Happy holidays from Scriptorium! Featured guests, DITA training, and beyond
Thanks for joining us this year! Through webinars, podcasts, LearningDITA training, and more, we’re grateful to be part of your content ops journey.
Ai
Why Cheap Content Is Expensive and How to Fix It, featuring Dawn Stevens
Will cheap content cost your organization more in the long run? In this webinar, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Dawn Stevens share how poor workflows, inaccurate source data, and the commoditization race can undermine both product quality and brand trust. Sarah and Dawn also discuss why strategic staffing and mature content ops create the foundation your AI initiatives need to deliver reliable content at scale.
Sarah O’Keefe: I write content that’s great for today. Tomorrow, a new development occurs, and my content is now wrong. We’re down the road of “entropy always wins.” We’re heading towards chaos, and if we don’t care for the content, it’ll fall apart. So what does it look like to have a well-functioning organization with an appropriate balance of automation, AI, and staffing?
Dawn Stevens: I think that goes back to the age-old question of, “What are the skills that we really think are valuable?” We have to see technical documentation as part of the product, not just supporting the product. That means that we, as writers, are involved in all of the design. As we design the documentation, we’re helping design the UX.
Futureproof your content ops for the coming knowledge collapse
What happens when AI accelerates faster than your content can keep up? In this podcast, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Michael Iantosca break down the current state of AI in content operations and what it means for documentation teams and executives. Together, they offer a forward-thinking look at how professionals can respond, adapt, and lead in a rapidly shifting landscape.
Sarah O’Keefe: How do you talk to executives about this? How do you find that balance between the promise of what these new tool sets can do for us, what automation looks like, and the risk that is introduced by the limitations of the technology? What’s the roadmap for somebody that’s trying to navigate this with people that are all-in on just getting the AI to do it?
Michael Iantosca: We need to remind them that the current state of AI still carries with it a probabilistic nature. And no matter what we do, unless we add more deterministic structural methods to guardrail it, things are going to be wrong even when all the input is right.
The five stages of content debt
Your organization’s content debt costs more than you think. In this podcast, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Dipo Ajose-Coker unpack the five stages of content debt from denial to action. Sarah and Dipo share how to navigate each stage to position your content—and your AI—for accuracy, scalability, and global growth.
The blame stage: “It’s the tools. It’s the process. It’s the people.” Technical writers hear, “We’re going to put you into this department, and we’ll get this person to manage you with this new agile process,” or, “We’ll make you do things this way.” The finger-pointing begins. Tech teams blame the authors. Authors blame the CMS. Leadership questions the ROI of the entire content operations team. This is often where organizations say, “We’ve got to start making a change.” They’re either going to double down and continue building content debt, or they start looking for a scalable solution.
— Dipo Ajose-Coker
AI and content: Avoiding disaster
As a purveyor of high-stakes technical content, I am watching the rise of AI with alarm. Our interest in automation and new technologies is on a collision course with our mandate to deliver timely, accurate information. I am not the only one who is concerned; many people are writing on this topic. (Here’s a recent post from Michael Iantosca.)
Balancing automation, accuracy, and authenticity: AI in localization
How can global brands use AI in localization without losing accuracy, cultural nuance, and brand integrity? In this podcast, host Bill Swallow and guest Steve Maule explore the opportunities, risks, and evolving roles that AI brings to the localization process.
The most common workflow shift in translation is to start with AI output, then have a human being review some or all of that output. It’s rare that enterprise-level companies want a fully human translation. However, one of the concerns that a lot of enterprises have about using AI is security and confidentiality. We have some customers where it’s written in our contract that we must not use AI as part of the translation process. Now, that could be for specific content types only, but they don’t want to risk personal data being leaked. In general, though, the default service now for what I’d call regular common translation is post editing or human review of AI content. The biggest change is that’s really become the norm.
—Steve Maule, VP of Global Sales at Acclaro
From classrooms to clicks: the future of training content
AI, self-paced courses, and shifting demand for instructor-led classes—what’s next for the future of training content? In this podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Kevin Siegel unpack the challenges, opportunities, and what it takes to adapt.
There’s probably a training company out there that’d be happy to teach me how to use WordPress. I didn’t have the time, I didn’t have the resources, nothing. So I just did it on my own. That’s one example of how you can use AI to replace some training. And when I don’t know how to do something these days, I go right to YouTube and look for a video to teach me how to do it. But given that, there are some industries where you can’t get away with that. Healthcare is an example—you’re not going to learn how to do brain surgery that someone could rely on with AI or through a YouTube video.
— Kevin Siegel
AI in localization: What could possibly go wrong? (podcast)
In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow unpack the promise, pitfalls, and disruptive impact of AI on multilingual content. From pivot languages to content hygiene, they explore what’s next for language service providers and global enterprises alike.
Bill Swallow: I think it goes without saying that there’s going to be disruption again. Every single change, whether it’s in the localization industry or not, has resulted in some type of disruption. Something has changed. I’ll be blunt about it. In some cases, jobs were lost, jobs were replaced, new jobs were created. For LSPs, I think AI is going to, again, be another shift, the same that happened when machine translation came out. LSPs had to shift and pivot how they approach their bottom line with people. GenAI is going to take a lot of the heavy lifting off of the translators, for better or for worse, and it’s going to force a copy edit workflow. I think it’s really going to be a model where people are going to be training and cleaning up after AI.
Ready, set, AI: How to futureproof your content, teams, and tech stack (webinar)
Your customers expect intelligent, AI-powered experiences. Is your content strategy ready for an AI-driven world? After a popular panel at ConVEx San Jose, the team at CIDM brought the conversation online in this webinar.
