ConVEx 2026: Metadata, DITA, AI-readiness, and more
What does the content future actually look like? At ConVEx 2026, our team shared glimpses of the future and practical insights on how to prepare.
What does the content future actually look like? At ConVEx 2026, our team shared glimpses of the future and practical insights on how to prepare.
In this webinar, Emilie Herman, Director of Content Operations at the Financial Accounting Foundation (FAF), shares lessons from her career journey. Through the lens of publishing services and large-scale content workflows, Emilie shows how the shift from manual processes to automation mirrors what’s happening with AI, and how these adaptation techniques apply to your content ops career.
It’s isolating when you feel like it’s all on you to figure out how to reinvent your career. Reach out and talk to people. It’s nice to make a human connection, which is very important to get past AI, but also to look at what other people are doing. Collaborate, talk things through, and acknowledge that everybody’s trying to figure things out. People want to experiment! There’s strength in numbers. If you have a manager, mentor, or someone who can help put you in the room to be part of the discussion, you feel empowered to take control of your destiny.
— Emilie Herman
Content experience matters. We don’t often get a chance to talk openly about our clients and content experience. This time, the good experience came to us AS THE CLIENT, and it was so good that we have to share.
Ready to futureproof your content operations? These upcoming events have the insights you’re looking for!
As AI adoption accelerates, accountability and transparency issues are accumulating quickly. What should organizations be looking for, and what tools keep AI transparent? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe sits down with Nathan Gilmour, the Chief Technical Officer of Writemore AI, to discuss a new approach to AI and accountability.
Sarah O’Keefe: Okay. I’m not going to ask you why this is the only AI tool I’ve heard about that has this type of audit trail, because it seems like a fairly important thing to do.
Nathan Gilmour: It is very important because there are information security policies. AI is this brand-new, shiny, incredibly powerful tool. But in the grand scheme of things, these large language models, the OpenAIs, the Claudes, the Geminis, they’re largely black boxes. We want to bring clarity to these black boxes and make them transparent, because organizations do want to implement AI tools to offer efficiencies or optimizations within their organizations. However, information security policies may not allow it.
Generative AI + lip service to guard rails = instant free content.
The brutal reality is that content is a commodity.
We’re ready to bring you more industry-leading content ops insights in 2026! Check out these upcoming events.
Like every conference in the past few years, AI was a major emphasis at tcworld in mid-November. With around 4,000 attendees and a huge trade show, tcworld is bigger than any of the North American technical documentation events. The program includes sessions in both English and German, and attendees come from all over the world.
At LavaCon 2025, we investigated the impossible dream of customer content, uncovered the potential of structured learning content, and shared solutions to make sure your content doesn’t sleep with the fishes—or the whale sharks.
We have several industry-leading sessions lined up for the rest of 2025. Learn about our upcoming events in this blog post.
For a few months, I’ve been hearing rumors that Zoomin would be discontinued after its purchase by Salesforce.
We have several great events lined up for the summer of 2025. Here’s where you can see Scriptorium in action.
Reeling from a one-two punch of scattered and inaccessible content? Ready to transform chaotic content into a seamless user experience? I trained a scattered group of content using a combo of robust metadata and content filtering to publish player-specific rules guides. Get in the ring and find out how you can apply these lessons to your own content processes.
Did you miss a podcast, blog post, or webinar? We get it–there’s too much content and not enough time, but we’ve got you covered. Here’s a collection of our biggest topics from this year.
In episode 178 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Christine Cuellar perform a pulse check on the state of AI as of December 2024. They discuss unresolved complex content problems and share key considerations for entering 2025 and beyond.
The truth that we’re finding our way towards appears to be that you can use AI as a tool and it is very, very good at patterns and synthesis and condensing content. And it is very, very bad at creating useful, accurate, net new content. That appears to be the bottom line as we exit 2024.
— Sarah O’Keefe
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.
LavaCon 2024 delivered actionable insights, emphasizing that your business case for content operations requires strong alignment with business goals. Successful content modernization hinges on executive support, effective change management, and a wary eye on AI.
Is it really possible to configure enterprise content—technical, support, learning & training, marketing, and more—to create a seamless experience for your end users? In episode 177 of the Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow discuss the reality of enterprise content operations: do they truly exist in the current content landscape? What obstacles hold the industry back? How can organizations move forward?
Sarah: You’ve got to get your terminology and your taxonomy in alignment. Most of the industry I am confident in saying have gone with option D, which is give up. “We have silos. Our silos are great. We’re going to be in our silos, and I don’t like those people over in learning content anyway. I don’t like those people in techcomm anyway. They’re weird. They’re focused on the wrong things,” says everybody, and so they’re just not doing it. I think that does a great disservice to the end users, but that’s the reality of where most people are right now.
Bill: Right, because the end user is left holding the bag trying to find information using terminology from one set of content and not finding it in another and just having a completely different experience.
In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, industry experts Sarah O’Keefe and Carrie Hane explore the intersection of structured content and artificial intelligence. Discover how structured content improves the reliability and performance of AI systems by increasing accuracy, reducing hallucinations, and supporting efficient content management.
In this webinar, attendees will learn:
Are you looking for real-world examples of enterprise content operations in action? Join Sarah O’Keefe and special guest Adam Newton, Senior Director of Globalization, Product Documentation, & Business Process Automation at NetApp for episode 175 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast. Hear insights from NetApp’s journey to enterprise-level publishing, lessons learned from leading-edge GenAI tool development, and more.
We have writers in our authoring environment who are not writers by nature or bias. They’re subject matter experts. And they’re in our system and generating content. That was about joining us in our environment, reap the benefits of multi-language output, reap the benefits of fast updates, reap the benefits of being able to deliver a web-like experience as opposed to a PDF. But what I think we’ve found now is that this is a data project. This generative AI assistant has changed my thinking about what my team does. Yes, on one level, we have a team of writers devoted to producing the docs. But in another way, you can look at it and say, well, we’re a data engine.
— Adam Newton
Whether you want to connect in person or online, you can see Scriptorium at these upcoming conferences and webinars.
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.
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.