Closing Panel Discussion: The Future of Content

 Conference organizer Jack Molisani hosted this closing panel, which included Mel Davis, Patrick Bosek, Noz Urbina, Trey Smith, Sarah O'Keefe, and [name unintelligible].

 Starting short term, what do you think is going to be the focus of content teams over the next 6 months. 

Take 5 things from this conference and you will be further ahead of anyone else. Short term goal is to survive the AI hype and to keep our jobs until the C-level gets a clue. 

Everybody needs foundational content operations. 

One of the biggest problems is that LLMs are not really large language models, but large English models. 

If we are the guardians of the information experience, then we are also guardians of the truth.  

Thoughts on importance of soft skills.

 You're not going to get the recognition you deserve until you tell others what you're doing. 

Others with advanced degrees think that any fool can write. And it's true. Any fool can write--and it shows.  

We don't just write words, We code as efficiently as any engineers. Have to express that in terms that make sense to your audience.  

Content developers stand to be one of the most valuable assets for a business. Otherwise, won't be successful in the deployment of AI technologies.

Future of content is trust and reputation.  

From Chaos to Clarity: Automating the Hidden Costs Out of Content Operations

 Bernard Aschwanden, AEM Guides Technologist, CCMS Kickstart, said he was going to present on the results of some research on content. 

Content chaos includes mixes of formats, no single source of truth, duplicates, conflicting outputs, and content silos. 

Content volume is growing faster than teams can scale.  But it is tough to find good people. 

Why do standard s slip? Style guides and training are tough to scale, manual review of content is unreliable, so hidden costs keep rising.  

Structured automation is the bridge from unstructured docs to validated structured XML/DITA. A CCMS reduces compliance and workforce risks. Structured content is the "what, and CCMS is the "how," all to make it repeatable at scale.  

 People come and go, contractors, come and go. Automation and validation make quality and efficiency permanent. You wan to make sure quality doesn't leave when quality people leave. 

Am I The AI Luddite? Questioning the Use of AI in Content Creation

 Alan Porter, Founder / CCO, The Content Pool started by saying that for 40 years, executives have seen new machines and technologies and asked with them, why do we need so many people. 

Last year, it seemed everyone at LavaCon was drinking from the AI hose. We're going through another technology adoption. But we should not drink from the hose;l we should ask what the impact should be. 

What does your company mean when you say AI? A lot of things have been labeled "AI" that have already existed. Marketing just slapped an "AI label on it. If someone says "AI," ask them exactly what they mean. 

AI is good at analyzing large amounts of data and to see patterns and (in theory) make informed decisions.  

Generative AI is not ready for prime time, in any way, shape, or form.

Do you know how AI works? When you're talking to someone, ask them.  Things like ChatGPT don't solve problems; it's more like a dumb person trying to sound smart. They spit out words based on mathematical percentages rather than cognitive learning, memory, experience, and education. 

If you know that, and accept that, you can work within those limitations. 

ChaptGPT is not a search engine. It just generates statistically likely sentences.  

Executives are asking to find a project to use AI, rather than asking if there is a business problem that AI can help solve.  

 

Tuesday Afternoon Featured Spekers

 Tuesday at LlamaCon ended with three featured speakers in the Grand Ballroom. 

 Jason Kaufman, President & CEO of Zaon Labs, started by talking about "The Curators of Truth: Elevating Knowledge in the Age of AI." He started by saying AI mirrors our content, not our truth. It can confidently repeat misinformation. 

Technical communicators must evolve from content creators to content curators, preserving what's true and removing what's not. We're in the best position to write for AI. We're skeptical. We know how to find facts. Truth curation is our new mission. 

But structure and clarity don't guarantee accuracy. Repetition creates illusion of truth.  

 We have the opportunity to be bold in the things we delete and the things we archive. Intentional archiving clears clutter and reduces AI confusion. Knowledge drift is a real thing. 

Now we write for both humans and machines. Our best practices support that. 

AI can help us validate and audit faster. Curation is now a machine-assisted, not a manual task. 

Human verification is the new gold standard. We must go beyond "published" to "trusted." It's not about being perfect. It's about accountability. There's a huge amount of trust placed on us as content creators to do this for our companies. 

