ConVEx Pittsburgh Presentations
The ConVEx Pittsburgh program offers career-empowering knowledge, practical solutions, best practices, and the best networking in the industry.
IMPORTANT PROGRAMMING NOTE
The lineup and schedule posted here are based on current commitments from presenters and are subject to change.
Tuesday ~ April 14, 2026
Listen First: Strategies, Structure, Practice for AI-Ready Content + AI Readiness playbook
AI promises to change how organizations create, manage, and deliver content, but only if the content itself is prepared to support it. This panel brings together industry experts, each representing a different part of the “content elephant”:
Marianne Calilhanna, Data Conversion Laboratory: The practical, actionable side of converting and migrating content into structured formats, and how much of tagging and chunking can be automated.
Jack Molisani, ProSpring Staffing: The voice of the technical communications profession, explaining how day-to-day workflows and the skill set of writers are evolving in an AI-driven world.
Regina Lynn Preciado, Content Rules: The “content listener” who emphasizes how your existing content tells you what it needs and how it can best serve the business.
Sarah O’Keefe, Scriptorium: Strategy and AI readiness specialist, guiding how organizations prepare content, people, and processes with a clear AI Readiness Playbook.
Dipo Ajose-Coker, RWS (Moderator): Facilitating the discussion to keep it grounded, actionable and aligned with business priorities.
Together, this panel will explore how strategy, structure and practice converge to build a resilient, future-proof content ecosystem. We’ll go beyond the “what” and “why” to a clear AI Readiness Playbook: how to listen to your content, identify readiness gaps, apply structure, and reuse thinking, align teams to support AI, govern metadata, and prepare your organization for next-generation content operations.
Content Automation 101: What to Automate and What Not To
Automation is a powerful tool for scaling content operations but knowing where to apply it (and where not to) is critical for success. In this introductory and insightful session, I’ll guide content managers and business leaders through the fundamentals of content automation decision-making. You’ll learn a practical framework for evaluating your content processes: which tasks are high-volume and repetitive (great candidates for automation), and which tasks require creativity, nuance, or judgment that only humans can provide.
I’ll share common areas where automation delivers strong ROI – for example, automating formatting and publishing workflows, content reuse and assembly, template-driven content creation, or batch tagging of content with metadata. Equally important, I’ll discuss tasks you shouldn’t automate blindly, such as final editorial sign-off, sensitive content approvals, or any process where quality or context could be lost. This session emphasizes establishing scalable governance for automation projects: ensuring you have monitoring in place, maintaining content quality standards, and involving the right stakeholders (like content strategists and IT) in automation efforts. Whether you’re just starting with automation or looking to refine your approach, this talk will equip you to make smart, strategic decisions that maximize efficiency without sacrificing quality.
Dipo Ajose-Coker, RWS
Dipo Ajose-Coker is Solutions Architect and Strategist for RWS Tridion Docs, where he blends technical expertise with business development to drive customer success. With 18 years’ experience in structured content, MedTech, and technical communication, he specializes in DITA, content enablement, and regulated industry workflows. After starting his career in technical writing and later product marketing, Dipo now focuses on empowering enterprises through buyer-journey insights, webinars, battlecards, and feature adoption strategies. His goal is to bridge technical innovation with strategic outcomes, ensuring organizations unlock the full potential of their content technology investments.
Tridion Docs. Agentic AI, MCP and System Interconnectivity with DXD
Get ready for a live “Test Kitchen” demo session where we mix cutting-edge content technologies and AI to cook up the future of documentation. In this hands-on demonstration, we’ll show how a Dynamic Experience Delivery platform (DXD) and Model Context Protocol (MCP) unite with AI agents to make your stored knowledge more interactive than ever before.
As a consumer, have you wanted a quick summary of product version differences? As an author, have you needed to see similarities across documents for a market or customer? Or found yourself piecing together knowledge for a specific task? These are exactly the scenarios agents can serve using MCP and a dynamic delivery platform.
We’ll walk through a step-by-step scenario: creating modular DITA content in a CCMS, flowing it through MCP, using DXD to deliver to different channels, and finally introducing AI agents that surface insights and remix knowledge for users and editorial teams alike.
This interactive session will spark your imagination. Live on stage, we’ll experiment in real time, invite audience input, and show what’s possible when modern content architecture meets AI. You’ll leave with practical ideas for your own organization.
Dipo Ajose-Coker & Nigel Lock, RWS
Dipo Ajose-Coker is Solutions Architect and Strategist for RWS Tridion Docs, where he blends technical expertise with business development to drive customer success. With 18 years’ experience in structured content, MedTech, and technical communication, he specializes in DITA, content enablement, and regulated industry workflows. After starting his career in technical writing and later product marketing, Dipo now focuses on empowering enterprises through buyer-journey insights, webinars, battlecards, and feature adoption strategies. His goal is to bridge technical innovation with strategic outcomes, ensuring organizations unlock the full potential of their content technology investments.
Nigel Lock is a husband, father of three and soccer player who enjoys living on 100 acres of beautiful countryside of the Flint Hills of Kansas, just west of Kansas City. With RWS since 2005, Nigel is a Principal Solutions Consultant within the Tridion Solutions Consulting team, experienced at speaking with organizations about optimizing their global content management and delivery processes. He’ll be happy to talk to you about that, or indeed more excitedly about his family’s burgeoning farmstead operation, including multiple bee hives and two awesome Maremma livestock guardian dogs.
Breaking Down Silos: A Practical Approach to Better Technical Documentation
Technical writers often work in isolation from the teams that shape the products they document—engineering, product management, support, and compliance. This separation can lead to gaps in understanding, inconsistent terminology, and documentation that misses the mark. In this session, I will walk through how breaking down departmental silos leads to stronger, more accurate, and more user-focused documentation. I’ll share examples of how cross-functional collaboration improves clarity, reduces rework, and helps writers anticipate user questions before they arise. We’ll look at simple ways to build trust across teams, set up shared review processes, and advocate for earlier involvement in development cycles.
Andrea Altenburg, Altenburg Solutions, LLC
Andrea Altenburg is a Contract Senior Technical Writer based in Sylvania, Ohio who thrives in collaborative, cross-functional environments. She brings a thoughtful, structured approach to documentation, working closely with subject matter experts, engineers, and compliance teams to ensure content is accurate, consistent, and user focused. Andrea values open communication and shared ownership, often serving as a bridge between technical and non-technical stakeholders. She’s known for building reusable frameworks that streamline review cycles and support team-wide alignment on style and standards. With a strong interest in continuous improvement, Andrea actively explores new tools and workflows—including AI-assisted writing—to enhance team productivity and documentation quality. Whether contributing to a small project or supporting a larger documentation strategy, she approaches each task with clarity, curiosity, and a commitment to shared success.
Upgrading the DITA Specification: A Case Study in Adopting 2.0
After 20 years of DITA, are we ready for 2.0?
As we near the final stretches of development on DITA 2.0, it’s time to start using the new version to define the spec itself. Each prior version of the specification was published using the upcoming version of the standard, allowing members of the technical committee to test out both new language capabilities. This also provides implementations with a complete document to use as a test case for any changes that come with the new release. In this session, we will find out what it took to migrate the specification to DITA 2.0:
* How was the migration managed?
* What challenges did we encounter?
* Should we have done anything differently?
* Most importantly, were the tools ready for this change?
Robert Anderson, Oracle
Robert Anderson has been working with DITA XML and DITA processors for over 20 years. He is co-editor of several versions of the standard, including the upcoming DITA 2.0, and has worked closely on the DITA Open Toolkit. Outside of the standard, Robert supports the engineering infrastructure behind Oracle’s Cloud documentation — from the pipeline used to publish content (DITA and otherwise) all the way to the site itself.
New System, New Skills: The Hidden Curriculum of CCMS Adoption
Adopting a new Component Content Management System (CCMS) is never just about learning structured or topic-based authoring. Success depends on a broader set of skills that often go unnoticed until they become stumbling blocks. Metadata discipline, workflow awareness, metrics gathering, and integration know-how can make the difference between a smooth rollout and a frustrating tangle of workarounds. Drawing on recent efforts at Paligo to redesign our onboarding training, this session highlights the “hidden curriculum” of CCMS adoption: the overlooked capabilities that shape collaboration, governance, publishing, automation, and long-term content strategy. Attendees will gain a practical framework for identifying which considerations and challenges belong to their content schema and which to their CCMS, along with concrete questions to ask vendors and steps to prepare their teams. Whether you are evaluating a new system or struggling to get the most out of your current one, this talk will help you anticipate pitfalls, sharpen your adoption strategy, and set your team up to maximize the value of your CCMS.
Josh Anderson, Paligo
Josh Anderson is an Information Architect at Paligo. He analyzes and structures content to reveal the insights that come from the creative organization of information. Josh earned a Master of Information at the University of Toronto and has spoken at conferences including LavaCon, ConVEx, the Society for Technical Communication Summit, ContentTECH Summit, and World Information Architecture Day events in Toronto and Okinawa on topics such as content strategy, information architecture, technical communication, and Web3 technologies. Recently, he has been an Adjunct Instructor of Information Architecture at Brandeis University.
