I think curiosity is one of the most important things that you can have if you're always curious you're going to think about things to ask questions where you're going to seek out people who have the right answers it's going to help you understand all the different ways that a product is used or could be used or could break welcome to another episode of tech bites I'm Bobby Brill your host for this episode but more importantly that was Katie a senior director content operations and experiences and Katie leads a large team of content creators now of course you can't have a discussion today about content creation without talking about AI or generative Ai and on this episode of the podcast we're going to dive in with Katie and get her thoughts on AI and content creation and more specifically the role of technical writers working with AI and how writers can set themselves up for success by partnering with AI so Katie how did you get into this very specific world of technical writing growing up in high school I loved creative writing I really flourished in in that department and then my first job first paid job was being a technical writer for my father's software company they were writing software for a security guard who was going to have a high school education he said you pretty much have a high school education you're a junior in high school you're an honor student I'm going to I'm going to say that's done right something that you would understand write something that somebody with the high school education would understand explain how to use this this piece of software and he just gave me the software and told me to write and gave me no other direction and so that was my introduction into the world of technical writing so you just gave me the greatest segue ever because you just described an AI prompt on how to write something congratulations you are a high school writer and you need to write for someone who is a high school writer so let's get into that aspect of it of AI how does AI mesh with your experience and what you've been in charge of in the last say 10 15 years of from the writing aspect I've moved from being a writer to managing writers I ran the entire documentation team at huet Packard for their printers and then I came to service now I've managed writing teams and now my role right now is to actually manage all of the aspects of creating content that don't actually consist of managing writers we're creating writers experiences we're creating customers experiences and all the tools that go into making those two experiences really great so I'm talking about videos and images screen captures infographics anything that has been produced with the intent of educating our customers about what the product is and how to use it so I think AI is an enabler for all of those experiences that we're creating like we are trying to figure out how can we incorporate AI to make writers more efficient to make the content more clear to customers just how how can we use it to enhance the work that we're doing today so then to go to the first part of your question like how you know as a writer can this help you I think one of the biggest challenges that any writer faces is that blank screen I'd say blank page but really we're all writing on computers noways so it's that blank screen i h i know what I need to write about I've had a million conversations with subject matter experts I've played with the software myself I might even have a template that sort of outlines the order in which I should put stuff in but to actually get started of like how do I explain how to use this it's the hardest thing because you're just staring at sort of a blank page once you start to get content in there you can see how the story is taking shape or see how how you want to explain this really complex concept to somebody who might not understand it a technical writer skill set is being able to understand the technical and communicate it in a simple term and so we're we're doing that magic but to have something to get us started faster or get that draft on the page that we can start you know manipulating and turning into something really simple and understandable is going to be really powerful and I think out of the gate where the technology is right now I think that's the thing that AI is going to be able to do best for us at this moment you said something interesting there that idea that the writer has all this knowledge they've more than likely written this content before but that blank page that new document fear where it's like how bespoke does this need to be is a challenge for a lot of writers or is that a challenge of technical writing as a whole I think it's a challenge for writers in general yeah I think back to high school and college when I was doing creative writing glasses and that was the biggest challenge too I have this prompt how do I get started my my most favorite writing challenge ever was a teacher walked into the room and said pick a number you know between 1 and 10 between 11 and 25 and gave us like four sections of numbers and then handed us a paper and said okay these are your characters this is your scene this is the action based on the numbers you selected and you wrote A Creative story that kind of captured all that and that was really easy because I had my characters I had my scene I had I had had the structure in place and I just had to start filling in the gaps kind of not unlike what's happening with us in technical writing and multimedia production where we're given a UI some directions some buttons and we have all these elements in hand and and we're tasked with creating this document and so you have those elements I think a lot of writers um when they're doing their work are taking notes or they're recording meetings they have some way of recording the information that they're Gathering and so to be able to just put that into an AI tool and give it a couple prompts and say take all this information and give me a user guide or take all this information and summarize the asks that were described or what whatever the The Prompt is that you want to give it and then continue to refine that from there I think that would be really powerful because taking all of your biases out of of writing as well and it's saying just like here take all this information and give it to me digest it down give it to me in whatever form I'm asking for and then I'm going to be able to start writing from part of the issue too when you become really entrenched in a piece of software the details are the little tiny things that are kind of important you start to skip over those right you saw you're like oh I can make the jump I no longer have to go ABCD I'm just going a to d because B and C are really simple little things but for somebody who's not as familiar with it that little detail that they need to continue forward if you give it to in AI to give you the summary it's going to include that instead of just skipping it out it's going to give you all the details you need that's interesting because I know you and I had talked before we we had done this and you had you know you had given it that great label of co-writer or assistant and that's a very good example what are some other examples from your experience and what you're really liking about this and how it can help other technical writers to see Ai and gen AI as a co-writer or an actual helper in this situation I think if you think of AI as that co-writer that smart assistant