Next was  Wendy Richardson, Former Mastercard Executive and President of Managing Up, talking about "Unlock Funding: How to Persuade Leaders to Invest in your Vision." She said we need funding to keep growing our teams. 

 First strategy called priming. Get a few easy yesses to low-commitment things. 

Next is finding the things that executives want to hear. You have to figure out how to translate what you do. Listen to executives and listen to what is important to them. 

Finally, there's FOMO. Have to be able to translate all the things we're passionate about into what's important to the business. But make sure we talk about to risks of failing to invest in content strategy. 

Wrapping up the day was Dipo Ajose-Coker, Senior Marketing Manager, RWS, who talked about "No One Left Behind: The Business Case for Inclusivity and Inclusive Content." He started asking about what's happening in America and around the world. People are starting to say we've done enough, we're going to pull the ladder up, and leave people behind. 

 Accessibility in information means designing information so everyone can use it. It removes barriers for people with diverse needs. It protects your brand and avoids legal risk. And it builds trust with your audience. 

Inclusivity isn't just accessibility.  Accessibility is compliance. Accessibility builds belonging. Depth over optics. Superficial diversity undermines connections. 

Accessibility answers the question of can I get in. Inclusivity answers the question will I feel welcome once I get in. 

Exclusion happens by accident a lot of the time. Mistakes include untagged PDFs, low contrast, idioms and jargon, "click here" links, and gendered title and acronyms. Moast inclusions aren''t intentional, but are little things that quietly lock people out. 

Exclusion has real costs. Lost customers, lawsuits, PR disasters. Exclusion isn't just unethical, it's expensive.  

No one left behind. Let that be your motto.  

The Four Pillars of Creating Findable and Usable Content

Viqui Dill, Documentation Specialist at Navy Federal Credit Union said this talk came from onboarding employees, when they were getting people not familiar with technical communication principles, such as fiction writing or journalism. They were good writers, but were used to writing differently. This was to help them understand not only what they do, but why they do it. 

Readers aren't paid to learn documentation. They're getting paid to get back to work. 

Thinking about readers, they are "naked and afraid." We're going to help them by using plain, consistent language. We're going to help them by making content findable and discoverable.  

User profiles asks who are our readers. Includes primary, secondary, tertiary readers, and gatekeepers. Primary readers are the action takers. Secondary readers are advisors.  Tertiary readers are people who have interest n the information. 

Consistency helps readers know what to expect.  

A Tale of Ten Productivity Prompts

Gavin Austin, Principal Technical Writer at Salesforce, said this is not going to be a prompt-building workshop. But our teams are using AI tools to save money. Using AI is a creative and collaborative art. 

Was in charge of creating a content strategy platform. Needed to create an executive document in 2 days. Used Gemini and fed it previous documents and asked it to update from that content for new features. And created the document in 3 hours rather than 2 days. 

Another prompt improved UI text review efficiency by 40-60 percent.  

AI Content Strategy: Unifying Enterprise Teams, Redefining Authority

 Jeff Coyle, SVP, Strategy at Siteimprove & MarketMuse, started by saying that content strategy has been uniquely disrupted. AI implemented so far has been too transactional. Need to build and deploy AI agents. 

There's an infinite content tsunami. But it is mediocre. Differentiation--again--is the most valued thing. Differentiation, and authority, and quality, are the differentiators. 

Redefine quality. Quality isn't negotiable. Go beyond keywords. Need good content, and be able to quantify that. Quality is trust, depth, and usefulness. 

In the past, content strategy was publish and pray, hoping for results. Didn't have the data to measure impact. That's changing today, with data-driven metrics and rubrics. Editorial integrity is always part of these rubrics. 

Authority in the AI era is adapt or be invisible. Deep expertise plus disciplined process equals agenda-setting content. Content must provide the best answer and be engineered for relevance. It's about being citation-ready, because anything else is digital invisibility. `

RAGs to Riches: How Our Content Affects Retrieval Augmented Generation

 

Manny Silva, Head of Documentation at Skyflow, started by saying there is a knowledge problem. AI was around long before generative AI, and gen AI tools have significant challenges. As technical communicators, we are uniquely qualified to solve this problem, and RAG is part of that solution.

RAG is retrieval augmented generation.