Death and Tax-onomies: Metadata with minimal pain
Business-related metadata is a critical piece of your DITA content model. But taxonomy work is overwhelming to many people. The fields of library science and knowledge management offer tools that let you avoid reinventing the wheel. In this presentation, you’ll learn about the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), how it maps to the DITA content model, and how you can use the Dublin Core standard to develop your organization’s metadata.
Allison Beatty, Scriptorium
Allison Beatty is a technical consultant at Scriptorium, where she specializes in metadata and taxonomy within DITA systems. With a background in library and information science, she gravitates toward complex information environments with an emphasis on patterns and the organization of many components.
Piecing Together a Docs-As-Code Framework With AI
Docs-as-code is an approach to technical writing where technical writers use the same tools and processes as the engineers of the product, usually software developers. While such an approach has many benefits such as increased integration with engineering and higher content accuracy, many writers find several drawbacks. Because docs-as-code tools were developed for highly specialized engineers, such tools can be challenging for writers to use.
In particular, the way that content is sourced, authored, built, and deployed as a documentation website the “docs framework”can be difficult for both developers and technical writers to maintain. This session shares the experiences of a small team of technical writers without coding backgrounds who increasingly took ownership of the docs framework. It reexamines the processes in light of AI, showing how AI helps them develop tools and website features.
Art Berger, Solo.io
Art Berger works as a Technical Writer for Solo.io, where he helps create technical documentation for the company’s agentic AI and cloud networking technologies and open source projects. He produces a wide range of products, including user guides, instructions, application program interface (API) documents, user interface (UI) text, command line interface (CLI) strings, error messages, diagrams, and more. He also increasingly develops and maintains documentation tools and frameworks as part of the team’s ContentOps.
AI Prompt Development and Testing using XML Technologies
XML technologies are a good fit for AI development work. Any non-trivial AI deployment inside an enterprise needs to define and maintain a large number of related prompts. This can be challenging if these prompts are authored and managed as text files. As you are using the DITA XML standard you already have the tools to manage content, making sure you have consistency across related deliverables via content reuse, profiling, and various validation options. AI prompts can be yet another deliverable from your structured content source.
Another important aspect of AI development is testing, trying to asses how things change if a new AI engine is used, or how things change if a prompt is updated. There is already a testing framework available for XML languages such as XSLT, XQuery and Schematron, called XSpec. By using an XPath extension functions to access AI models, you can use this testing framework for AI prompts, taking advantage of all the available infrastructure for checking results, graphical reports, etc.
AI prompt development and testing can benefit immediately from the stack of XML technologies that are mature and ready to provide a rich infrastructure for authoring and maintaining AI prompts at scale.
George Bina, Syncro Soft / Oxygen XML Editor
George Bina is one of the founder of Syncro Soft, the company that develops the Oxygen XML suite of tools for editing, authoring, developing, publishing, and collaborating on XML content. With over 20 years of experience working with XML and related technologies, he has brought many innovative ideas to life, contributed to open-source projects related to XML, and presented at numerous XML and DITA conferences.
Strategies for Interviewing Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
Interviewing subject matter experts (SMEs) is a core skill technical communicators need to master to do our jobs effectively. We can learn a great deal on our own about new features through research and testing, but sometimes that isn’t enough to get the answers we need. In this talk, we will discuss strategies you can use during all three stages of an interview — preparing, conducting, and following up. We will discuss how to use the principles of both journalism and technical communication for an efficient and productive interview — whether the interview is in person, virtual, or asynchronous.
Please come to the session with your challenges with interviewing subject matter experts, and I will do my best to provide useful strategies. We can also share solutions with each other.
Nicky Bleiel, Innovative Systems, Inc.
Nicoletta (Nicky) Bleiel is the Senior Information Developer & Content Strategist at Innovative Systems in Pittsburgh, PA, USA. She has more than 20 years of experience writing and designing content for software products in a variety of industries — including fintech, AI, single-sourcing, media sales, industrial automation, and pharmaceutical management. Nicky is a fellow and past president of the former Society for Technical Communication. See nickybleiel.com for a list of her talks and articles.
Tag, You're It! Playing Nice with DITA
Marketing, technical, training, and support teams often create content in silos, leading to duplication and inconsistency. DITA provides a common set of rules that enables collaboration while preserving each team’s unique goals.
This session highlights how metadata supports discovery and targeted publishing, how taxonomies promote clarity without semantic overload, and how highly designed materials can be adapted into DITA without losing impact. We’ll also explore strategies for creating reusable, modular content that flows across teams to improve consistency and customer experience, creating a coordinated, sustainable content ecosystem.
Jake Campbell, Scriptorium
Jake Campbell is an experienced technical consultant who blends technology and design to deliver multichannel publishing solutions for content. Driven by both process and solution-oriented approaches, and a love for solving puzzles, he’s at home in the technical publishing world. Drawing from his background in e-learning development and software QA testing, Jake is adept at working with people across different disciplines to understand their needs. He then develops workflows that support those needs and business goals.
Automating API Readiness for AI
As AI becomes a core part of the customer experience, the accuracy and usability of API documentation are critical to ensuring reliable, AI-driven support and automation. This session highlights two open source-powered automated tests to improve API documentation quality and readiness for AI consumption. The first is the AI Readiness score, built on the IBM OpenAPI Validator. This tool analyzes API specifications for clarity, completeness, and consistency, which are key factors that affect both human usability and AI performance. It helps teams identify vague or underspecified parameters that can lead to incorrect AI-generated outputs. The second is automated API request example validation, which uses Prism, an open source mock server, to test curl request examples in API docs. It ensures these examples are syntactically correct, executable, and aligned with the API definition, making them reliable for human developers and AI assistants alike. Together, these automated tests reduce manual effort, surface hidden issues, and help product teams deliver trustworthy, accurate API documentation.
Carolyn Carpenter & Jenifer Scholtfeldt, IBM
Carolyn Carpenter is the ContentOps and docs build lead for IBM Cloud, where she guides the authoring processes, automated builds, and contribution workflows for hundreds of contributors across IBM Cloud product and API documentation. With a Master of Science in Technical Communication from North Carolina State University, Carolyn began her IBM career in 2012 as an information developer for WebSphere Application Server before transitioning to a content designer and strategist for IBM Cloud. In her current role, she focuses on streamlining publishing workflows so writers can concentrate on what they do best: creating high-quality, user-focused content. She brings deep experience in technical writing, content strategy, and tooling to help organizations meet the evolving demands of their users.
Jenifer Schlotfeldt drives the docs business of IBM Cloud, from technology to tooling to content strategy. More recently Jenifer has also been contributing to the AI strategy in IBM Cloud. As the Senior Technical Staff Member in this space, she leads a team of software engineers, content engineers, context engineers, and content designers who own the IBM Data and AI Experience. Not only is the team supporting the continuous delivery of the IBM Cloud AI assistant and the IBM Cloud Docs and API Docs, but they also embrace DevOps and Design Thinking practices. She is also the co-author of “DITA Best Practices: A Roadmap for Writing, Editing, and Architecting in DITA” and author of several industry articles.
Future-Proof Your Docs: AI-First Strategies for Smarter Content
As AI tools become more deeply integrated into the customer journey, product documentation is evolving from static reference material into a dynamic data source that powers intelligent systems. Content professionals now play a pivotal role in shaping how AI interprets and responds to user needs. This session presents a two-pronged approach to preparing documentation for AI: leveraging automation technology and evolving content strategy. On the technology side, we’ll share practical methods for automating the maintenance of UI, CLI, and API documentation, which reduces manual effort while improving accuracy and consistency. On the content strategy side, we’ll explore how to adopt an “AI-first” mindset by updating information architecture, refining terminology, and applying AI-specific writing best practices. Together, these strategies help teams ensure their documentation is maintainable and optimized for AI tools.
Carolyn Carpenter & Michelle Kaufman, IBM
Carolyn Carpenter is the ContentOps and docs build lead for IBM Cloud, where she guides the authoring processes, automated builds, and contribution workflows for hundreds of contributors across IBM Cloud product and API documentation. With a Master of Science in Technical Communication from North Carolina State University, Carolyn began her IBM career in 2012 as an information developer for WebSphere Application Server before transitioning to a content designer and strategist for IBM Cloud. In her current role, she focuses on streamlining publishing workflows so writers can concentrate on what they do best: creating high-quality, user-focused content. She brings deep experience in technical writing, content strategy, and tooling to help organizations meet the evolving demands of their users.
Michelle Kaufman is a Content Strategist and Context Engineer at IBM with 13 years of experience shaping user-centered content for enterprise software and cloud platforms. She began her career as an Information Developer intern after earning a Master’s in Technical Communication from NC State University and has since held roles as a Content Designer for WebSphere, team lead and Content Strategist for IBM Cloud, and now Context Engineer working on AI-driven initiatives. Michelle combines technical knowledge with a focus on user satisfaction and accessibility, creating content experiences that inform, empower, and include users of all abilities.
