen: Wow. 

    Howard: And so back to your AI story: so that is two pages in [00:14:00] script, hard to read, but really rich. It’s a firsthand account of combat interaction where somebody was actually killed in action, he was wounded. Now we take that using AI and turn it into a 60 second podcast with emotion and story arc. It’s pretty cool really back to our mission. Personal stories: that is as storytelling as you get. 

    Maureen: So did he record the 60 second podcast?  

    Howard: No,  

    No. What he did is in Forties, write this out. This was his submission  

    Maureen: Okay. 

    Howard: for purple (heart). We then found the paper record. Digitized the paper record, and AI takes over and takes that digital image, converts the handwritten script into actual text, and then further turned it into a podcast. And so back to how we’re using AI, like that’s a great example. We’re not gonna make believe we have his voice on file. We don’t, so it’s clear that it’s not his [00:15:00] voice, but it is his authentic story. And back to some of the people that helped shape, my business career. That’s where Martha was great. Martha Stewart is authentic as it gets. Like we would shoot a TV show, she’d be cooking or ironing whatever she was doing, and cut to commercial break. She would keep doing it, she wasn’t just doing it for the cameras. That was her being authentic and who she is. And so that’s our AI vision is, again, grounded in authenticity. 

    Maureen: And so how do you then put guardrails to it? Because I know some people are incredibly excited about AI and the things it will do. And yet it can also still make things up. 

    So how do you create the guardrails, which I assume you have done with great rigor so that people’s history doesn’t include, Shrek walking across the screen or something. 

    Howard: That is important to [00:16:00] us. And so whether we’re gonna create a video, which is on the roadmap for the future, or a podcast, which is live today, an audio story. We have put parameters in to only use the source material that we provided. 

    Maureen: Ah, okay. 

    Howard: Not make up a story from cloth. 

    So it is gonna use the immigration record that we have. It’ll use a draft or it’ll use content that we are feeding it to provide this highly curated, highly personal narrative about your ancestor. We’re not trying to make your ancestor come alive. We say we’re not trying to make dead ancestors dance. We are again, being authentic with the story. 

    Maureen: Beautiful. Thank you. I love that the parameters then are the content we provided. You don’t get to make stuff up. 

    Howard: Yep. Including, it could come from the customer, UGC, user generated content, user generated photos; very important.  

    Maureen: So [00:17:00] all of this work that you’ve done on helping people create their stories, how does that influence how you lead and the legacy that you’re choosing to create for yourself and the company? 

    Howard: Legacy is a big question. My, my son who’s now in college, I remember when he was in high school, sometimes your kids ask you those interview questions, and then it just stumps you. And he, I’ll never forget, he asked me that question and it stumped me. Listen I do ultimately go back to where I started. My mother as a customer, my neighbors as a customer, my family as a customer. I want them to wanna renew Ancestry because they are loving the service. Not liking, but loving what we’re doing. 

    The new products, loving the content, loving the stories, and they wanna share it with people. I guess my legacy would be I want more people, to be loving ancestry, be loving the product. Nothing can make me prouder if we accomplish that.  

    Maureen: Your [00:18:00] retention metrics are unusually strong. So what leadership behaviors and decisions have contributed most to long-term loyalty, and one of the things I heard was moving from a vision that was created by an external expert to genuinely working with the people who’ve been delivering these stories for 40 years, working with the folks who are engaging with building document repositories and connecting them to humans. 

    Howard: Let’s start with employees. Back, earlier I had said, I asked the employees, some engineers to take down some of these features that we’ve built over the past three years and they did it over a weekend. That’s ’cause they really rallied around the mission. 

    They’re passionate about what we do and keeping people focused on our mission really is a North Star, is centering and motivates people. And Ancestry is also one of those sort of big small companies where product manager, an [00:19:00] engineer, customer service representative, can do something, could create a new feature that’s live on the site relatively quickly. More than most companies, our employees are touching our customers frequently. So we have eliminated some management layers to do more of that, to bring our employees closer to management, closer to me. And closer to our customers and on our customer side, family history is something that people get passionate about. I’m sure your dad did it for many years. It’s like gardening. It’s a hobby you pick up and don’t put down. And so long as we are keeping up our end of the bargain — innovating, bringing more content, improving the core functionality — customers are gonna keep subscribing.  

    Maureen: That passion for family history: that rolls through our society, creates a web of connection that we wouldn’t have otherwise had. Is that part of your, why you do [00:20:00] this? 

    Howard: Part of my why: if you know that your parents survived, the Depression, lived through World War II, served in Vietnam — whatever their hurdle was, they got through it. And so when kids realize, “Gosh, they had a tough time, they got through it.” 

    It helps them get through whatever struggle they’re going through. There is meaning beyond just preserving the stories that drives me, that drives the company. 

    Maureen: How do we help them better understand that they come from sturdy people? 