AI is going to require us to think about our content across the organization, across the silos, because at the end of the day, the AI overlord, the chatbot is out there slurping up all this information and regurgitating it. The chatbot doesn’t care that, for example, I work in group A, Marianne’s in group B, and Dipo’s in group C, and we don’t talk to each other. The chatbot, the world, the consumer, sees us all in the same company. If we’re all part of the same organization, why shouldn’t it be consistent?
— Sarah O’Keefe
Transforming The Future: ContentOps In The Age Of AI (webinar)
In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series, Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler himself, talks about the future of content operations in the age of artificial intelligence. You may know Scott from his work as a consultant, conference presenter, and talk show host, but in this session, we turn the spotlight back on Scott and ask him what HE thinks about the future of content ops.
Viewers will learn how AI is reshaping content operations, including:
- Creating seamless system connectivity
- Transforming content creation, management, and delivery
- Changing how platforms for professional content creators work
AI, replatforming, and penguins?
The tcworld/tekom conference took place in Stuttgart, Germany, from November 5–7. The event is the largest technical communication conference in the world, typically with 2,500–3,500 attendees.
Strategies for AI in technical documentation (podcast, English version)
In episode 169 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Sebastian Göttel of Quanos engage in a captivating conversation on generative AI and its impact on technical documentation. To bring these concepts to life, this English version of the podcast was created with the support of AI transcription and translation tools!
Sarah O’Keefe: So what does AI have to do with poems?
Sebastian Göttel: You often have the impression that AI creates knowledge; that is, creates information out of nothing. And the question is, is that really the case? I think it is quite normal for German scholars to not only look at the text at hand, but also to read between the lines and allow the cultural subtext to flow. From the perspective of scholars of German literature, generative AI actually only interprets or reconstructs information that already exists. Maybe it’s hidden, only implicitly hinted at. But this then becomes visible through the AI.
Strategien für KI in der technischen Dokumentation (podcast, Deutsche version)
Folge 169 ist auf Englisch und Deutsch verfügbar. Da unser Gast Sebastian Göttel sich im deutschsprachigen Raum mit KI beschäftigt, kam die Idee, diesen Podcast auf Deutsch zu erstellen. Die englische Version wurde dann mit KI-Unterstützung zusammengebastelt.
Sarah O’Keefe: Was hat die generative KI mit Gedichtinterpretationen zu tun?
Sebastian Göttel: Ja, nun, also oft hat man da ja den Eindruck, dass KI das Wissen schöpft, also Informationen aus dem Nichts erschafft. Und da ist die Frage, ist das denn wirklich so? Denn für die Germanisten ist es, glaube ich, schon eher normal, nicht nur den vorliegenden Text anzuschauen, sondern auch zwischen den Zeilen zu lesen, den kulturellen Subtext einfließen zu lassen. Und aus dem Blickwinkel der Germanisten, interpretiert oder rekonstruiert generative KI eigentlich nur Informationen, die schon vorhanden ist. Möglicherweise ist die verborgen, nur implizit angedeutet. Aber die wird durch die KI dann sichtbar.
AI
Brand credibility
Business case/ROI
DITA
Industry insights
Personalization
Podcasts
Scalability
Structured content
Self-service content in the age of AI with Patrick Bosek
In episode 165 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and guest Patrick Bosek of Heretto discuss how the role of customer self service is evolving in the age of AI.
I think that this comes back to the same thing that it came back to at every technological shift, which is more about being ready with your content than it is about having your content in the perfect format, system, set of technologies, or whatever it may be. The first thing that I think either of us will say, and a lot of people in the industry will tell you, is that you need to structure your content.
— Patrick Bosek
ConVEx 2024: Advice for AI in content operations
At the 2024 ConVEx conference, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe was part of a panel of content experts including Dawn Stevens, Val Swisher, and Rob Hanna. The panelists discussed the pros, cons, and cautions of using AI in content creation.
AI needs content operations, too (webinar)
In this episode of our Let’s talk ContentOps! webinar series, Scriptorium CEO Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Megan Gilhooly, Sr. Director Self-Help and Content Strategy at Reltio, explore how to successfully integrate AI into your content operations. They discuss how to use AI as a tool, how to create content that an AI can successfully consume, and how the role of the writer will shift in a GenAI world.
In this webinar, you’ll learn
- The role of content in training the AI
- How semantic content drives chatbots
- How AI may change the way you write
- How to adapt in a GenAI world
How machine translation compares to AI
In episode 154 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar discuss the similarities between the industry-disrupting innovations of machine translation and AI, lessons we learned from machine translation that we can apply to AI, and more.
“Regardless of whether you’re talking about machine translation or AI, don’t just run with whatever it provides without giving it a thorough check. The other thing that we’re seeing with AI that wasn’t so much an issue with machine translation is more of a concern around copyright and ownership.”
— Bill Swallow
Applications of AI for knowledge content with guest Stefan Gentz (podcast)
In episode 152 of The Content Strategy Experts Podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Stefan Gentz of Adobe discuss what knowledge content is, what impacts AI may have, and best practices for integrating AI in your content operations.
“As a company and as a content producer who’s publishing content, you are responsible for that content and you cannot rely on an agent to produce completely accurate information or information that is always correct.”
— Stefan Gentz
AI in the content lifecycle
Updated as of June 2025.
We are now in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Everyone is talking about AI and its impact. Scriptorium is focusing on AI’s effect on content operations, and the impact of ChatGPT and other generative AI engines means rethinking the entire content lifecycle.