that's working with you it becomes a little less intimidating and it emphasizes that you're still in control and it it makes it so that you you're not working alone so a lot of times if you're just in in a vacuum while by yourself you're working alone it that can also be a little challenging or you can start to go down a path that you know you get get kind of sucked into a detail and you get sucked down that path and you can with the AI tools it keeps a record of the conversation so you can always go back and review it and be like oh yeah I took this weird left turn here for some reason I'm going to go back up to this part of the conversation and start again from there continue down this other path yeah I was going to ask you about Styles because you've got the background of two different styles how stylistically is it different than writing copy for a video or social media posting or even you know uh marketing speak it it used to be very different so technical writing when I first got into it you know it was like you're very very technical there's no emotion in the writing that you have and it's very dry this is what you do these are the steps 1 2 3 4 this is the outcome and in the recent years there's been a lot of research and some findings that say a more conversational tone actually has a bigger impact so if you think about it you and I are having a conversation we'll remember these details you know for a while because we're having a conversation back in fourth if I'm going to read a recipe about you know how to make dinner tonight I'm probably not going to remember that recipe after I make that that dish until the next I need it because it was just in it was just one two three four follow these steps whereas if it's I had sat down and had a conversation with a friend of mine they were like oh you have to make this recipe you do this and you do this and then you know you added this extra detail here your brain remembers a conversation a different way than it remembers the structured content how how do you explain conversational to the writers you work with and and also for some of the new writers thinking about this that idea of a conversational tone it's a little more casual right so it's instead of I'm going to the office and I'm GNA be very you know tied up and professional I'm GNA go to the office and sit down and talk to my co-worker next to me as we figure out a problem we're going to have a more casual I know I don't know about you but I'm a lot more Curious when I'm just sitting down having a conversation with somebody I'm going to go in a couple different directions or something they'll say will prompt me to ask something else I think that's part of the beauty of this as well is that it's it's putting the writer or the Creator in that more relaxed casual frame of mind to just be a little bit more curious about the subject that they're writing about now using Ai and thinking about that conversational style what are some ideas that can help writers think about perspective and value in what they're writing the only way to really fully explain everything that you're writing about is to understand all those details and the only way to understand all those details skills is to get curious and think about things not just from your soulle perspective but to say okay now can I put myself in this other slightly different perspective or different role or different have a different goal in mind what other questions am I going to ask what other things am I going to want to know about the software or how to use it and I think AI can help with that write me this task from the perspective of an admin write me this task from the perspective of an end user who's using the form to create a workspace write this in the perspective of somebody who doesn't know anything about service now you can ask AI to rewrite things from different perspectives that you may not come from on your own so it gives you that Curiosity without you having to actually do all the heavy lifting if a writer is a little bit nervous or a little bit trepidacious in using AI whether it be here at service now or within their own career what is some advice that you can give them from your experience to use AI in the best way and to how to approach it in a way that makes it easy for them to use for me the biggest thing is to shift your perspective on it as it's a tool versus a replacement to your job and I think our industry will evolve as Ai and llms and ji evolves and gets mature and more powerful it will be able to do more that it can do now you still have that understanding of how to convey information in a really compelling way and that if you think of AI as a tool to make you work faster or give you different perspectives in in different ways understand that we all come to to work with our own biases and that this might be able to help us avoid some of those and kind of think Beyond those a little bit more and I would go out and just start using it the only way to really fully understand how to use it best or how you can use it best is it go out and use it for like little random things so you know you need to write a Christmas newsletter put in all the information about all the accomplishments for your family or have you everyone say like hey send me your top five things you did this year and then just put it in there and say write me a Christmas newsletter for my family highlighting all these things and just see what it comes up with you we have a quarterly newsletter and I have to write an introduction for it every time and I always put it off to the last minute and I've started using chbt for it because I I say here are like the 10 things or like these are the I want to highlight give me a draft of that it moves me off of that that blank page and sort of doesn't punish me for procrastinating so just find ways to use it and then I would also say try and understand how it works because if you understand the technology behind it just like for technical writers you understand the technology behind everything we're writing about if you understand the technology behind how the llms work how they're trained it makes it a lot less intimidating how does curiosity work in a big soft Ware technical glass and steel building type of organization that so many of us are working in in the technical world how is curiosity important to what we do curiosity is one of the most important things that you can have because it allows you to ask good questions so if you're always curious you're going to think about things to ask questions where you're going to seek out people who have the right answers for technical writing it's going to help you understand all the different ways that a product is used or could be used or could break I think one of the biggest things we do in technical writing is write documentation to help you get past those stumbling points or those sticky points that the software you know design madebe didn't quite capture correctly and so just to understand all of those different parts of the experience the way you get to that is to have curiosity well there you have it I guess it always does come down to one thing curiosity if you've enjoyed this episode please hit subscribe on whatever podcast platform you're listening on so you never miss an episode and if you have any questions on working with the service now platform head over to docs. servicenow.com or head over to YouTube and check out the service now Community Channel thanks for listening