Enterprise DITA Content Refactoring: Lessons from Pure Storage PEAK
Pure Storage’s PEAK (Performance Education and Knowledge) initiative undertook an ambitious enterprise-scale DITA content refactoring project—systematically transforming content at scale while maintaining live production operations in Heretto CCMS. After nearly two years building their DITA infrastructure using Heretto and Zoomin, stakeholder feedback revealed that technical implementation alone wasn’t enough; content quality was the missing piece for customer satisfaction.
This presentation shares real-world lessons from refactoring thousands of DITA topics across multiple product lines. We’ll demonstrate our methodical approach: automated gap analysis identifying structural inconsistencies, collaborative Information Architecture training between consultant and internal teams, and the development of sustainable automation tools including Schematron validation rules and Ryffine’s automated conversion and refactoring platform that is integrated with Heretto.
Key insights include balancing automation with human judgment, managing content freeze coordination across development teams, implementing quality gates that prevent regression, and building internal capability for ongoing maintenance. We’ll share metrics showing measurable improvements in content discoverability and user experience, plus candid discussion of challenges including scope creep, stakeholder alignment, and technical complexity.
Attendees will gain actionable strategies for planning large-scale content transformations, practical automation techniques, and frameworks for building sustainable content quality processes that scale with organizational growth.
BreAnn Cintron, Pure Storage and Bill Gearhart, Ryffine
BreAnn Cintron serves as Senior Manager, Knowledge & Community for Pure Storage, where she leads the strategic transformation of customer-facing documentation and educational content through the PEAK (Performance Education and Knowledge) initiative.
With extensive experience in technical communication leadership, BreAnn has guided cross-functional teams through large-scale content strategy implementations, balancing technical requirements with user experience priorities. Her approach emphasizes sustainable processes that scale with organizational growth while maintaining content quality standards.
At Pure Storage, BreAnn manages the ongoing evolution of PEAK’s information architecture, working closely with product management, engineering, and customer support teams to ensure documentation serves both internal efficiency goals and customer success objectives. Her leadership during the comprehensive content refactoring project demonstrates expertise in change management, vendor partnership, and measurable improvement methodologies that other organizations can adapt for their own content transformation initiatives.
Bill Gearhart is a Senior Consultant at Ryffine, specializing in enterprise content strategy and DITA implementations. He’s spent his career helping organizations transform their content operations, with particular expertise in complex integrations involving multiple content systems and formats.
Bill has guided numerous enterprises through strategic content transformations, focusing on practical approaches to content architecture, technical implementation, and organizational change management. At Ryffine, he leads client engagements that require deep technical expertise combined with strategic business thinking. His collaborative approach emphasizes knowledge transfer and capability building, ensuring clients can sustain and evolve their content operations long-term.
Unlocking Efficient Collaboration: Content Fusion Cloud for Modern Documentation Teams
Content Fusion is a next-generation platform designed to streamline technical documentation through real-time collaboration, open standards, and seamless integration with modern tools.
It is available either as a Cloud Subscription or as an Enterprise on-premise installed server.
Content Fusion is a next-generation platform designed to streamline technical documentation through real-time collaboration, open standards, and seamless integration with modern tools. It is available either as a Cloud Subscription or as an Enterprise on-premise installed server.
The Content Fusion CMS is built on the DITA standard, ensuring no vendor lock-in and full compatibility with Git. By connecting to a Git repository, teams gain complete ownership of their content history and can leverage a wide ecosystem of tools, including continuous integration and quality checks.
– Documentation writers can work on multiple projects branches and publish their work to WebHelp and PDF directly from the platform.
– With its advanced concurrent editing algorithm, multiple subject matter experts can review content together, track changes, and make edits in real time.
– The AI Positron Assistant integration allows safe, reviewable AI-assisted edits, while visual diff tools make it easy to preview changes.
Content Fusion also supports Markdown, making it simple to integrate developer-written content. Its optimized Git layer and project-level revision history enable efficient multi-author workflows and reliable project-wide operations.
Radu Coravu & George Bina, Syncro Soft/Oxygen XML Editor
Radu Coravu is a DITA XML expert working on oXygen XML Editor. During the last years, his main focus has been on the development of the visual XML Author editing environment and the specific-DITA support provided by oXygen, combined with working on the Oxygen AI Positron add-on which adds specific AI functionality for editing DITA XML content.
He provides support for complex integrations and helps steer the product in the right direction, all this with some development on the side.
George Bina is one of the founder of Syncro Soft, the company that develops the Oxygen XML suite of tools for editing, authoring, developing, publishing, and collaborating on XML content. With over 20 years of experience working with XML and related technologies, he has brought many innovative ideas to life, contributed to open-source projects related to XML, and presented at numerous XML and DITA conferences.
Enhancing AI Intelligence: Leveraging Tools for Contextual Editing
Discover how to empower AI engines with enhanced editing capabilities by utilizing tools to provide precise context. This presentation explores innovative techniques to bridge the gap between AI and human-like understanding, enabling smarter, more efficient content editing and decision-making processes. Learn how contextual tools can transform AI into a more intuitive and effective tool for your projects.
AI engines can be used with special tools to access sufficient context information from the existing documentation to generate accurate and useful content and help the technical documentation writing process.
Radu Coravu, Syncro Soft/Oxygen XML Editor
Radu Coravu is a DITA XML expert working on oXygen XML Editor. During the last years, his main focus has been on the development of the visual XML Author editing environment and the specific-DITA support provided by oXygen, combined with working on the Oxygen AI Positron add-on which adds specific AI functionality for editing DITA XML content.
He provides support for complex integrations and helps steer the product in the right direction, all this with some development on the side.
Beyond Prompts: AI-Ready Content Strategies for Professionals
Technical writers are leading an underrecognized transformation in preparing content for artificial intelligence. This session shares early findings of an ethnographic study on how professionals across industries are restructuring documents, redefining metadata, and evolving workflows to create AI-ready information. Attendees will learn about a new taxonomy for classifying content strategies—structural, semantic, contextual, and operational—and see practical before/after examples from real organizations. The discussion also addresses industry-specific approaches in software, healthcare, finance, and education, and uncovers variables that determine strategy success. Emphasis is given to techniques with proven impact, such as modular content design, controlled vocabularies, and AI-driven validation methods. Attendees will leave equipped with frameworks for assessing their own AI content readiness, and actionable steps for both small teams and large enterprises. The session calls for participation in research to systematically document what works—contributing to a community-driven knowledge base for the future of AI-enabled content.
Lance Cummings, University of North Carolina Wilmington
Lance Cummings, PhD, is an Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, specializing in writing, information architecture, and the intersection of AI and technical communication. Drawing from both academic research and industry partnerships, Lance’s work focuses on how organizations adapt content strategies for emerging technologies. He leads ethnographic research into AI-ready documentation and is a frequent presenter on content innovation for professional and academic audiences. As author of “Cyborgs Writing” on Substack, he connects technical writers and content professionals exploring the future of human-AI collaboration in content development.
Not Your Grandparents' Comparative-Doc Review - Applying DITA and Generative-AI
In the past 20 years, DITA has demonstrated depth and power when it comes to producing technical documentation for enterprise, consumer, and regulated products. The same infrastructure and information architecture supporting customer-visible documentation is equally available for teams developing internal reports.
Harnessing DITA for competitive documentation reviews represents such an opportunity.
Traditional competitive doc reviews in many companies have shortcomings:
- Far more interpretive/subjective the data driven.
- Review data collection is predominantly manual, not automated.
- Review results are fragmentary. Sustained, recurring reviews are needed.
- Reviews do not integrate feedback from generative AI systems.
- Review documents rarely auto-reference collected data.
Stan will illustrate how DITA can drive next-generation competitive doc reviews using the same infrastructure and techniques that have made it the high-water mark for customer-facing content development.
- 21st century evaluation criteria
- AI-driven techniques for competitive data collection
- DITA map and topic templates for collecting/integrating data.
- Techniques to evaluate competitive data over time.
- Anonymized samples of industry samples.
Stanley Doherty, Ph.D.
Stan Doherty lives in the Boston area and has just retired from Google LLC as a senior documentation manager. He is a current and founding member OASIS DITA Technical Committee, chair of the ACM SIGDOC committee on Structured Authoring, IEEE technical reviewer, and co-manager of the Boston DITA Users Group. Feel free to contact Stan if you are considering DITA, DITA tools, or DITA-Markdown hybrid environments.
Contact: [email protected]
This is What We Trained For DITA, GenAI, Semantic Layer
This presentation will be a chronology over the 20 years of DITA (the presenters was an early adopter and likely the first heavy equipment adopter). In that journey the presenter will discuss successes, mistakes and observations from his own experience as an adventurer both with XML schemas and geography.
The presentation will not be focused on nostalgia, but reflective. It will move into the current GenAI boom and how DITA has prepared us for what is still coming –the long promised semantic layer and structure for easy AI digestion.
