Sarah O’Keefe: AI in Technical Communication and Content Strategy – Episode 4

Sarah O'Keefe The arrival of AI affects every area and aspect of content practice. In the technical documentation field, Sarah O'Keefe sees three immediate impacts on the work she does for her clients: how AI agents can support technical documentation workflows, the ability to create content with generative AI, and the ways that AI is changing the delivery of technical content And wherever she looks in the content and AI landscape, she sees the need for governance guardrails and strategic thinking. We talked about: her work at Scriptorium, which focuses on scalable, efficient technical documentation her take on the current impact of AI on technical content the unique concerns about generative AI that arise in the technical communication world how chat-based user interfaces will change the delivery of technical content how users will always hack systems to use them as they wish the looming role of trust and reputation as important factors in online interactions how techniques like RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) can help LLM-based applications deliver better results the importance of thinking about the content life cycle as you assimilate and integrate AI into your practices and workflows a very simple AI-risk-analysis heuristic open questions - many of them complex and non-obvious - around copyright issues in the AI world Sarah's bio CEO Sarah O’Keefe founded Scriptorium Publishing to work at the intersection of content, technology, and publishing. Today, she leads an organization known for expertise in solving business-critical content problems with a special focus on product and technical content. Sarah identifies and assesses new trends and their effects on the industry. Her analysis is widely followed on Scriptorium’s blog and in other publications. As an experienced public speaker, she is in demand at conferences worldwide. In 2016, MindTouch named her as an “unparalleled” content strategy influencer. Sarah holds a BA from Duke University and is bilingual in English and German. Connect with Sarah online LinkedIn info at scriptorium dot com Video Here’s the video version of our conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOfdOSD8C1A Podcast intro transcript This is the Content and AI podcast, episode number 4. The arrival of generative AI, large language models, and other AI technologies obviously affects us all. In the world of technical documentation, Sarah O'Keefe sees three immediate impacts on the work she does for her clients: how AI agents can support technical documentation workflows, the ability to create content with generative AI, and the ways that AI is changing the delivery of technical content - and across them all, the need for guardrails and strategic thinking. Interview transcript Larry: Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number four of the Content + AI podcast. I'm really happy today to welcome to the show Sarah O'Keefe. Sarah is the CEO and founder at Scriptorium, which is a company that does technical communication and documentation stuff. Sarah, tell the folks a little bit more about your work there at Scriptorium. Sarah: We're interested in the question of how do you apply systems and technology to what we call enabling content, which is technical product learning, knowledge base, all of the things that are content that enables you having purchased a product or service to actually successfully use that product or service. And we do a ton of work around content management systems, translation management systems, and basically helping companies scale their content operations into something that works. Right? Because typically, somebody shows up on our doorstep and says, "Well, we're doing it this way and we've been doing it this way forever, but this way isn't working anymore. We acquired a couple of companies. We got a lot bigger. We're doing more and more localization and we're just drowning in cont...