    Howard: I grew up with a grandmother who was very quiet and she was a Holocaust survivor, and that’s all I knew and she didn’t talk about it. But think of a relatively petite, quiet woman with a Eastern European accent. So fast forward, I joined Ancestry and I’ve always wanted to learn more about who she was, where she came from, what was her [00:21:00] story. And part of what we do at Ancestry is digitize at-risk records or records that wouldn’t be otherwise digitized, and we make them available for free. So we digitized Holocaust records. 

    Spending millions of dollars, digitizing lists of prisoners that were in the Holocaust and survived the Holocaust and give it back to a museum so they could show it to their constituents. So I actually found the prison roster from Auschwitz where my grandmother 

    Maureen: Wow. 

    Howard: I found a letter showing that there were experiments done on her. I found the letter of when she was put into a ghetto, put into a camp, put into forced labor. And then I found out that she was actually previously married, before the war. Her husband was murdered in the war. She didn’t know that. She spent years looking for him. 

    And then she left Europe and moved to the US. She actually [00:22:00] somehow, I dunno the answer to this. She moved all the way to LA; so here’s a petite woman. Knows nobody in the US, doesn’t speak the language. Lands in New York, gets to LA, back to New York, gets reparations from the German government at some point. 

    Marries my grandfather, was my grandfather’s second marriage as well, but the only grandmother that I had known, and I knew none of this 

    Maureen: Wow. 

    Howard: and talk about a survival story. And so now that story is preserved. I tell it to my family, I tell it to my kids. You know that’s meaningful. 

    Maureen: As you say that, it’s just makes me want to cry. Having spent time with Holocaust survivors to understand what they experienced. It’s so different from our lives and the things that we are distressed by. 

    Howard: Exactly that and knowing those stories and passing them down does make you stronger. 

    Maureen: And [00:23:00] also hopefully we learn to not repeat the most horrendous of human. Cruelty. 

    Howard: Yes, indeed. I. 

    Maureen: So let’s shift gears again. Let’s go to looking ahead, what innovations are most exciting to you? You are relatively new as a CEO, so what is on the roadmap for you? What will we say about you in some number of years? 

    Howard: Yeah. So yes, new as CEO took over just over a year ago but not new to Ancestry. I’ve been in ancestry 17 years I think it’d be understatement to say I hit the ground running. Meaning I had vision, a point of view, mission statement for where we want to take the company. So we’ve been moving fast and we’re just gonna move faster. I gave you a little flavor in the mission statement about family stories, but that’s the direction. And so [00:24:00] AI is amazing and what it can unlock in terms of storytelling. I’ll give you an example of these Revolutionary War pension files. So it’s pensions from those soldiers that served in the Revolutionary War. So we digitized this 20 years ago, just a couple of weeks ago in advance of a big genealogy conference. We re digitized it using AI. Imagine it looked like, a record from 250 years ago, handwritten script with a quill and 

    Maureen: Wow. 

    Howard: and hard to read and just, you could digitize maybe one name. AI just read all of it, right? And so now we ten-Xed the number of names and now all of a sudden you’re finding out not just the primary soldier, but any witness. Those names are also found. The widow. Widower. All these names are now discoverable, searchable in this file. And the next step is to take this file, which can be 10, 12 pages long, and turn it into a story.[00:25:00]  

    ‘Cause in there are all the battles, everything that the soldier witnessed, what they did, whether they were wounded. I just read one, the soldier was shot in the head. Disfigured, but survived and lived into his eighties.  

    Maureen: Wow.  

    Howard: Really neat stories. And so you could see a world where AI’s first gonna find this record that was never discoverable, then turn it into a story today. 

    That’s an audio story in the future. That could be a really emotional video story. Maybe there’s a photograph, he could, weave in what we know, what the uniforms looked like back then. Maybe we knew where they lived and they could trace the land over time, the house over time. So we’re gonna turn it into a storytelling product that people wanna use and share. 

    Maureen: How do you prepare your teams, the humans, build the culture and navigate the technology?  

    Howard: We take a step back and start again with the customer. Our customers [00:26:00] aren’t subscribing to Ancestry for AI or for technology or for certain… they’re subscribing is they want a really neat story and they wanna learn about their family history. And so starting with a product vision, and the technology is behind the scenes, making all of that come to life. So technology, AI, is in service of the customer experience. We don’t want it to be the other way around where we’re showing 

    Maureen: Yeah. 

    Howard: Hey, here’s some really, neat technology. Come check it out. That’s not the way we’re orienting. It’s the 

    Maureen: Yeah. 

    Howard: where customer first customer serves it. So one of the things we did after the mission, we did our culture statement, which we just didn’t have one. So passion for the customer. And then the next couple of words are curiosity, candor candor, and collaboration. We want people to be very candid with each other, we do 360 feedbacks on each other. 