- Pre DITA XML
- DITA escape from the lab
- Growth and Adoption
- Candid successes and failures
- Preparing for the future
- Exploiting what we have already done in the new age
Charles Dowdell, Komatsu NA
Charles Dowdell has 25 + years experience leading technical communications teams, tools and processes. Most of his experience is in global multinational corporations across several different industries (both regulated and unregulated). He is an experienced conference presenter and enjoys a good laugh coupled with professionalism in Tech Comms and Information Science. His career started as a global field service engineer. He is an alumnus of Syracuse University iSchool and has worked on all 7 continents.
Why Portals, Search, and AI Underperform
Organizations invest significant time and money in portals, search, and AI. They expect results. Fast. But without a standard way to package documentation, those systems underperform. iiRDS is the only open metadata standard purpose-built for modular, intelligent technical documentation delivery. Use it to turn scattered PDFs, HTML, Markdown, or XML from disparate content silos into intelligent packages that systems can actually use to surface answers. The payoff: content alignment, faster time to value, lower support costs, and existing technology finally delivering the ROI you paid for.
Lief Erickson, Intuitive Stack
Lief Erickson is co-founder of Intuitive Stack, a content strategy consultancy for businesses with outdated technical documentation practices. He holds a master’s degree in Content Strategy from FH Joanneum (Austria), where he also teaches information architecture. With expertise in taxonomies, search optimization, and ContentOps, Lief has held roles as a technical writer and information architect. At Intuitive Stack, he helps organizations modernize their content strategy so they can focus on their next innovation.
Navigating ContentOps, DITA, Markdown, and AI: A ConVEx Atlas
Attending ConVEx as a newcomer can feel like entering a new world of acronyms, tools, and experts. This session is designed for early-career professionals navigating their first professional conference. We will introduce a practical model for understanding levels of complexity in Content Operations, from basic desktop publishing workflows to tightly structured topics with advanced reuse strategies. Participants will also gain a hands-on orientation to DITA and Markdown as essential foundations for content creation and exchange. Like an atlas that charts unfamiliar territory, this presentation will map the key concepts, communities, and technologies that define today’s content landscape. We will highlight not just the “what” of tools and processes, but also the “where” and “how” they fit into broader ecosystems of practice. Generative AI will be explored as a new “frontier” on this map—its opportunities, challenges, and implications for modern technical content workflows. The goal is to equip attendees with the vocabulary, concepts, and confidence to engage fully in sessions, conversations, and workplace projects. This presentation offers a welcoming space for newcomers and an opportunity for experienced professionals to connect with and mentor the next generation of practitioners.
Carlos Evia Puerto, Virginia Tech and Rebekka Andersen, University of California, Davis
Carlos Evia Puerto is a professor of communication, associate dean for transdisciplinary initiatives and chief technology officer in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences. A mediocre studio session DJ turned decent entertainment journalist, Carlos moved to the intersection of information technology and the humanities with early jobs as database designer and technical writer. In his academic career, he has been a professor of English (technical communication) and communication (digital publishing and content strategy) and an award-winning researcher in transdisciplinary technical communication and content operations. He is the author of “Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight DITA, editor of “Content Operations from Start to Scale, co-author off “Technical Communication and the Discipline of Content: Considerations for Research, Training, and Career Readiness,” and has contributed to the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) and Lightweight DITA (LwDITA) standards for digital content. A proud Mexican American, Carlos taught himself how to speak English by watching Sesame Street and (not simultaneously) reading MAD Magazine.
Rebekka Andersen is an associate professor in the University Writing Program at the University of California, Davis, where she teaches courses in professional and technical communication and serves as the Associate Director for Professional Writing. Her research focuses on strategies for building stronger connections between academia and industry as well as on implications of digital transformations, particularly around content, for education and research in professional communication. She regularly presents her research at both industry and academic conferences and serves on the editorial boards or reviewer boards of several journals in the field of professional and technical communication. She also serves on the steering committee of the ACM SIGDOC Committee on Structured Authoring and Content Management and on the Technical Communication Advisory Board at the University of Minnesota. Rebekka is co-author of “Technical Communication and the Discipline of Content: Considerations for Research, Training, and Career Readiness.”
Automating Content Audit with AI Agents: An SAP Case Study
Imagine auditing the quality of hundreds of online help pages in minutes. Is it a dream – or can AI agents make it a reality?
Content audit is a methodology to evaluate the content quality, uncovering gaps, inconsistencies, and needs for updates. It’s more than language editing: it helps content strategists ensure that documentation really adds value to customers. However, our experience has shown that auditing content manually can be very time consuming, even for small products.
What if content audits were automated via AI agents? Can AI support all the contextual information required for a content audit? Can an AI agent evaluate terminology, accessibility, DITA, plus completeness and accuracy on a large guide? If so, how? And how far can technical writers who don’t code go in creating an AI agent from scratch?
All these questions came up as I partnered with three fellow technical writers at SAP to put together a proof of concept to automate content audits of online product documentation using AI agents. In this session, I will guide you through our steps, challenges, and results. Initial findings are that development work might be required, and that prompting is an extremely valuable skill.
Alice Fagundes Otero, SAP
Alice Otero is a User Assistance Development Architect at SAP Labs Latin America in Brazil, with a background in translation, writing, editing, and innovation management. Since 2009, she has been designing and creating content for HR and logistics software used in USA, Canada, Brazil and Spain. She believes in using the available technologies to solve real problems from users and crafting the most effective content. In her spare time, Alice also produces olive oil and olive oil-based cosmetics in southern Brazil.
Why Knowledge Capture Should Be Our #1 Priority
The core role of a tech communications expert is to capture and relay new information. Traditionally, we capture knowledge for a specific project or publication. However, this view is limited and doesn’t unlock the full power of structured authoring. We need to stop aligning projects to particular publications and seek ways to create versatile content repositories capable of feeding content needs that may emerge in the future.
Moving to a knowledge capture mindset would shift the primary focus to creating content components and then using these components to make the near-term deliverables. This mindset shift would lay the groundwork for future projects, including supporting AI agents.
In this session, we:
- Share the value of moving to a knowledge capture mindset
- Discuss how moving from a document to a Q&A model shifts the information we need to capture
- Explore how this shift changes how we work
Leslie Farinella, Content Rules
Leslie Farinella is the President of Content Rules.
With a background in engineering, software development, process optimization, content strategy, and instructional design, Leslie has spent the last 25 years solving complex business problems within Fortune 1000 companies, first working as a consultant and then delivering technical solutions while serving as Chief Strategy Officer at Xyleme, a leading CCMS for Learning.
Leslie believes that value generation is about mastering the ability to identify the crux of the problem through a deep understanding of the user experience, devising a feasible path forward, and then executing that plan with laser precision using a mix of business processes, change management, and technology.
When she’s not solving problems, you can find Leslie outside reading, gardening, or walking on the beach.
Enterprise Content to Knowledge: Unifying DITA, Multimedia, and Unstructured Content
KION Group’s Central Technology Organization faced a critical challenge: their fragmented content ecosystem couldn’t deliver unified experiences across diverse content types—from DITA-structured technical documentation and multimedia assets to unstructured content from multiple legacy systems and formats. This presentation chronicles our strategic-to-tactical journey implementing enterprise content aggregation, beginning with KION’s Automation & Robotics operational unit as a focused pilot before expanding enterprise-wide. We’ll share our progression from strategic vision—analyzing pain points, evaluating AI integration opportunities, and defining transformation goals—to tactical execution with practical frameworks and proven solutions.
Learn how KION is building a true knowledge base by aggregating DITA and non-DITA content for their Automation & Robotics audiences (customers, dealers, field personnel, and internal teams) by integrating their Component Content Management System (Bluestream XDocs), Digital Asset Database (DAD), and multiple unstructured content sources through Fluid Topics as their central Content Delivery System (CDS). Strategic insights include: Vision development and stakeholder buy-in for phased enterprise content aggregation, how technology evolution and emerging AI capabilities make aggregation efforts more feasible, operational unit-focused pilot approach for managing implementation complexity. Tactical demonstrations cover: “Putting things in motion”—from requirements and tool selection to integration lessons learned and pain points, scalable validation approaches for enterprise deployment.
Tania Fuhrmann, KION Group and Bill Gearhart, Ryffine
Tania Fuhrmann is Sr. Manager Global Technical Documentation in KION Group’s Central Technology Organization, specifically within CTO Robotics Lifecycle Support. In this role, she leads the strategic transformation of how technical information reaches KION’s diverse automation and robotics audiences—from customers and dealers to field personnel and internal teams.
Tania brings extensive experience in enterprise content strategy, having guided KION’s automation segment through the complex evaluation, planning, and implementation of their unified Content Delivery System. She specializes in bridging business requirements with technical implementation, ensuring content strategies align with organizational goals while meeting user needs across multiple formats and languages.
Within KION’s automation and robotics division, Tania has been instrumental in establishing the strategic foundation for enterprise content aggregation, working collaboratively with cross-functional teams to define content strategy frameworks, information architecture requirements, and technical validation approaches. Her practical experience managing large-scale content transformation projects provides valuable insights for organizations facing similar enterprise content challenges in complex technical environments.