 Today's language models are incredibly powerful--but also have limitations. LLMs are trained on vast troves of data. This approach has limitations. The training data is inherently outdated, which leads to a knowledge cutoff. When asked about topics outside their training data, LLMs hallucinate. The inherent boas is to provide an answer, any answer, even if they have no data on which to base an answer. It is a horrendous problem. 

Hallucinations are more insidious when they are plausible sounding. They undermine user trust. 

RAG: a technique aiming to solve this problem by providing LLMs with relevant information at runtime. RAG works when a user submits a query, it goes to the retrieval system, which gets relevant documents, sends that to the LLM, which generates a response.  The response includes the relevant data that is provided at runtime. 

A couple of different ways to implement RAG: vector database and knowledge graph. 

Vector-based RAG is most common and easiest to implement.  Allow us to find relevant information from similarity searches. Includes document processing pipeline, vector database, retrieval mechanism, and LLM integration. Similarity search is really fast and low cost. Scales well for large doc sets. But doesn't explicitly understand relationship between contexts and struggles with longform content. Quality of vector-based RAG depends on how well you process your content. 

Disadvantage of a knowledge graph is that they take a lot of time and effort to create. There is additional computational overhead because it is computational AI. This means additional cost, especially at enterprise scale.  

So content best practices. Think about how content will be chunked and retrieved. 

Clear headings are important. Logical organization, whether more or less structured. Summary paragraphs are particularly useful. Consistent formatting across documents. 

 Metadata and tagging are important. May capture information not in actual content. Can often include metadata with each chunk. Think of this as SEO for RAG.

Human and machine needs. Where appropriate, content should be machine readable, such as DITA, XML, etc.  Maintain (and ship) a glossary. 

Building the Case for Content Operations in Complex Organizations

Trey Smith, Sr. Program Supervisor and TechPubs Lead at Honeywell said his theme is around managing change. 

Found that we had the wrong tools for our size. 

When building a business case, establish your win condition, leverage your network, and don't let a good crisis go to waste.  Understand it is a marathon, not a sprint. 

Influencer 101 is network, target your audience, money talks, and fill your skill gaps.  

Tuesday Morning Featured Speakers

 Tuesday is the longest LavaCon day, and it began with a slate of three featured speakers in the Grand Ballroom. 

Rob Hanna, CEO and Co-founder of Precision Content, kicked the day off speaking about "Broken Trust, Broken Docs: Fixing the Hidden Gaps Undermining Your Technical Content." He said that once we break people's trust in content, they won't even bother to look at it anymore. 

The top 8 factors affecting trust: credibility, consistency, clarity, transparency, relevance, accuracy, language proficiency, and presentation. These 8 factors make up your trust quotient on your content. 

 Content needs to get smaller and smarter so we can use it more effectively. Governed by 4 factors, of focus, function, form, and framing. 

Five archetypes for user intent: reference, task, concept, process, and principle. 

Provenance matters in how we deliver content. 

AI-augmented authoring is on =e of the biggest technological advances in the field of technical communication. But what it can't do is tell you what to write, especially when introducing new content.  

AI is simply another channel for your content. It is not the source of truth. Your content is AI infrastructure. If your source isn't trusted, your AI won't be trusted.  

Next was Megan Gilhooly, Sr. Director GRC Content at OneTrust, speaking on "Why Technical Writers Should Care About Governance, Risk, and Compliance (Even if It Sounds Boring)." She started with a story that led to the idea that privacy is no longer the provenance of the rich and famous. 

With the regulations out there, and with AI, we have to build privacy into our solutions. 144 countries have their own privacy laws. GDPR was enacted in 2018. /compliance is a moving target. 

The complexity of complying with these laws provides both a threat and an opportunity. Need to understand the threats to privacy. 

Purpose limitation says that you have to use data only for what users agree to. Right to be forgotten means that you must erase data at a user's request. Transparency means you have to tell users how you will use their data.  

Now add AI to the equations. AI is data hungry. Models do not forget without major business impact. Non-linear models can go any which way.  

Opportunity to be part of the solution, maybe swoop in and save the day.  With really structured content, can help avoid a compliance fire drill. 

 Privacy and the responsible use of data is what builds trust, and trust is everything. 

