The following has been edited for clarity and length. Listen to/watch the full interview on the Interviewist YouTube channel.

Sarah: How are you involved with interviewing these days?

Alix: At Mythic, I help spearhead the demand generation function within our agency. That includes developing a lot of thought leadership content.

The agency world is hustling and bustling, so our subject matter experts don't really have time to write thought leadership content. So I’m interviewing those subject matter experts and ghostwriting content for them to bolster our agency capabilities and demonstrate our expertise in different areas.

What’s your interviewing superpower?

This is maybe a personality thing for me, but I tend to inject humor into the interview process because I think humor can really make you feel a little bit more relatable to the person you're interviewing. 

Obviously, humor isn't everyone's cup of tea. But generally, it makes people feel a little more comfortable, a little more disarmed. Because interviews can be very intimidating, especially if it's your first time being interviewed. So if you inject a little humor, you're saying, this is a comfortable setting.

You have a background in broadcast journalism. Do you feel like it impacts how you interview today?

Definitely. One thing that I took away from journalism is coming into the interview and setting expectations before you turn on the camera or before you start recording or asking questions—not just jumping straight into the interview. Giving people context and having a conversation makes people feel as comfortable as possible before you actually start hitting them with the hard-hitting questions. 

As you mentioned, executives’ time—especially for thought leadership— is usually very limited. How do you prep to get the most out of your interviews with busy execs? 

I start with research to make sure my questions are very tight and pointed. From there, I like to send the questions ahead of time. For journalism, maybe that wouldn't be a best practice. But for this type of interviewing, having them know exactly what's coming their way so they can be prepared is always helpful.

Then I usually start off the conversation by giving them more context about what the post will look like, the process I'll go through to make sure they’re happy with the post before it even goes out to anyone else in the agency.

AI—we’re all talking about it. How are you using AI in the interviewing process?

For our editorial content process, we'll have a general idea of a headline for a thought leadership topic. I'll write a concept write-up to say, “Okay, this is exactly what we want this thought leadership piece to cover.” I'll go into ChatGPT, I'll copy/paste the prompt and say, “Hey, can you give me X number of questions based on this prompt?” And use that as a starting point for my interview questions.

I use Mintel, which is a paid research platform. They have an AI function called Leap, and it can help you do background research and provide consumer insights. So if I need background information for articles or even to inform questions, I can go to Leap and dig up information quickly.  

So you get this preliminary list of questions from ChatGPT. What happens next? 

I'm definitely reordering questions to have the best flow for the interview, and tweaking, and adding questions that I think will be good follow-ups to those questions.

ChatGPT can provide a decent outline, but once you're in the interview, depending on what people say, you may have follow-up questions. Their interview may take you down a totally different path. And sometimes it's worth going down that path—it might spark a new thought leadership content idea, or it might inform another part of the article, or it might take you down a path that you weren't expecting.

Do you use any AI tools post-interview? 

Yes, I use Otter.ai religiously. It isn’t always completely accurate. But the fact that it has that playback tool, so you can actually hear what the person said and make sure that the quote is correct—that helps me a lot, especially if I'm going for direct quotes. I want to make sure I've got exactly what the person said, and it just speeds up the process so much.

Do you foresee a future where AI is conducting interviews?

And also, like we said, being able to disarm people and make them feel comfortable—I can't imagine AI in that way.

Do you have a most memorable interview? 

Anytime I interview someone super passionate about what they do—those interviews stand out the most. At NOAA, I got to interview a ton of scientists. I interviewed someone working with the Coral Reef Alliance, and he was super, super passionate about what he did. It makes you want to learn more after the interview. It makes the research and the writing process more fun.

Do you have any interviewing inspirations, muses, role models?

Gosh, I love Oprah. She is the queen of interviewing. If you don't answer Oprah's question, she's going to ask you several times more—but in the nicest way, with a smile on her face. She just has a way of getting information out of people and making them feel so at ease. I would love to be the type of interviewer.

Do you think Oprah would use ChatGPT for interviews?

I think Oprah's producers probably do, but I think Oprah is just going with the flow.

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