Good content = good AI: The fundamentals that never change

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Good content fundamentals have been the foundation of effective product content for decades, and those same principles are exactly what make content AI-ready today. In this episode, Bill Swallow and Alan Pringle explain how attending to your hierarchy of content needs is the key to AI success.

Alan Pringle: Right now, AI is not going to fix bad content problems. It is going to regurgitate that bad information, giving your end users information that’s flat out wrong. If your content at the basic source level is wrong, your AI by extension is going to be wrong. And that is the unglossy, unvarnished, hard truth that is still, I don’t think, seeping in like it should across the corporate world.

Bill Swallow: It really does come back to the fact that, despite the world changing on a day-to-day basis, the fundamentals have not changed.

Related links:

• A hierarchy of content needs
• Technical Writing 101, 3rd edition
• Structured content: a backbone for AI success

LinkedIn:

• Alan Pringle
• Bill Swallow

Transcript:

This is a machine-generated transcript with edits.

Introduction with ambient background music

Christine Cuellar: From Scriptorium, this is Content Operations, a show that delivers industry-leading insights for global organizations.

Bill Swallow: In the end, you have a unified experience so that people aren’t relearning how to engage with your content in every context you produce it.

Sarah O’Keefe: Change is perceived as being risky; you have to convince me that making the change is less risky than not making the change.

Alan Pringle: And at some point, you are going to have tools, technology, and processes that no longer support your needs, so if you think about that ahead of time, you’re going to be much better off.

End of introduction

Bill Swallow: Hi, I’m Bill Swallow.

Alan Pringle: And I’m Alan Pringle.

BS: And in this episode, surprise surprise, we’re going to talk about content.

AP: Really? Who would have thought?

BS: But more specifically, what good content means today. Today, everything is all about AI. There is lots of change in progress with regard to AI tooling and content delivery with AI. But have the needs for content really changed? And I would say that off the bat, if you’re doing content right, you really don’t have to reinvent the wheel to make it AI acceptable.

AP: No, in this crazy AI-hyped world we’re in, there’s some very basic foundational things that tend to get overlooked because they’re not sexy, and they’re not special and hot and whatever else. All that kind of marketing garbage that just sets me on complete edge and makes me want to say profane things in podcasts. 

The bottom line is, there are things that the content world, and especially our little subdomain of it, product content world, has been doing for decades now. And I mean decades. 

BS: Or should have been doing.

AP: Correct. There are basic tenants that have been in place for decades. That if you’re following them, you are starting down the road of success with AI. I think to kind of prove our point, we’re going to step back and look at some of the things that Scriptorium has talked about and written in the past and see how it stacks up. And Bill, you found one. And let’s talk about that blog post that Sarah O’Keefe wrote. What was the date on that again?

BS: It was 2014. And that is when we came up with the hierarchy of content needs. And it really wasn’t so much an invention as it was just a regurgitation of what it means to create good content. So we have a pyramid of content needs. At the bottom, we have available. So is content available? Does it exist? Can someone get to it? I think that we’ve mostly solved that problem given the dearth of information we have out on the internet. But as we know, that information is not always useful. So we go up a rung or a layer on that pyramid and see whether or not the content is accurate.

And if it’s accurate, if it provides the correct information, that’s fantastic. Then we go up another level and see whether or not the content is actually appropriate. So it can be correct. It can exist. But is it appropriate? Does it meet a reader’s needs? And is it formatted in a way that works for the reader to ingest?

Then we go up a step further and see whether or not the content is connected. And this is where we kind of get to the more modern aspect of content. Does it link out to correct additional resources? Is it available to people in a variety of means? And does it engage with the audience?

And then finally, at the top of the pyramid, we have intelligent content. Is the content intelligent? And we’re not talking about AI here at all, but we are really talking about is the content fashioned in a way that it can be used intelligently across different media?

AP: That it can be manipulated for different purposes. And that is quoting Sarah directly. And I think that is key here, because that is what AI does. It takes information and basically chops, slices, dices it, and provides it in a new way via a chatbot, for example.

So that is that whole manipulation that Sarah is talking about. And we will post a link to the post in the show notes so you can read this at a greater detail to see how well this hierarchy of content needs has stood up. And she even talks about, for example, integrating database content, how you can pull in other information product specifications.

If you think about it from an AI lens, I think that parallels pretty closely to the idea of retrieval augmented generation, where you are pulling content from other sources and kind of weaving it in with what an AI engine is providing you. So RAG is, I think, could be kind of interpreted as another way of integrating other information into the way that AI is processing that content.

BS: Right, mean, because AI, I mean, it’s not really an audience, but it is a delivery point. There are some structural needs that need to happen there. But ultimately, you’re still writing for people. You might be writing in a way that it allows the AI to repurpose and refactor the information so that the audience gets exactly what they’re looking for. But it still needs to be somewhat tailored to the needs of people because AI in itself, it doesn’t care what the content is, but it’s going to try to produce something for an eventual person to be able to read.