Finally,  Melinda Belcher, Head of Experience Design at JPMorgan Chase, spoke on "The Experimentation Mindset: How Testing Transforms Content Strategy." She stared by saying that HIPPO, the highest paid person in the room, is vibes, not data. 

The experimentation mindset isn't about being right, it's about being less wrong. Not about greatness, but by making small changes. About making decisions on evidence.  

Words are money They can cost us money, they can make us money. Second most important asset we have, after our product. That's why it's worth testing. 

Failure is part of the process. It gives us useful data.  

 

Monday Afternoon Featured Speakers

 Monday ended with a trio of featured speakers in the Grand Ballroom. 

 Sarah O'Keefe, the CEO of Scriptorium, began by talking about "The Impossible Dream: Unified Authoring for Customer Content." She started by defining enterprise customer content, which is targeted at end users, avoids product liability, increases costumer satisfaction, provides information for buyers, and meets regulatory and compliance requirements. 

The organizational problem: silos, consisting of tech comm, learning, and support.  And the report to different C-level executives. Organizationally, everyone's building their own thing and buying their own tools. And because the silos reflect that structure, you've shipped our org chart, which you should never do. 

Need a comprehensive solution for enterprise customer content. Your customers don't care where your content. They see only a single website, as one entity, the company. 

What we need to do is deliver a consistent UX across the different silos. It's hard, but not impossible. It's also expensive. But if you unify hour authoring, you can unify the website. You might also unify the content team, a single content responsible for all customer-facing content, and then have a Chief Content Officer. 

The way to get budget in 2025 is to tell management that it's an "AI initiative." Then find your peers, do some joint projects n metadata, taxonomy, terminology, and design standards. At the end of the day, it is about people, not the machine. 

Then Stefan Gentz, Principal Worldwide Evangelist at Adobe, stepped up to talk about "Embracing the Age of Fluid Content." He asked what's wrong with what we did in the past. We published content--and then prayed it would be found. Is that how customers today want to find content? Go to Google or opur portal and search? No. That time is over. 

This is passive content. Customer expectations have changed. Users expect instant, precise, short, contextual answers. The experience bar is set by their everyday apps, not your help center. 

Context drives the assembly of content. It is based on role, intent, device, location, and history, with no user configuration required. I want the content to find me, not have me find the content. 

The content needs to be multimodal by default.  It comes from one source, by takes many forms. It can be hands-free guidance, tiny-screen summaries, or deep desktop views. 

The answer should be the outcome. 

And finally,  Patrick Bosek, CEO of Heretto, spoke on "Deploying Your Docs to AI is Easier Than You Think." He started by saying as much as this is a talk about AI, it's really a talk about content. 

Putting docs into AI means your company's AI systems they employ internally and externally and the public models. Have to be building for both of these. 

The docs to AI maturity model starts with handing off a file, then publishing a website, publishing a semantic website, publishing an API, and finally MCP, or Model Context Protocol. MCP for content is the pinnacle of what we're looking at today, bit it has the most complexity. 

 Websites have limitations. They have limited control over chunking and retrieval, has a propagation delay, has no ability to influence context or incorporate other data, and has no ability to provide tools to AI. 

 

Top Five Ways to Harness the Power of AI Co-Pilot

Scott Abel, Content Strategy Evangelist from Heretto, said that the examples in today's talk come from Heretto's customers. He said that everyone is using AI, but typically not in the most effective way, especially for technical writers. 

AI-powered copilots are built in to the tools we use. When they are inside the tool, they are designed (usually) to understand our content rules. They can act directly on our documentation, but are not writers and cannot replace us. They are like an extra set of hands or eyes. 

AI isn't going to take you job, but if you don't know how to use AI tools, the next person who comes along and who does know them is going to.  

Copilots live inside out tools, and the best ones are trained on the work you do. It's context aware; it doesn't just have the ability to spit out a few words. It also works within the structure of the documentation because it feeds on patterns. 

One way an AI copilot can help is to analyze and improve content, such as ensuring style guide rules are followed, analyzing a topic and making changes, finding and removing or replacing terms, polishing text from non-native speakers, slitting long sentences, and changing voice and tone.  It can even rewrite titles based on the content. 

Another way is for restructuring content. If your unstructured content has some semblance of structure, if there is some predictability, AI is really good in coding that. It can also change content structure, and do it quickly. 

