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Structured content
From ad hoc to autonomous: The AI content ops maturity model
There are five levels of maturity for AI-driven content operations. Which level are you in? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow walk through the AI content ops maturity model, from ad hoc experimentation to fully autonomous workflows.
Sarah O’Keefe: We want this automation, right? We want the ability to go in and extract release notes and do something with them. We have to have a certain level of maturity on the software development process so that we can grab the appropriate information. The same thing is true on the content side. You have to have a certain level of maturity in your content development processes, in your content management, so that you can identify the right things to process and the right things to access.
How to survive the four horsemen of the AIpocalypse (webinar)
Confront the chaos that generative AI can unleash on your content and discover how to regain control. In this practical session, Torsten Machert (Congree Language Technologies) and Sarah O’Keefe (Scriptorium Publishing) revealed the four biggest threats that undermine quality when you rely on GenAI for content creation.
Sarah O’Keefe: It is way, way cheaper to build out the maturity of your content, to do the terminology work, to do the structure work, to do the metadata work, label everything, give it categories, give it classifications ahead of time than it is to try and remediate the content after the fact, after it’s been processed, after it’s been ingested into the AI and then spit back out. My fear right now is that we’re seeing a lot of, “Ingest everything, spit it back out, then consider how to fix it.”
Conversational AI: The cost of ignoring structured content (webinar)
Conversational AI is everywhere, but reliable AI responses depend on reliable content. So, how do you ensure your content is reliable? In this webinar, guest Rahel Bailie, Content Solutions Strategist at Content Seriously, and host Sarah O’Keefe, Founder & CEO of Scriptorium, examined how the intersection of structured content and conversational AI has evolved. They also share practical next steps that organizations can take to create a successful AI content strategy.
Rahel Bailie: How do you know your content is ready for AI? The level 1 test is, “Is the AI agent working well?” If it’s working well, then you go to, “Why isn’t it getting the right answer?” Then, you go to the content. The content can be good or bad and can be measured in a couple of ways. Is the source content marked up well? Does it have the right semantics on it? Does it have the right metadata? Do you have a knowledge graph in the background that’s making these relationships, so that the AI can pull out the right content?
Taming AI: Using AI for content conversion at scale
AI promises to transform content conversion, but what does it actually look like when you’re processing thousands of documents a day? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe (Scriptorium) and Rich Dominelli (DCL) dig into the real-world challenges of using AI for large-scale structured content conversion.
Rich Dominelli: If you have millions of articles and you’re asking the AI, ‘What did we do for this project six months ago?” The AI has to find those articles, pull the relevant information out of those articles, summarize it, and hand it back to you. The best way of doing that is to give extra signals to the AI, structured relevant bits of information, front matter, back matter, publication date, keywords, abstract, that allows the AI to query the corpus and get the relevant chunks out of that corpus in a very quick manner. Then, it can summarize what those chunks are. So the AI almost becomes the user interface over that corpus. But to find that data in the first place, structured content is key. Structured content is key when you’re dealing with big indexes and the web, and it’s the same with AI.
Make the move successful: Replatforming content ops
Replatforming your content operations isn’t just about swapping systems. In this episode, Alan Pringle and Bill Swallow share what organizations must consider to successfully replatform. From navigating technical debt, system integration, and the people caught in the middle, they discuss change management, technical debt, and why your exit strategy should be part of the plan from day one.
Software isn’t forever. Systems come, systems go, they get improved. Your requirements are ever changing with the content that you need to manage. Not thinking about your next jump is really to your detriment.
— Bill Swallow
Good content = good AI: The fundamentals that never change
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.
Futureproofing content ops: Career growth, structured content, and AI risk
Ready to futureproof your content operations? These upcoming events have the insights you’re looking for!
Check in on AI: The true measure of success for AI initiatives
In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle explore how AI transforms content delivery from static documents into dynamic, consumer-driven experiences. However, the need for human-led governance is critical, and Sarah and Alan explore issues of accuracy, accountability, governance, and more. They challenge organizations to define AI success by its ability to deliver accurate, high-impact outcomes for the end user.
Sarah O’Keefe: The metrics that are being used to measure the success of AI are all wrong. We should be measuring the success of various AI efforts based on, “Are people getting what they need? Are they having a successful outcome with whatever it is that they’re trying to do?” The metric we actually seem to be using is, “What percentage of your workflow is using AI? How many people can we get rid of because we’re automating everything with AI?” It’s the wrong metric. The question is, how good are the outcomes?
Structured content: a backbone for AI success
When we first shared PDF files online instead of printing them decades ago, did accuracy in those PDF files improve with the shift from print to digital? And when we later published that same content as web pages, did old information become current because of the shiny new delivery format?
Business case/ROI
Learning content
Localization
Personalization
Replatforming
Structured content
Structured learning content
Cases for structured content: Accelerate global delivery and transform user experiences
Ready to see the business advantages of structured content in action? These case studies show how moving to structured content can reduce time-to-market, enable accelerated global content delivery, and deliver personalized outputs that improve user experiences.