Bill Gearhart is a Senior Consultant at Ryffine, specializing in enterprise content strategy and DITA implementations. He’s spent his career helping organizations transform their content operations, with particular expertise in complex integrations involving multiple content systems and formats.
Bill has guided numerous enterprises through strategic content transformations, focusing on practical approaches to content architecture, technical implementation, and organizational change management. At Ryffine, he leads client engagements that require deep technical expertise combined with strategic business thinking. His collaborative approach emphasizes knowledge transfer and capability building, ensuring clients can sustain and evolve their content operations long-term.
Making the Case, Making the Change, Making a Difference
In case you haven’t noticed, our industry is undergoing some changes. Whether we call ourselves content strategists, information developers, or communication professionals almost everything we do is being changed with the advent of new technologies and, less visibly, deep transformations in how our organizations function. The question that is on everyone’s mind, or that should be, is where do we fit in this brave, new world and what can we do to find and execute on a new role in it. This question is both big and profoundly practical. It applies to what we do on a daily basis, what tools we use, and how some of the things we have relied upon so heavily, like some of our markup standards, will need to evolve if they are going to survive. This talk, which is grounded in experiences with at least two preceding technology revolutions, is about what we can do in this situation. It is really about some of the business considerations we need to grapple with as we make the case for our role in shaping the future.
The good news is that all the pieces do in fact come together. There is, as a consequence, hope.
Joe Gollner, Gnostyx Research
Joe Gollner is the Managing Director of Gnostyx Research Inc. (http://www.gnostyx.com) where he specializes in providing objective and research-based guidance on the development, management, and strategic use of content technologies. In this field, he is a veteran implementer with over 30 years of experience, and he is well-known for mixing leading-edge ideas (and all too frequently concocting them) with highly pragmatic implementation tactics. He has Masters degrees from both the University of Oxford (Literature) and McGill University (Management), blogs about Content and Management (http://www.gollner.ca), and is pursuing doctoral research into the role of AI-enabled text analytics in the management of organizations.
From the Trenches: Challenges of Translating DITA CCMS content
Our work (translating DITA CCMS content, using vendors and internal/external CAT/TMS systems) is very challenging and complex. It helps to compare notes and learn from the mistakes of others. I’ve got a lot of lessons learned, and I expect others would if they’ve done similar work.
I work with Tridion Docs, but there are other CCMSs out there.
Frieda Gress, Thermo Fisher Scientific
Frieda Gress has been managing translation projects for technical user documentation at Thermo Fisher Scientific for over 7 years. Her team works closely with technical writers that author DITA XML content through a CCMS. Her team has worked with internal and external translation management systems (TMSs), CAT tools, and language service providers/vendors, and has delivered user documentation to customers in PDF and HTML formats and via multiple delivery channels. Of course, mistakes were made and lessons were learned, while some things clearly paid off (such as the investment in a CCMS).
Prior to Thermo Fisher Scientific, Frieda worked in education, publishing, and public service. Along the way, she studied languages, linguistics, computer science, information science, and educational technologies.
Agentive AI and the Future of Technical Documentation
AI and the Future of Technical Documentation: From LLMs to Fully Agentive Workflows
Many technical documentation teams are already experimenting with AI, some more extensively than others. Whether through direct use of large language models (LLMs) or commercial tools that incorporate them, AI is becoming a common part of the landscape. But integrating AI into isolated tasks is one thing -automating the entire content supply chain is something else entirely.
You may have heard of AI agents and agentive workflows. But have you actually seen a complete, end-to-end agentic workflow in action, one designed specifically for the production and management of technical documentation? Join Michael as he shares what it takes to build an industrial-grade agentive content supply chain. This isn’t just about writing clever prompts or deploying a single-purpose bot. It’s about orchestrating a comprehensive, multi-agent system where content professionals collaborate with AI across the entire content lifecycle.
This isn’t hype or hypothetical. Michael will demonstrate real, production-ready agentive workflows already delivering results and evolving rapidly. These systems are transforming not only how content is produced, but also what it means to be a content professional in the age of AI.
Michael Iantosca, Avalara
Michael Iantosca is Senior Director of Content Platforms at Avalara Inc., with over four decades of experience at the intersection of content and technology. A pioneer in structured content, Michael spent 38 years of his 44 year career at IBM, where he led the development of groundbreaking content management systems and co-founded the team that created the DITA standard. With dual expertise in content strategy and systems engineering, he helped shape the early foundations of structured content in the 1980s and drove some of the industry’s first scalable content platforms. Today, Michael is at the forefront of integrating AI into the content lifecycle, leading the design of advanced agentive systems that automate and elevate technical content creation. His work continues to define how content professionals adapt to—and lead through—the next wave of technological transformation.
Bringing DITA, iiRDS, and Markdown Closer Together
The OASIS DITA Technical Committee and iiRDS Consortium built a joint working group to develop an integration of DITA and iiRDS. The goal was to expand the iiRDS metadata harvested from DITA, and to provide IRIs (Internationalized Resource Identifiers) to enhance the DITA content supported by iiRDS metadata, thus enhancing information retrieval. The integration uses subject schemes and the DITA element to standardize the incorporation of iiRDS metadata for organizations that want to facilitate retrieval of content. Integration of iiRDS into markdown is also supported.
Bob Johnson, Cliostechscribe and Harald Stadlbauer, NINEFEB
Since he started working with DITA in 2006, Bob Johnson has worked as a DITA author, content strategist, and information architect. Bob brings twenty-five years of content management experience, including more than ten years working for a CMS vendor and participation in multiple CCM acquisitions. After working in software and in medical devices, Bob currently collaborates with equipment manufacturers and operators to address their technical content needs. Bob is co-facilitator of the Boston DITA User’s Group and is known in the DITA community for his work on accessibility.
Harald Stadlbauer is General Manager of the NINEFEB Group of companies, dedicated to the advancement of Technical Communication, like Technical Documentation as well as eLearning to the intelligent delivery of it. He is actively engaged in developing iiRDS further as well as contributing to the AAS (Asset Administration Shell) submodels of the IDTA (Industrial Digital Twin Association).
AI in Action: Securely Summarizing Content at Build Time
While modern content delivery platforms can generate topic summaries on demand, there are compelling business and operational reasons to generate them statically during the publishing process. In this session, we’ll explore why our team chose to integrate AI-driven summarization at build time rather than at runtime, and how this decision supports scalability, performance, and governance. We’ll walk through our approach to combining Python with Open Toolkit to automate summary generation, and how we leveraged ServiceNow’s OneLLM service to produce consistent, high-quality results. Along the way, we’ll share lessons learned about integrating large language models (LLMs) into publishing workflows, including key considerations around data security, content integrity, and infrastructure constraints. Whether you’re exploring AI for technical documentation or looking to streamline publishing operations, this talk will offer practical insights into how build-time AI can enhance content delivery – without compromising control.
Eliot Kimber & Abdul Choudhry, ServiceNow
Eliot Kimber is a founding and current member of the DITA Technical Committee, as well as contributor to many other related standards, including XML, XSL-FO, and HyTime. Eliot has been doing structured markup and document processing for a very long time, most recently as part of the Product Content Engineering team at ServiceNow. Eliot holds a black belt in the martial art Aikido. Eliot lives and works in Austin, Texas.
Abdul Choudhry is a Content Engineer at ServiceNow, where he works on the product content engineering team alongside his co-presenter and senior colleague Eliot Kimber. Abdul is currently pursuing a graduate degree in Data Science Analytics at Georgia Tech, with a focus on applying AI to technical content publishing workflows. His recent work explores the intersection of build-time automation, Python integration, and secure use of large language models to enhance content delivery.
English Majors Make the Best Prompt Engineers
Current text-generating AI works only in response to prompts. If two people, a technical writer with training in the English language and a software engineer with training in AI, are asked to generate a technical document, the English-major technical writer will out-perform the software engineer. This session shows you how.
Eric Kuhnen, TransPerfect
Eric Kuhnen is President of the GlobalLink CCMS business at TransPerfect, Inc., where he leads strategic product lines and services delivering enterprise-scale component-content-management solutions. With a career spanning over two decades in structured content and technology innovation, Eric has held leadership roles including President of Vasont CCMS and Director of Product Management at several software firms. Since 2006 he has focused on enabling organizations to author, manage and deliver topic-based, reusable content that accelerates global digital transformation and content-supply-chain efficiency. Eric holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Brigham Young University.
Is Your Content Ready for Agentic AI?
Agentic AI isn’t coming — it’s already here. With Model Context Protocols (MCPs) launched more than a year ago, the shift from simple chatbots to autonomous, goal-driven systems is accelerating fast. These aren’t tools that just answer questions; they orchestrate full processes—diagnosing issues, guiding repairs, and resolving customer cases end-to-end. The technology stack is ready. The critical question now: is your content ready to power it?