A third way is performing table gymnastics. For example, converting tables to lists or lists to tables or adding, moving, or removing rows or columns.  

A fourth way is enriching content with semantics and metadata, such as wrapping content in DITA elements, adding attributes to DITA elements, specifying element properties, and adding metadata like keywords based on the content of topics. 

A fifth way is guiding people who are new to XML, such as building a specific structure in DITA, answering questions about DITA, and providing understanding of concepts. 

Other practical uses include generating content from tickets, finding tone inconsistencies and quality issues, spotting opportunities for reuse across product information sets,  and identify content appropriate for specific experience levels.

Documentation as Infrastructure: Scaling Strategy, Speed, and Trust at Broadcom

Alex Price, from Broadcom and Bernard Aschwanden, from WriteMore AI, picked this topic because a lot of companies are merging and the way content is developed and managed is changing. In these situations, working with structured content is a lot easier than working with unstructured content. The latter came with lots of utilities and special macros to keep things running, all custom built processes. That created a significant amount of content risk and debt. 

Moving people from tech pubs to business-critical thinker is a mindset shift.  

Documentation is no longer support. It is part of your infrastructure. Documentation infrastructure includes people, processes, platforms, and governance.  

When integrating two structured systems, it is a lot easier. Even if the structure, such as DITA, is a bit different, you can automate a lot of the conversion, and ultimately reduce risk.  

The historical "it's just manuals" devalues content. 

Content in Color: How Strategists and Architects use Design to Bring Ideas to Life

Amber Swope, from DITA Strategies, and Roland Muts, from Veer Agency talked about how design and architecture work together in content strategy. Not just customer-facing design, but internal content, where your employees are your customers. 

A content strategist interprets business goals in content initiatives, develops user personas and user journeys, performs usability studies, leads cross-team initiatives to develop content-based user support, and advocates for content as an asset. 

Information architecture divides into 2 roles: management information architect and delivery information architect. Most teams have more of the latter. Delivery contexts keep adding on. 

Design without information architecture is visually appealing and aligned for UX, but may not align with delivery IA or management IA, and may not support a content pipeline or workflow.  

With design and information architecture in collaboration you can define clear requirements, define user journeys for each user, and more.  

Content Strategy 101: Why Content Strategy Is Important and How You Can Make a Case for It

Mary Southworth and Lee Bryars, of Fidelity Investments, started by saying the journey to content strategy starts with resistance, passes through discovery, and ends with well-organized content. 

Content strategy is a term with many meanings. Is you content more like a book or a newspaper, ephemeral or a durable asset. If you treat your content as ephemeral, you're going to have a mess. 

To prepare your content for AI, you want to stay ahead of your competitors, make it personalized, be consistent, and define your purpose. 

Planning for AI is a lot of up-front work, and most people won't understand that value. Will provably have to think outside your org chart, because most companies aren't structured for this kind of work. But it is an enterprise-level activity, and you don't want to forget the content creators, themselves. Document what you have and what you want. You need exhaustive discovery, ensuring you know what's working and where the gaps are. This will require a content audit. 
 

Opening Welcome, Plus Featured Speakers

Jack Molisani kicked off the 23rd LavaCon Conference on Content Strategy by welcoming nearly 400 attendees in the Grand Ballroom of the Downtown Atlanta Hilton. Attendees are from 21 countries, and there are also almost 100 virtual attendees from around the world. The farthest are from India and South Africa, about 8000-9000 miles. 

The conference's first featured speaker was Caroline Roth, Vice President of Content Experience, Salesforce, with a talk on "From Almost Laid Off to Indispensable: How to Thrive as a Content Leader in the World of AI."She said that she stopped listening to the CEO who was saying that our jobs were going to be taken bu AI and started redefining our story. 

None of these things are rocket science. They are tactical things we have done to change our story. 

Have to know our value to become indispensable. We know the AI is only as good as the content it's grounded on. If you don't have structured, outcome oriented content, the AI is going to fall flat.  Found that dozens of organizations across the company using our content for AI. 

North star because confirmed costumer resolution. When asked if the content found through AI solved their problem, track who says yes. 

