The Culture of Writing Podcast

Esperanza Rodriguez, from Salesforce, shares how she broadcasts time-saving innovations that the Salesforce Content Experience (CX) Team is making with AI.

Join Samartha Vashishtha, Director, Content Experience for Salesforce for a brisk (9 minute) summary of how he and his team used AI to tackle a new documentation project. First, they used AI to digest and summarize hundreds of pages of dense documentation that they were unfamiliar with. AI helped them find the WHY (why is this important to me, the user? Why should I care?). Last, they leveraged AI to quickly create concise, finished documentation that has since been published.

Plain writing makes your documentation far more effective–easier to understand, easier to localize, and easier for AI agents to digest so they can return more relevant answers. Learn simple, actionable tips from two experts in the field, and have some fun along the way.

Your readers are giving you a valuable gift: their time. Make sure your technical writing makes the most of it. Don't hesitate to leverage AI for assistance—clear and concise writing enables users to quickly find and understand the information they need.

Prepare to be amazed as technical architect Ian Varley shows how he uses AI to enhance his workflows, increasing efficiency and the quality of his work. Some of his discoveries are counterintuitive and surprising. But they’re easy—and you’ll have a lot of fun using them.

Successful technical documentation is clear, accurate, concise, helpful, and focused on real-world user goals. Almost as important is understanding what not to write. Think of it as opportunity cost. Time and effort spent writing unnecessary or duplicative content could be spent more productively on the many things we do need to document. Our 23-minute podcast discusses how you, the writer, should look at your requests and why you have the right and obligation to ask if you think the work may be unnecessary.

What does the future of technical documentation look like with AI? Could an AI talking to another AI perform complex cloud software integrations without admin assistance? Or provide solutions to multi-faceted technical challenges? How might this redefine the very meaning of work?

When you've got thousands of help articles, they can't all be up to date. How do you know which to focus on for revision and consolidation? Stephen Munoz and his team have an answer. His "self-help" group uses AI to analyze customer feedback and zero in on the content that helps customers resolve their issues most effectively.

And relates story-telling to technical documentation.

Jon Varese, Content Experience VP of Salesforce Industries and Revenue Cloud, discusses why it's important to craft writing based on people and what they need from our documentation. More information on the Dickens Project talked about in this episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Qoilrlmw4U&t=0s