For technical communication professionals, this is both a huge opportunity and an urgent wake-up call. Agentic AI requires structured, machine-consumable content to deliver on its promise. Teams that adapt quickly will move from producing documentation to shaping entire user experiences, becoming strategic enablers of their company’s AI transformation. Those who wait risk being left behind as competitors redefine service and support with Agentic systems. This session will cut through the hype and show real-world use cases that prove Agentic AI is already reshaping the industry. You’ll walk away with a clear view of why this is the next evolution of content delivery and how you must act now to prepare.
Fabrice Lacroix, Fluid Topics
Fabrice Lacroix is a serial entrepreneur and a web pioneer. He has been working for 25 years on the development of innovative solutions around search technology, content enrichment and AI. He is the founder of Fluid Topics, the leading Content Delivery Platform that reinvents how users search, read and interact with technical documentation.
Beyond Content Models and Tools: Workflow as the Game-Changer
When organizations undertake content transformation projects—implementing structured authoring, adopting a CCMS, or modernizing publishing pipelines—most of the attention goes to content models and tools. Yet the overlooked pillar that often determines success (or failure) is workflow.
Workflow isn’t just a series of steps; it is the connective tissue that brings together people (roles and responsibilities), processes, tools, content, and data. Without well-designed workflows, even the best content models and most powerful technology may fail to achieve transformation objectives or deliver intended results.
This session makes the case for putting workflow first in content transformation projects. We’ll explore common failure points caused by not addressing workflow adequately, then show how intentional workflow design unlocks the full potential of structured content models and advanced technologies. Attendees will gain practical approaches for designing workflows that align with business and operational requirements, enabling more sustainable, scalable, and measurable transformation.
Toni Mantych, Content Rules
Toni Mantych is a content strategy thought leader with over 20 years of experience guiding enterprise organizations through large-scale content and technology transformations. At ServiceNow—a company built around enabling workflow—she scaled the Product Content organization from 40 team members to more than 160 globally, driving new ways of working that connected people, processes, and tools across regions. Since moving exclusively into consulting in 2024, Toni has expanded her portfolio beyond enterprise SaaS organizations to include projects in the pharmacy, medical device, publishing, and restaurant industries. Beginning October 2025, Toni serves as VP, Content Operations Strategy and Solutions at Content Rules, where she partners with global enterprises to modernize content practices at scale. She combines her corporate content leadership experience, professional coaching expertise, and extensive training in project and change management to focus on creating sustainable change. Whether as an executive, consultant, industry speaker, or private coach, Toni takes a practical, human-centered approach to helping organizations and individuals achieve their goals.
Transforming Your Organization to AI-First Content Design
In today’s digital landscape, content is more than just information. It’s a high-value business asset and, increasingly, high-value data. As AI becomes integral to the client journey, our organization is embracing an AI-first content strategy to revolutionize how we plan, create, maintain, and deliver content. This transformation enhances efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction by embedding AI into every stage of the content lifecycle—from generation and automation to fine-tuning and analytics.
AI is reshaping how we work, requiring new habits and tools that integrate AI into our platforms and products. Instead of AI replacing the writer’s role, an AI-first approach elevates it. By leveraging AI thoughtfully, teams are empowered to deliver smarter, faster, and more personalized content experiences. This shift positions content not just as a support function, but as a strategic driver of business value in an AI-powered future.
Courtney Mauney & Jenifer Schlotfeldt, IBM
Courtney Mauney is a seasoned leader at IBM, managing a multidisciplinary team of software developers and technical content professionals who craft user-centered experiences for enterprise software and cloud platforms. With a Master’s in Technical Communication from NC State University, Courtney began her 20-year career as an Information Developer and has since held roles as Editor, Content Designer, Content Strategist, and Manager. She’s known for driving business transformation through strategic content leadership, aligning cross-functional teams, and delivering impactful project plans that elevate the client journey. Courtney’s leadership style centers on collaboration, clarity, and empowering teams to deliver content that drives results.
Jenifer Schlotfeldt drives the docs business of IBM Cloud, from technology to tooling to content strategy. More recently Jenifer has also been contributing to the AI strategy in IBM Cloud. As the Senior Technical Staff Member in this space, she leads a team of software engineers, content engineers, context engineers, and content designers who own the IBM Data and AI Experience. Not only is the team supporting the continuous delivery of the IBM Cloud AI assistant and the IBM Cloud Docs and API Docs, but they also embrace DevOps and Design Thinking practices. She is also the co-author of “DITA Best Practices: A Roadmap for Writing, Editing, and Architecting in DITA” and author of several industry articles.
Let Them Theory – Surviving & Thriving in Collaboration Chaos
Technical writers are often caught in a perfect storm: expected to produce polished, accurate content with incomplete information, minimal collaboration, and under tight deadlines—while convincing others that documentation even matters. The result? Burnout, resentment, and a creeping sense of invisibility. This talk offers a counterintuitive but powerful solution: the “Let Them” theory, popularized by Mel Robbins. Instead of chasing validation or trying to control dysfunctional team dynamics, technical writers can reclaim energy and influence by letting go of what they can’t control—and strategically focusing on what they can.
In technical communication, where we can sometimes feel underappreciated, undervalued, and overshadowed, this theory provides the framework to deal with other people’s behavior when it’s frustrating, confusing, or out of your control. Rather than sinking into apathy, redirect your energy into your own boundaries, clarity of purpose, and strategic actions.
Let them complain. Let them ignore the documentation. Let them think user documentation is just a box to check to comply with the SLA. Instead of trying to force respect, drag people into collaboration, or argue about the importance of docs: Let them. And do your job anyway — better.
Jennifer Miller, Independent
Jennifer Miller is a documentation and knowledge systems evangelist who thrives at the intersection of people, processes, and technology. She transforms documentation from a static necessity into a strategic asset that drives decision-making, reduces costs, improves retention, and mitigates risk. Backed by research and data, she champions the measurable value of well-designed knowledge systems.
After 7 years as a technical writer in software development, she joined an Information Security Team where she developed and manages the knowledge and documentation system that helps her team capture, maintain, organize, and access the information they need in the appropriate format and the right location.
Jennifer has a B.A. in Human Learning & Development and an M.S. in Library & Information Science. Her passion for language led her to technical writing—and to a fiercely competitive streak in Scrabble.
Content Ryffiner: AI Platform for Content Conversion and Quality
Problem:
Content migrations are slow, manual, and error-prone, while ongoing quality management lacks visibility. Teams spend weeks converting Word, FrameMaker, HTML, and DocBook to DITA without understanding baseline content health or measuring quality improvements on an ongoing basis.
AI Solution:
Content Ryffiner provides integrated modules for comprehensive content intelligence: Converter automates transformation to DITA 1.3 and DocBook 5, while Evaluate analyzes content across four quality dimensions—minimalism, semantic richness, scalability/modularity, and stylistic consistency. Beta testers have demonstrated measurable quality improvements through AI-guided analysis and conversion.
Value to Attendees:
Teams gain quantified visibility into content health before and after migrations, enabling data-driven quality decisions. The platform transforms subjective quality assessments into objective, measurable metrics accessible to non-technical content professionals.
Test Kitchen Experience:
Participants will observe live demonstrations of both Converter and Evaluate modules using curated sample documents. You’ll see guided conversion workflows, real-time quality analysis across the four assessment dimensions, and before/after quality comparisons. Interested attendees can schedule individual content reviews for their own documents. The session shows how the Content Ryffiner streamlines complex conversions, provides full visibility into quality,, and delivers measurable savings in time and cost.
Frank Miller, Ryffine
Frank Miller is an industry thought leader at Ryffine whose career focuses on leading enterprise client engagements and building the information development community. He has guided dozens of successful DITA implementations across diverse industries, working with leading organizations to transform their content strategies and technical communication workflows.
Frank’s expertise spans enterprise content architecture, AI-assisted conversion methodologies, and scalable quality management systems. His hands-on experience includes implementations at major corporations and small-to-medium businesses, where he has demonstrated measurable improvements in content quality through systematic analysis and automated optimization.
Beyond client work, Frank actively contributes to the information development community by sharing insights on emerging trends and facilitating adoption of best practices. His approach emphasizes making complex technical solutions accessible to content professionals regardless of their technical background, ensuring that advanced content intelligence tools serve practical business objectives while building organizational capability for sustained quality improvement.
AI Costs: Usage Scenarios for Determining the Cost of AI
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly embedded in technical content workflows—from automated documentation and intelligent search to virtual assistants and developer tools—understanding and managing its operational costs is essential. This session introduces a practical framework for simulating the cost of deploying AI across a range of technical use cases. Attendees will explore key cost drivers such as model selection, usage volume, and integration complexity, and learn how to use a customizable calculator to forecast expenses. Whether you’re planning to implement AI for internal support, content generation, or customer-facing tools, this session will help you make informed, budget-conscious decisions. Join this interactive session to share your own use cases, learn from peers, and explore how others are approaching AI cost modeling in real-world applications.
Pam Noreault, Ellucian
Pam Noreault is a Principal Information Architect at Ellucian. She has over 25 years of experience in technical communications, education, and management. She specializes in content strategy, customer engagement, content conversions, and social networking strategies. Pam has an undergraduate degree in education from The Ohio State University and a master’s degree in English and Professional Writing from Wright State University. Pam moonlights as a web developer for a dog rescue, combining tech skills with heart.