You can know your value, but it doesn't count unless people can see it. For example, created a Slack channel where we posted everything were were doing with AI, both successes and failures, as well as thought leadership. We taught someone on our team how to craft messaging, and they because responsible for the content in this channel. 

AI is a shift in how we work as content creators. 

Next was Joe Gollner, speaking on the "New Age of Content Leadership."  He said that our past challenges seem bigger today, but that he also has been working with AI for a long time, working on expert systems. But, spoiler alert, collaboration is the answer. 

In organizations, the march is toward quantification and reports. Control is often used for alternative person, to disguise responsibility. 

Organizations have a love/hate relationship with technology. The unlimited potential for good or ill, depending how it is used, which describes AI. 

Content is a core asset. Like money and talent, it connects all business activities. This is content strategy, what content and why. Content operations is then the jobs that integrate all the content. Content engineering puts all the peices together, as well as integration across the organization. 

Content has to flow.  

The final featured speaker was  Lucie Hyde, Senior Director of User Experience & Design, PayPal, who spoke on "I Drew the Five of Cups! A (tongue-in-cheek) Tarot Reading on the Future of the Content Creation in the Age of AI." She stated that people turn to tarot or other forms of divination in times of fear. 

We have many things in our favor. The skills we learned are even more relevant in the age of AI. We have consciousness and creativity, and AI has neither of those. This is a moment of disruption, not destruction. 

Make hope and purpose your north star. This is not the end, but a moment of disruption that will bring forward a new cycle, bringing order out of chaos.  

 

 

AI-Powered, Human-Approved: Content Strategy That Wins

 In this Sunday workshop, Amanda Patterson, Sr. Consultant at Comtech Services spent some time talking about AI tool selection. The criteria included if you're helping IT choose an LLM, where you are in a project, if it's part of a larger content creation initiative, if you're championing a tech comm tool, if you're evaluating a writing tool or delivery mechanism, an if you're being told "this is the tool you have to use" and now you have to make it work. 

 The biggest part is that it's a time and money question. As they say, you have have two of good, fast, and cheap. Make the argument that you can use AI to increase the capacity of your team, so you can do more, rather than reduce team size. 

The statement "You are not your user" still holds true--but some of your users are not human, and how do you address that?

 

They Already Sent a Poet, and It’s You

Carol Hattrup, Senior Technical Writer HCLTech for T-Mobile noted that we as technical writers have an advanced skill that many others don't have, the skill to wield words. As tech writers, need to get out of our rational brain for this session. 

 As a tech writer, already a natural poet.  What is a poem. Again, as a tech writer, there are 2 forms we already know. And the better we get at poetry, the better we get to tech writing.

The ways tech writing and poetry overlap.

• Curiosity. One way to enter a poem is to ask a question
• Brevity
• Attention to detail, every character and word metters in a poem
• Word choice
• Specifics, use concrete, specific words to describe the world
• Structure, even free verse poems are structured
•  Formatting and style
• Vocabulary, grammar, and punctuation
• Visually appealing
• Iteration 
• Voice and tone
• Working with people, especially an audience
• Active voice, actually rarely use passive voice in poems

Most modern poems won't typically hard rhyme at the end of every line, won't use vague, non-specific, abstract language, aren't very long, and don't do deep dives into the poet's own feelings. 

Effective poems use strong imagery, repeat sounds throughout,  explore universal experiences and feelings, but in individual specific ways, are grounded an actual places and objects, and use surprise, contradiction, mystery, and imagination. 

An effective poem doesn't create meaning on purpose. Instead, need to let readers bring their own meaning to the poem. When you let the reader bring their own meanings, you realize they are coming in different seasons of their life. 

2 forms of poems a tech writer already knows:

• List poem (reference topic)
• How-to poem (task topic)

A list poem uses a list or catalog format as its primary structure, and content can be related in some way. 

A how-to poem is a type of "instructional" poetry, typically structured as a set of instructions, often metaphorical, with content ranging from everyday tasks to complex emotions, and usually written with imperative sentences.  

 

Hands-On with AI: How to Work Smarter, Not Harder with ChatGPT

The 2025 LavaCon Content Strategy Conference kicked off in Atlanta with this early morning workshop, given by Kat Reierson, Manager, Product Documentation, Docusign. She began by pointing out that AI is such a fast-changing industry that it's hard to keep up. Any AI tools will only be as good as what you're giving them. We're still trying to tidy up our content. If we put our content into AI without tidying it up, it will be a mess. 