AP: I think that then in turn points to something else in our vast compendium of Scriptorium content. And that is a book that Sarah and I wrote, the first edition in 2000, which just kind of makes me shake my head. I know this is not a video podcast yet, but I’m shaking my head in disbelief. The book, Technical Writing 101, has three editions, published between 2000 and 2009. We will put a link in the show notes. You can still download the third edition. And by the way, it’s free. You can get a PDF or EPUB. It’s free. You can get it from our store with some more recent resources from the store. 

But to me, I flipped through that book this morning. And I was genuinely surprised at how much of the advice on how to create good product content still is true in this AI era. Everything of talking about modular, writing things in a modular way, being very systematic and structuring things, even if you’re not using a structured authoring tool, use a template, make things very standardized. These are all things that, yes, they make for better, consistent, standard, tech-com, product content for the person reading it. But let’s pretend like AI is the person reading, and I’m doing air quotes here, reading it. It is going to do a better job of understanding, again, I’m sort of personifying here, and I know that’s sort of a no-no.

But if you feed AI, a large language model, content that is very structured, that is very templatized, that is standardized, that is in bite-sized chunks, and also, this is very important, the idea of metadata, which we do talk about in that book briefly. We do talk about it. Because you need to be able to label it for different audiences, because I’m thinking about someone sitting, trying to use a product, trying to use a piece of software, talking to a chatbot. And the chatbot is going to ask it, what product are you using? What’s the model number? All of those kinds of things. And now we’re getting to this whole idea of labeling and breaking things apart so that a chatbot, just like a user of a product.

Let’s say somebody has a printer that’s on the highest end of the scale. They’re going to have a lot more features that apply to their model than to someone who bought a more basic one. But the thing is, if your product content has not clearly labeled what are features in each of the models, the chatbot is going to spit out the wrong thing. So again, this idea of breaking things up in discrete chunks and labeling them in a way where someone who wants specific information about a specific model, they can get it. And it doesn’t matter if it’s from a web page, it’s from a PDF, a printed book, God forbid in 2026, or from an AI chatbot. Those rules still apply. Those fundamental principles are still there.

BS: Mm-hmm.

AP: I think one of the biggest problems here is when people do not have those fundamentals already in place, right?

BS: If they don’t have those fundamentals in place, they can’t get to the top of that pyramid that Sarah was talking about. And really those fundamentals are those first three layers. Content is available, content is accurate and content is appropriate. If you can actually nail those three layers of the hierarchy of content needs, you are set to then jump to connected and intelligent fairly quickly because your content is already well written, standardized, and appropriate for different audiences.

AP: So we’re right back to talking about the way you put content together, your content operations, and how you have to have these fundamental principles basically embedded in your processes to create that content that goes up all the way up to the hierarchy, the very top of the hierarchy of need pyramid. 

So then that begs the question, what is going to happen to your AI if you don’t have those fundamentals in place, if you aren’t all the way up that hierarchy of content needs? I’m afraid to tell you your AI is going to fail. And this is something that I’ve said often, but it bears repeating because it is clear. Unfortunately, a lot of people high up the corporate food chain do not understand this. 

Merely slapping AI on top of content that is fundamentally outdated and incorrect. Right now, it is not going to fix those problems. It is not magically going to fix them because what is AI going to do? It is going to regurgitate that bad information, acting like it’s knowing what it’s talking about until your end users very definitively that you need to do this to make this happen and it’s flat out wrong. And again, right now, AI is not going to be able to fix that right now. One day it may be able to, but right now, if your information, your content at the basic source level is wrong, your AI by extension, is going to be wrong. And that is the unglossy, unvarnished, hard truth that is still, I don’t think, seeping in like it should across the corporate world.

BS: It really does come back to the fact that, despite the world changing on a day-to-day basis, the fundamentals have not changed. Nothing is new.

AP: No, no. And if you have an AI initiative and you are part of the content world and your content operations aren’t up to snuff, this is a way to get funding to get your content operations up into the 21st century. And I don’t want to say that as and sound glib and dismissive, but by the same token, I know for a fact there are a lot of companies out there who are still serving up their content locked up in PDFs that may be online. That is not going to fly. That does not follow. It doesn’t go high up the hierarchy of content needs, if you want to look at it from that perspective. So it is time to break free of this idea of you present content in a particular way.

And you have to look at content as something that is basically, it’s a commodity, it’s data that AI is going to manipulate and do whatever to to meet the needs and the wants of the people who are using the chat bots and other agents that are accessing that large language model.

BS: And I think that’s a good place to leave it. Thanks, Alan.

AP: Thanks, Bill, short and sweet, but needed to be said.

Conclusion with ambient background music

CC: Thank you for listening to Content Operations by Scriptorium. For more information, visit Scriptorium.com or check the show notes for relevant links.