Staying Relevant in an AI-First TechCom World
As we are forcibly swept into the world of AI, I’ll explore how we’re adapting to and adopting artificial intelligence technologies in technical documentation at SnapLogic. I will chart our journey from the beginning to the present and where we go from here. I will:
- discuss how we are weaving AI into our DDLC workflow, leveraging AI for our customers’ benefit, experimenting/learning with AI, and more.
- share my trials, tribulations, and quiet victories.
- gaze into the AI crystal ball to hypothesize how life-changing AI tech could change the lives of TechCom professionals, till the next life-changing technology.
I will finish off with an audience poll on how you are using AI, which we can also open up to all the participants at ConVEx.
Ankur Parekh, SnapLogic, Inc.
Bio Coming Soon
Metadata Is the Model: The Secret Sauce of Effective Content
Metadata isn’t just a technical checkbox. It’s the secret sauce that elevates your content from business obligation to business asset.
Your metadata strategy should empower the business to reduce redundancy, speed up content retrieval, and improve user satisfaction. The cracks in weak metadata foundations are becoming impossible to ignore as employees and customers increasingly access information through a variety of AI interfaces.
Even among organizations that have implemented structured authoring, many teams wrestle with inconsistent tagging, fragmented taxonomies, and processes that don’t scale. Without robust metadata, AI systems can’t deliver reliable results—and neither can your teams.
This session unpacks how metadata enables you to transform content into findable, reusable knowledge assets to leverage across a multitude of content experiences. You’ll learn why metadata is mission-critical, how to identify gaps in your current approach, and where to start if you’re building from the ground up.
Regina Lynn Preciado, Content Rules
Regina Lynn Preciado is the Senior Director of Content Strategy Solutions at Content Rules, Inc. She leads content strategy teams to guide organizations through structured content adoption and content transformation. She has enabled global enterprises to achieve business objectives such as reducing content development time, optimizing content for AI, and delivering personalized experiences at scale. Regina’s customers include tier 1 companies in pharma, biotech, high-tech, manufacturing, and financial services. When not guiding content teams through business transformation initiatives, she can be found choreographing dog-and-pony shows with her dog Echo and her two miniature horses, Gambit and Trick.
Launching an Enterprise Content Strategy for Profit, Savings, and AI
As the lead for Avalara’s new enterprise content strategy initiative, I’d like to share how we are scoping the work, justifying it, and driving it, from the enterprise architecture team in the CTO across marketing, sales, documentation, developer, partner, support, and employee content. We are connecting experiences and lifecycles to deliver improved content velocity, revenue, savings, customer satisfaction, and scalability, building on centrally governed content standards, strategies, navigation, metadata, ontologies, and AI models.
Michael Priestley, Avalara
Michael Priestley is the Enterprise Content Strategy Lead for Avalara, and has experience working with and across marketing, sales, training, documentation, and support content, coordinating requirements, and delivering common processes and standards. He was named an OASIS Distinguished Contributor for his development of the DITA content standard.
Paying Down Your Content Debt
Like technical debt, content debt silently grows until it becomes overwhelming—bloated libraries, outdated docs, and duplicated effort. This session explores how to identify, measure, and strategically pay down content debt before it erodes user trust. Attendees will learn auditing techniques, prioritization frameworks, and maintenance approaches that fit into agile cycles. With real-world examples, we’ll uncover how reframing content backlog as “debt” shifts conversations with leaders and secures resources for cleanup.
Kat Reierson, Docusign
Kat Reierson is a documentation leader and strategist with over 15 years of experience in technical communication. She specializes in creating scalable content systems, exploring the future of documentation through AI and structured content, and championing human-centered approaches to complex problems. Kat’s talks blend practical frameworks with authentic storytelling, giving audiences both inspiration and actionable strategies. Known for a playful yet grounded style, she highlights the often-invisible work of content professionals while pushing the field toward innovation.
The CCMS Journey Continues: Refine and Grow
Building on our previous 4 ConVEx presentations, we’ll share highlights of the past exciting year in our CCMS. We’ll discuss refinements we’ve made to the system, our content, our processes, and our roles. We’ll also address the first phase of scaling the system beyond our team.
Sarah Rowe & Bobbi Werner, Baxter
Sarah Rowe has a passion for increasing efficiency with technology tools. She is a CCMS administrator and technical writer for Baxter, a global manufacturer of medical devices and therapies. Sarah has a Master’s in Information Technology and is a member of CIDM.
Bobbi Werner is Senior Manager, Technical Communication, at Baxter’s Front Line Care division. She leads a team of technical writers, illustrators, and specialists to create, update, and release user documentation for medical devices. Bobbi is a member of CIDM.
Dazzling DITA: 20 Years of Technical Writing's Best OmniGadget
DITA was not the first form of structured technical content. It was also not the first to meet the burgeoning needs of an increasingly online world. But in the past 20 years, it has *mostly* met the needs of an ever-evolving technical writing community, adapting to meet a number of needs not originally planned for.
Deliver content across any type of platform? Easy. Need a way to easily measure ROI? Check. Require a cheaper and more efficient way to do localization? Done. Is it essential that your content be parsed accurately by your agentic AI? Got it. Presenter and industry consultant Keith Schengili-Roberts has been working with DITA since its release, and he has seen the ways that DITA has evolved to become an “OmniGadget”, morphing to fit requirements it was not originally designed for. Keith will talk about how the flexibility of this technical writing standard has led to its current success, and what may be in store for its future. If you are interested in learning more about how DITA can and has been used, this is the presentation for you.
Keith Schengili-Roberts, Ditawriter.com
Keith Schengili-Roberts is the “writer” behind the “DITAWriter.com” website, celebrating 15+ years as a key resource for those working with the DITA XML standard. Keith has presented at many conferences on DITA-related best practices, and works as an independent consultant, helping clients migrate to structured content. He was an award-winning lecturer on Information Architecture at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information and was formerly Chair of the OASIS DITA Adoption Committee. He lives in London, ON, with his partner Dhan, stepdaughter Anisa, and their always-energetic cockapoo Bella.
When Personas Talk Back: Stress-Test Docs with AI Assistants
User personas have long helped technical writers imagine their audiences, but they usually live as static artifacts buried in slide decks. What if those personas could actually talk back?
In this session, you’ll learn how to build user persona AI assistants using tools like custom GPTs and Gemini Gems. These assistants can embody your audience—novices, experts, and everyone in between—and interact with your documentation in real time. A novice persona might flag jargon and missing context, while an expert persona could call out over-explaining or inefficiencies. Paired with tools like user journey maps, these dynamic personas reveal missed insights, validate assumptions, and strengthen your docs before they reach real readers.
Through a clear, step-by-step walk-through, you’ll see exactly how to design and use custom AI personas. The result: a low-cost, scalable way to stress-test documentation, uncover issues early, and build empathy for your users.
You’ll leave with:
- Practical templates and persona-spec examples you can adapt immediately
- A step-by-step process for building GPT/Gem personas and knowledge bases
- Methods to test docs against personas and integrate this review into everyday workflows
Erin Servais, AI for Editors
Erin Servais helps technical communicators upskill with artificial intelligence. She is the founder of AI for Editors, where she offers courses and custom team trainings that show editors and writers how to integrate AI tools into their content workflows.
Erin has written about AI and editing for the Editorial Freelancers Association and the Independent Book Publishers Association, taught copyediting for the University of California, San Diego, and served on the board of ACES: The Society for Editing. A frequent public speaker, she has presented sessions on AI and content development for organizations including the Book Industry Study Group, the Center for Information-Development Management, Women’s Media Group, the Canadian Association of Learned Journals, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Media.
Learn more at www.aiforeditors.com.
Clarity to Connection: Elevating Technical Communication with AI
AI is fast reshaping the landscape of content development and technical communicators are standing at a powerful intersection of clarity, empathy, and innovation.
This session explores how content professionals can harness AI tools, not just for automation but for amplification of human insight across the user journey.
We will draw real-world examples from leadership, prompt engineering, and ethical storytelling to explore strategies for:
- Designing content that adapts to evolving user needs
- Integrating AI responsibly to enhance human judgment
- Building collaborative ecosystems that center empathy and inclusion
Whether you’re a novice curious about AI or a seasoned DITA specialist seeking fresh perspective, this session offers actionable takeaways and philosophical depth to help you lead with purpose in a tech-driven world.
Anu Singh, Fiserv
Dr Anu Singh is a strategic communication leader and passionate advocate for human-centered content in the age of AI. With a career rooted in technical communication, leadership, and community-driven learning, Anu brings a unique blend of clarity, empathy, and innovation to every stage of the customer journey.
Her work bridges the worlds of prompt engineering, ethical storytelling, and collaborative ecosystems. She is on a mission to empower content professionals to lead with purpose and precision. As a key contributor to STC India and global knowledge-sharing initiatives, Anu is known for crafting messages that build trust and inspire action.