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.
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.)
Every click counts: Uncovering the business value of your product content
Every time someone views your product content, it’s a purposeful engagement with direct business value. Are you making the most of that interaction? In this episode of the Content Operations podcast, special guest Patrick Bosek, co-founder and CEO of Heretto, and Sarah O’Keefe, founder and CEO of Scriptorium, explore how your techcomm traffic reduces support costs, improves customer retention, and creates a cohesive user experience.
Patrick Bosek: Nobody reads a page in your documentation site for no reason. Everybody that is there has a purpose, and that purpose always has an economic impact on your business. People who are on the documentation site are not using your support, which means they’re saving you a ton of money. It means that they’re learning about your product, either because they’ve just purchased it and they want to utilize it, so they’re onboarding, and we all know that utilization turns into retention and retention is good because people who retain pay us more money, or they’re trying to figure out how to use other aspects of the system and get more value out of it. There’s nobody who goes to a doc site who’s like, “I’m bored. I’m just going to go and see what’s on the doc site today.” Every person, every session on your documentation site is there with a purpose, and it’s a purpose that matters to your business.
The Sky is Falling—But Your Content is Fine, featuring Jack Molisani
Every few years, a new publishing trend sends leadership into a frenzy:
- “We need micro content for smartwatches!”
- “Everything must go into chatbots!
- “Get ready for VR and the Metaverse!”
- “AI will replace our content team!”
Sound familiar?
In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series, host Sarah O’Keefe and guest Jack Molisani explored how structured content will futureproof your content operations no matter what tech trends come along. Learn how to prepare content once and publish everywhere, from toasters to chatbots to jumbotrons and beyond.
Help or hype? AI in learning content
Is AI really ready to generate your training materials? In this episode, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle tackle the trends around AI in learning content. They explore where generative AI adds value—like creating assessments and streamlining translation—and where it falls short. If you’re exploring how AI can fit into your learning content strategy, this episode is for you.
Sarah O’Keefe: But what’s actually being said is AI will generate your presentation for you. If your presentation is so not new, if the information in it is so basic that generative AI can successfully generate your presentation for you, that implies to me that you don’t have anything interesting to say. So then, we get to this question of how do we use AI in learning content to make good choices, to make better learning content? How do we advance the cause?
Overview of structured learning content
Structured content separates content from formatting and enforces consistency, which makes it easier to deliver in multiple channels (elearning and classroom materials), scale up content delivery (delivering variants for different audiences), automate content, leverage AI for productivity, and localize the content for global markets.
Kickstart your enterprise content strategy with principal advisory sessions
Struggling with enterprise content strategy? Our principal advisory sessions will get you on track.
How Humans Drive ContentOps (webinar)
Discover how human dynamics shape content operations in the next episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps webinar series! Host Sarah O’Keefe interviews Kristina Halvorson, the Founder and CEO of Brain Traffic, Button Events, and an experienced content strategist. From repairing cross-silo tensions to identifying intrinsic motivations, this webinar explores strategies for navigating the human side of content operations.
In this webinar, viewers learn how to:
- Address personalities, ambitions, and company culture
- Balance legacy knowledge as currency
- Foster effective collaboration
Content management
Content reuse
DITA
Learning content
Personalization
Podcasts
Structured content
Structured learning content
The benefits of structured content for learning & development content
In this episode, Alan Pringle, Bill Swallow, and Christine Cuellar explore how structured learning content supports the learning experience. They also discuss the similarities and differences between structured content for learning content and technical (techcomm) content.
Even if you are significantly reusing your learning content, you’re not just putting the same text everywhere. You can add personalization layers to the content and tailor certain parts of the content that are specific to your audience’s needs. If you were in a copy-and-paste scenario, you’d have to manually update it every single time you want to make a change. That scenario also makes it a lot more difficult to update content as you modify it for specific audiences over time, because you may not find everywhere a piece of information has been used and modified when you need to update it.
— Bill Swallow
Calculate your DITA ROI
Will DITA bring enough value to your content operations to justify the investment costs? Calculate your DITA ROI to decide.
Powering Conversational AI With Structured Content (webinar)
In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, special guest Rahel Bailie, Content Solutions Director of Technically Write IT, and host Sarah O’Keefe, Founder & CEO of Scriptorium, discuss how organizations can leverage the unlikely connection between structured content and conversational AI.
In this webinar, attendees learn:
- What is structured content, and how it fuels reliable conversational AI responses
- How technical writers and conversation designers can collaborate for optimal output
- Where to get started with structured content and conversational AI
DITA and learning content
One of our 2024 trends was an increased interest in structured content for learning—classroom training materials, e-learning, and more—and even DITA-based learning content.
With this in mind, we have some new initiatives for 2025.
