Clear, structured and trusted documentation needs to be your foundation
Deploying AI and preparing for AI have become twin imperatives for every organisation. In the context of communicating about complex products, we mean:
- Deploying AI = using AI to create and manage your technical product content
- Preparing for AI = ensuring your technical product content is ready to be used by AI
Both are ways of thinking about AI readiness and AI-ready technical documentation. You can make progress with each independently, or treat them as interdependent. 3di has the expertise to accelerate your capability with both.
And, in both contexts the fundamental challenge is that AI retrieves information from whatever source material it can access. And, if the source material is a mess, the AI becomes a very confident confusion machine.
With both internal and external audiences increasingly using AI tools and agents to find and act on information, it is becoming a high priority for companies to ensure that their clear and trusted documentation is viewed as the definitive source, and that it outcompetes other sources of information. While AI tool use has only just tipped into majority adoption, many more users will come to rely on AI tools in the near future. If you don’t make your content AI-ready, it will be seen and used by an ever-decreasing audience.
Over the past few years, we’ve invested a lot of our resources in understanding how AI tools work, how they reference and cite technical documentation, and in building our own team of content tools developers who help create and maintain our own AI-powered tech stack. We use this experience to make us more efficient, and to help ensure our customers’ documentation is easy for AI tools to parse, is highly cited, and is the primary source of information for AI tools.
Want to talk to us about AI-ready technical documentation?
Preparing content for AI
AI readiness ensures your content is discoverable and likely to result in the AI providing a useful answer. In AI-driven search, selection is more granular than traditional search. AI systems parse content into smaller units and evaluate them for relevance and clarity, and composes the final response from multiple sources.
So, AI-ready content needs to be clear and trusted (the same as for humans) but structure and context become more important. These help ensure the AI is basing its answer on the right sources, and is able to make the correct connections and minimise how likely it is to hallucinate.
AI agents will increasingly be finding and then acting on that information, carrying out tasks, so providing the structural and contextual guardrails will keep the AI agent focussed on delivering the intended outputs.
Our process for getting your content AI-ready
We’ve been helping companies around the world ensure their content is AI-ready, and we have a proven process that we can tailor to your individual needs. We make it as simple as possible for you – no matter how complex your product or content, or how tight your deadline is. Here is a brief overview of our process:
Initial request
We understand what you want to achieve, agree on a commercial plan, and assign suitably skilled 3di technical writers and content tools developers.
Scoping
We assess your current content and what you need to communicate. We create a detailed AI-readiness plan for you to review.
Content creation
We migrate, enhance or create your content – automating what we can. You provide some input and check you are happy with early prototypes.
Delivery
We complete the technical content and fine-tune the final formats for publishing. Once published, we can continue to provide support and updates as needed.
Any questions about AI-ready technical documentation?
Our AI-tool stack
At 3di, we have spent 20+ years getting the best from industry-leading content tools. We’ve applied that experience and invested in our own in-house team of content tools developers, who create innovative tools to get the best from LLM-based GenAI, without compromising our clients’ data confidentiality and security.
We now deploy a suite of AI-enabled tools, which we use alongside industry-leading content tools to create your technical documentation. Our unique technology ecosystem enables us to deliver accurate, timely technical documentation that is optimised for AI search, ready for translation and localization, and more importantly, perfect for your end-users.
What to find out more about our bespoke AI tools?
Deploying AI to create and manage your content
At 3di, as we have developed our own ways of deploying AI as part of our suite of Content Operations services. We have found the following framework useful. When our customers work with 3di, we can accelerate an implementation that’s bespoke to them, or the framework is embedded in the way we’re delivering as an outsource provider.
Strategy and intent
The vision and business case for deploying, and preparing for, AI, and clarity about how you are going to get there.
Capability and literacy
The expertise, time, and skills needed for each phase of delivering the strategy.
Data and infrastructure
The technical infrastructure, data processing, and tooling to support research, development, deployment and scaling.
Governance, risk, and resilience
The responsibilities, processes and workflows that make it easy to manage and deliver against plans.
Deployment and operations
Delivering the AI-ready capability consistently for the business: evaluating against success criteria, responding as contexts change.
Find out how we can help you create AI-ready technical documentation
Case studies
Related posts
How to get documentation online?
How do you get your technical and product documentation online, and how can this benefit…
Content Operations helps you publish content people will trust
In this article we look at how a good content operations process is integral to…
5 tips for using AI in technical writing
In this article, we look at how technical authors can use AI to help them…