One attendee said she was at this particular workshop because "management doesn't know the difference between AI and magic." 

"People have their perception of what we do, and they are so wrong, all the time," Reierson said as folks were introducing themselves.  

Anything that you can do to give structure to your content will help AI ingest it. 

AI is your argument for getting time to update your old content. If you can convince people that you can use AI, but your content has to be better,  that's your ticket. 

Ethical considerations for using AI include:

• Transparency, letting people know you're using AI.  
• Accuracy. We know AI can hallucinate. And it tries to please you. 
• Privacy and Confidentiality, making sure you don't share sensitive, proprietary, or personal information.  Be careful. Protect yourself and others.
• Bias and fairness. AI scrapes all information, regardless of the sources.  

Getting better results with AI starts with prompt crafting. Start with context. AI performs best when it understand who you are, what you're doing, and what access looks like. 

Idea of different types of prompts, how detailed you want to get. Industry terms include zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot.  Zero-shot is vague or open ended. One-shot adds context, and few-shot gives lots of details, where prompts can be full paragraphs and lots of bullet points. 

Once you have your workflow documented, you can identify the pieces that would benefit from AI.  Focus where you can get gains. Highlight your failures. Track your capacity. 

 

Behind the Scenes

 It takes a lot of work to make a conference run well. One of the items all attendees get is a bag stuffed with information about the conference, information about conference sponsors, and other tchotckes. 

Well those bags don't stuff themselves. Dedicated conference volunteers, as well as the folks who run the conference, gather Saturday afternoon to put those bags together. Here's a little peek.

 

The 2025 LavaCon is Here!

 I am considering myself extremely fortunate. I was able to work out attending the LavaCon conference, despite being out of work for 6 months (and counting), where I hope and expect to learn about the latest in content development, management, and strategy tools, techniques, and trends. 

This blog is intended to share what I'm learning at LavaCon in real time. I will literally be taking notes on session content in real time and posting updates all day long. The hope is to share a little bit about what's currently happening in the technical communication world--and also inspire some of my peers to attend in comping years. 

I've been TechComm conferencing for decades. It began before I even graduated from college. I was in my senior year of getting my Technical Communication degree from the University of Washington, and I was also working part time for Joe Welinske, whose business at the time was names WinWriters. He, along with one of my professors, Dave Farkas, and on of his friends in the industry, Scott Boggan, decided to try and offer a conference focused on online help, which was booming in the years following the release of Windows 3.0. In a small conference room just north of downtown Seattle in the spring of 1993, a dozen content professionals listened to Joe, Dave, and Scott talk abotu online help and related topics. 

That ballooned into an annual conference that once hit 1400 attendees. One of the regular vendors at that conference was Jack Molisani and his ProSpring business. He started his own conference, LavaCon, initially in Hawaii, not long after. My impression at the time was that the conference seemed to focus largely on TechComm management, so my interest wasn't as high, even if that would have meant a trip to Hawaii.

LavaCon evolved over the years, and became very much about content strategy and management, attracting some of the top speakers on the subjects to speak each year. This year will be no exception. 

Conference activities actually start Sunday with pre-conference workshops. Monday morning brings the start of 2 1/2  jam-packed days of sessions along 5 tracks:

• Content Marketing and Content Strategy 
• Customer Experience and Governance
• Content Development and Content Ops
• Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
• Tools and Technology

The "problem" with this, and to be fair, this has always been a "problem" with LavaCon, is that in each time block throughout every day, there are at least two, and sometimes three or four sessions I want to attend. 

There needs to be a track on cloning.

I fully expect sessions in the AI track to be immensely popular, because every CEO everywhere is expecting every job to use and infuse AI, and so all of us are going to be wanting to find out how we all can do that best. And also, as some speakers asserted last year, how not to use AI.  

In addition to conference sessions, there will be a large vendor room on Monday and Tuesday. But perhaps the most anticipated event will be Tuesday, when LavaCon turns into LlamaCon. You really have to be here to find out. 

Meanwhile, don't forget to bookmark this blog's home page and check back daily to get just a bit of a peek at what's going on at this year's LavaCon.