    I did mine and published mine with my entire staff, so fully transparent. But to [00:27:00] instill this culture of transparency, and again, if people could ask questions and be candid with each other, I was totally candid with my goals with my feedback. That included feedback from the board. And again, driving the right culture that is looking to innovate around the culture, that is looking to be collaborative, and that is looking to be curious, meaning ask lots of questions. What do customers want? What are they looking for? What can we actually provide is how we’re building the right platforms. 

    Maureen: Thank you for sharing the personal example, ’cause lots of leaders say, I want you to be transparent. But there isn’t the, “I want me to be transparent” part; it– it’s “The rest of you people can do a 360 and share with me. ” So modeling that as the top of the house sets a very different tone than “I’m gonna pick my leaders who are struggling, do a 360 and have them report it to me.”  

    Howard: Well, first [00:28:00] all of us: everybody in the C-Suite did it. Which has been very helpful. ’cause then people understand why I’m focused on improving certain areas. It’s made my life easier. 

    I think it’s made the company better. It’s certainly made running the company better. 

    Maureen: So it sounds like you’re also very data focused. How do you use data to drive improving the culture, improving the products?  

    Howard: Yeah, so we do employee surveys, we do customer surveys all the time, and we track in customer engagement with a variety of metrics. And I have these dashboards that I look at every Monday that sort of tracks how customers are engaging with the site. But listen, it’s really, it’s two things. It’s not just the data. 

    I was just at our largest genealogy conference talking to customers. I get customer calls sent to me, so I have about an hour commute into the office each way, and so I’ll play the customer calls and listen to the customer feedback. And customers have some very basic challenges from [00:29:00] logging into the site to wanting better search. 

    So I’ll listen to these customer calls, which is, sometimes painfully frustrating ’cause you just wanna jump in and help ’em, but you can’t. It’s this recorded phone call. So I’ll listen to customer feedback. But then I’ll, I’ll also look at the data to see how many customers are having that specific problem, how many customers are having a problem logging in, or how many customers are having a problem with search. So it’s those two. And then trying to recognize a pattern among the two, and then bring that to our engineering and product team to improve the experience. We always try and mirror that in with some qualitative direct consumer feedback. 

    Maureen: Yeah. ’cause I can imagine there’s a demographic that’s gonna be more likely to call and there’s a demographic that’s gonna be less likely to call. 

    Howard: And then that, by the way, goes for our employee feedback. We’ll do an employee survey very consistently twice a year. And you have the data score, and then you have qualitative feedback. 

    Maureen: What kind of [00:30:00] behaviors are you looking for from your direct leadership team over the next couple of years? 

    Howard: Focus, focus. I want our leaders to use the product, but stay focused and not get distracted by 10 different growth ideas. Let’s do three ideas and do ’em really well and execute them really well. I have noticed with AI, all of a sudden, everyone has — and I get it, it’s very exciting — loads of ideas on how this could change how we do contracts, how this could change how we do search, digitize material, create new ad campaigns… loads of ideas. I want us to focus and let’s pick a handful of things and do those things well. And after we do those, let’s then expand beyond that and keep, rolling it out. But I don’t want everybody just to roll this through the organization and change the way we’re doing every initiative. 

    Maureen: I hear you, ’cause I’m inflicting pain on all of us trying to do things differently. [00:31:00] So in the spirit of innovating leadership and co-creating our future, what’s one leadership choice you believe senior leaders or boards should make in the next 30 days? And what system or practice must be put in place for that choice to stick? 

    Howard: I, I would actually go back to what I said. I would go back to focus. 

    I think people are losing focus, and staying focused on your mission, staying focused on three specific goals, and then holding yourself accountable, reviewing those every month in a systemized cadence of operational reviews is key. 

    And then you see progress week on week, day on day. And you can knock out one of those goals. And once you knock out one of the three, let’s bring another one in. But focus, focus, focus: So important. Focus in the boardroom, focus on agenda, focus on a few key priorities. That’s what I’m doing this year. That’s what I did last year. 

    Maureen: And it’s obviously delivered really strong results. So if I learn from you, I need to [00:32:00] focus. 

    Howard: Yes. And do some yoga. 

    Maureen: I do a lot of yoga. You can’t imagine what my team would be experiencing if I didn’t do yoga every day. It would be bad. Thank you, Howard, for sharing the depth of personal stories as well as business systems and experiences. How would listeners stay on top of what’s unfolding at Ancestry? 

    Howard: That’s a great question. I would use Ancestry (.com) as the best way. Then you’ll get the full customer experience, including all of our email and site updates, and I’m on LinkedIn, right? I’ll try to offer some insights. I had very memorable posts that people reacted to about my grandmother’s Holocaust story. So sharing these stories is really, personally impactful and meaningful to me. So yeah, follow us on Ancestry (.com). You could catch me on LinkedIn and I’m floating around the universe. 

    Maureen: Beautiful. Thank you. And to our [00:33:00] listeners, thank you for joining us and listening to Howard’s fabulous insights. Please like us, share us, share this podcast and comment on it and join Ancestry. 

    Howard: Thank you. 

    Maureen: Thank you.