Dana Aubin and Dr. Amanda Patterson, Comtech Services
October 15, 2024
This year’s survey focused on the impact that the first two years of GenAI have had on the technical communication industry. We heard from 120 industry professionals from sectors such as software, hardware, and manufacturing about what they are seeing and doing with GenAI. We also asked about what their concerns (ethical, legal, and regulatory) are, what challenges they faced, and how they overcame or mitigated them.
Our biggest take away from the survey is that GenAI will be a powerful tool for technical communications teams and an opportunity to provide high-value resources for their organization’s GenAI products. Our teams are getting faster and stronger by unloading monotonous and repetitive tasks to GenAI, which allows individual contributors to spend their time on the deeper knowledge work. Teams are using GenAI to work smarter, before working harder, to summarize SME information, generate short descriptions, and assist with administrative tasks.
We found that many organizations are implementing private LLMs, and then training those LLMs with product documentation. This process is where technical communication teams will demonstrate their value and necessity because they’re the ones creating and maintaining that high-quality documentation. LLMs work on a statistical vector prediction of words in natural language. That means if a team is creating documentation for things that never existed before, GenAI can’t accurately predict what words should come next. It also means that GenAI isn’t making real decisions; critical thinking is the work of the technical communicators.
Similarly, many organizations are concerned about the accuracy of information. This issue is a real concern for organizations only using public LLMs because they are not fine-tuned for a single organization’s content and the context that content creates. But, without technical communication teams, organizations would not have the natural language content they need to make the private LLMs work accurately and successfully. The content creation processes that technical communication teams have established are built on the need for technically accurate content written in clear natural language. It’s literally in our title!
Moreover, we see that many technical communications professionals are driving GenAI efforts in their organization. Anecdotally, we know that many organizations are situating the implementation of GenAI in IT or systems teams, which makes sense given the number of systems connections that need to be made for a private model to work. But we see strong partnerships between those teams and technical communication teams. The technical communication teams know the content ecosystem better than most teams, and we know how the information is stored and published, when that happens, and who needs that information. To go back to the earlier discussion on information accuracy, it is our content that will need to be tagged appropriately to allow the systems to find, identify, and surface the appropriate content at the appropriate time to the appropriate audiences.
GenAI is an exciting opportunity for the technical communication industry. As professionals, GenAI is a technology that we need to learn and understand. Managers and team leaders need to understand how the technology works to future proof or update content practices to prepare for GenAI as an audience. Individual contributors need to focus on how to communicate with the GenAI (prompt engineering) to get the most out of the tools and to make sure their content is ready for GenAI. We can be influential in decision making if we understand the systems and the current state of our content. This technology will be increasingly popular in the next few years. As an industry we need to embrace it.
For more highlights from the survey, check out, 2024 GenAI Survey Brochure.
To learn more about content strategy and writing for GenAI, check out Comtech’s GenAI workshops at https://comtechservices.com/training/.
To become a CIDM member and view the coming full report and other benefits, visit us at https://www.infomanagementcenter.com/.