The Evolved Technical Writer

Read this if you have been told AI is the end-all of our profession.

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As the Manager of a dedicated group of Tech Writers/Content Specialists in SaaS, I do not see it as my role to try to predict the future of our profession. I am not a savant, nor will I ever pretend to be. What I can do, however, and do well, is comment on where things stand.

Right now, our role, a role which I am seeing as “The Evolved Technical Writer”, exists in symbiosis with AI. Will it always be there? Time will tell. In the meantime, however, it is important for companies (most of all those who are implementing AI chatbots to deflect support tickets) to understand how our function works.

The content we write, whether that be customer facing or backend, directly feeds the AI bot. Without this input, there is no possible output. Are we at a place where AI agents can read code, and transform that into written content? Yes, we are. But there is a distinction here that we need to remember; technical changes are not customer impact. If I had to roughly estimate, simple “how-to” content is only 5%-10% of what we do. The rest is in-depth troubleshooting, addressing security concerns, best-practices, good-to-knows, scenario-based walkthroughs, setting up integrations, and so on.

This is where that symbiosis comes into play. AI is our new and valuable source of feedback. Gone are the days where customer had this bilateral path; either engage with the help content directly or contact a human Support Agent. Now, by design, they go through our AI bot as first-contact on any inquiries. Suddenly we have access to a goldmine of clean, summarized information we would have to otherwise read through hours of tickets to access, or rely on human agents to submit (and in case you never worked in SaaS, human agents can get *sort of* busy).

This AI bot to human Tech Writer feedback loop fills more content gaps than ever before. We aren’t being replaced, we are using this newfound efficiency to put our efforts where they matter most.

This is what I know, this where we are now. This role will keep evolving, of that we can be sure. For now, we need to foster this symbiosis to create the best experience for customers and deflect more tickets from Support than ever possible before.