Anu possesses numerous degrees and certifications, and loves reading about culture, new technologies and stories in the novel or short-story format.
iiRDS to Connect the Enterprise Information Silos
In most companies departmental data and information silos exist. We are experiencing that mechanical engineering has their own documentation, software engineering has their own and then suppliers provide their documentation, in an unstructured way e,g, pdf.
How can I use the information out of all of them? For a short period of time, GenAI showed up as a panacea, but could not prove the expectations in case of accuracy.
We will show how we span a knowledge graph using DITA enriched by iiRDS, integrate markdown documents, extending iiRDS with software elements and using iiRDS to harvest relevant metadata and topics out of pdfs using a iiRDS based RAG for GenAI.
Harald Stadlbauer & Martina Schmidt, NINEFEB
Harald Stadlbauer is General Manager of the NINEFEB Group of companies, dedicated to the advancement of Technical Communication, like Technical Documentation as well as eLearning to the intelligent delivery of it. He is actively engaged in developing iiRDS further as well as contributing to the AAS (Asset Administration Shell) submodels of the IDTA (Industrial Digital Twin Association).
Martina Schmidt has been working as a Technical Writer at NINEFEB for four years. Before joining NINEFEB, she spent ten years in the machinery and plant engineering industry, where she also coordinated training activities. She has experience with various XML-based Component Content Management Systems (CCMSs).
Her work focuses on creating clear and structured instruction manuals. Martina is interested in modern documentation approaches, including semantic standards like DITA, SKOS, and iiRDS, which support efficient content delivery and integration with new technologies.
She holds academic degrees in industrial engineering, technical product management, and technical documentation from universities of applied sciences in Austria, which provide a strong foundation for her work in technical communication.
Structured, Modular, Open: The DITA Promise, 20 Years Later
Twenty years ago, DITA promised something radical: an open standard architecture to create structured, modular content in XML. The path wasn’t always easy — the learning curve was steep, it was a lot of work to restructure content, the standard wasn’t (still isn’t) perfect, the tools had to evolve, and the skeptics were loud. But for those who embraced DITA, the payoff has been big: they leveraged reuse, reduced costs, optimized content delivery, and future-enabled their content.
In this candid, reflective, and fun session, I’ll share my DITA experiences and discuss what we did, what worked, what didn’t, and what I would do differently if I had the chance. We’ll explore the enduring principles that keep DITA valuable, the moments it fell short, and how its open-standard DNA makes it more relevant than ever in a world of omnichannel publishing, headless CMS, and AI. Finally, we’ll address the big question: Is DITA still relevant today?
If you’ve ever wondered whether DITA is a relic of the XML era or a springboard into the future of content, this talk will give you a fresh perspective — and maybe even renew your faith in structured content’s promise.
Amber Swope, DITA Strategies
Amber Swope is an internationally recognized DITA expert and information architect. With over 20 years of experience in information development and 15 with DITA, Amber aids organizations in creating opportunity through IA. She helps teams build scalable IA solutions to future-enable their content and mentors team members to advance the IA as it evolves to meet new business needs.
How to Start a Content Transformation Project
Headless, CMS, CCMS, DXP, DITA, personalization, AI … there are SO many systems and tools to learn about when you’re starting your content transformation journey. It can be quite overwhelming to understand what you need to get started amid a sea of resources and an ocean of options.
This talk is for people who know their content needs a complete overhaul and don’t know where to start. As a content strategist who has led a few large content transformation projects (and currently starting on one), I’ll highlight ways you can start identifying your business and content requirements to develop a comprehensive roadmap for your stakeholders.
Naomi Thalenberg, Nintendo
As a content designer and UX writer with a foundation in human-centered design, Naomi Thalenberg brings over a decade of experience implementing content strategies for websites, apps, and digital experiences. She specializes in making complex information clear, accessible, and actionable—whether I’m leading large-scale redesigns, building publishing workflows, or coaching teams on plain language and inclusive content.
Naomi is equally at home auditing 1,000+ pages, writing microcopy, facilitating workshops, or mentoring the next wave of content enthusiasts.
Driven by curiosity and clarity, she loves solving problems through words, structured content, data, and research.
Accelerating Content Development & Review With AI
This session presents a practical exploration of how artificial intelligence (AI) can be integrated into technical content development workflows. We will demonstrate how AI-driven tools can convert draft materials—including structured text and embedded visuals—into fully compliant documents aligned with enterprise style guides and template specifications. The presentation will also introduce methods for automated document auditing and scoring, enabling iterative quality improvements based on measurable criteria. By the end of the session, attendees will gain actionable insights into optimizing documentation pipelines using AI to enhance consistency, accuracy, and efficiency.
Vasanth Vaidyanathan & Chandrakala Murugesan, KLA Corporation
Vasanth Vaidyanathan is a seasoned technology leader with over 26 years of experience driving transformation across global enterprises, with a focus on technical communication. With a master’s degree in software systems, he has led high-impact, cross-functional teams and spearheaded strategic initiatives aligned with digital acceleration and operational excellence. Vasanth is deeply committed to talent development and is a frequent speaker at industry forums, where he shares insights on adaptive leadership, change enablement, and human-centric innovation. As an early adopter of emerging technologies, he champions user-first design and leverages digital tools to enhance experience, efficiency, and scale.
Chandrakala Murugesan has worked for over 18 years at KLA as a writer and leader in Technical Communications (Knowledge Services) department, curating content strategies and collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver best-in-class user documentation. With a background in electronics engineering, Chandrakala transitioned into documentation leadership, where she empowers her team to pioneer innovative approaches to information management. Known for her XML expertise and process-driven mindset, she plays a key role in mentoring writers, driving documentation initiatives, and supporting AI-driven projects that enhance customer success and satisfaction. Her passion for emerging technologies – especially artificial intelligence and machine learning – keeps her at the forefront of industry trends. Her leadership continues to shape the future of technical communications in the semiconductor industry.
Just Like That! Moving from MadCap Flare to IXIA CCMS
MadCap Flare is packed with features to facilitate easy content creation, reuse, and publishing, with a focus on smaller documentation teams. IXIA CCMS is packed with the same kind of features, with a focus on large, distributed documentation teams across an enterprise. Wouldn’t it be great if a growing team could seamlessly move from MadCap Flare to IXIA CCMS? That day is here! In this Test Kitchen, Leigh will show you how to export a Flare project, convert it to DITA, and import it into IXIA CCMS. That’s content in. How about content out? One of Flare’s strengths is its ease of template design. Again, wouldn’t it be great to continue using those templates with IXIA CCMS? That day is also here! Leigh will show you how to publish DITA content from IXIA CCMS to Flare Online, using the Flare templates you’ve already refined and perfected.
Leigh White, MadCap
Leigh White is the Product Owner of CCMS Documentation at MadCap Software, where in addition to writing, she works with the Product Definition team to design features, clarify the user point of view for the Development team, and helps drive IXIA CCMS releases that are robust, timely, and useful. She is also the author of “DITA For Print: A DITA Open Toolkit Workbook” and a contributor to “The Language of Content Strategy” and “The Language of Technical Communication.” Over her career, Leigh has been a DITA author, information architect, and DITA Open Toolkit fanatic and she advocates that effective technical communicators need to be more than writers; they need to be part programmer, part designer and part project manager. A conference veteran, Leigh has presented at a number of conferences, including DITA North America, ConVEx, DITA Europe, Intelligent Content, Lavacon, the STC Summit, and Writers UA. In her spare time, she hikes, bikes, reads, conlangs, and makes things from wood.
Chew on This! Feeding AI One Chunk at a Time
As DITA authors, we’re encouraged to write small, granular topics and “unite” them using map structures such as nesting, linking using the collection-type attribute, or the chunk attribute. It’s not that it’s easier for us to write small topics than a giant, all-encompassing topic. Sometimes it’s actually harder. Rather, our goal for writing smaller topics has traditionally been to facilitate reuse rather than ease of content creation.
What about when the goal is to help AI better process our content rather than optimizing reuse? How does that change our approach to information architecture? Does it, even? Do a couple of decades of conventional wisdom go out the window, or do the same principles we’ve been following all this time still hold true in the age of AI? What can we keep? What do we change?
In this presentation, Leigh will review some of our tried and true approaches for chunking (and reuniting) content and talk about how they might or might not be equally effective when writing for AI consumption.
Leigh White, MadCap
Leigh is the Product Owner of CCMS Documentation at MadCap Software, where in addition to writing, she works with the Product Definition team to design features, clarify the user point of view for the Development team, and helps drive IXIA CCMS releases that are robust, timely, and useful. She is also the author of “DITA For Print: A DITA Open Toolkit Workbook” and a contributor to “The Language of Content Strategy” and “The Language of Technical Communication.” Over her career, Leigh has been a DITA author, information architect, and DITA Open Toolkit fanatic and she advocates that effective technical communicators need to be more than writers; they need to be part programmer, part designer and part project manager. A conference veteran, Leigh has presented at a number of conferences, including DITA North America, ConVEx, DITA Europe, Intelligent Content, Lavacon, the STC Summit, and Writers UA. In her spare time, she hikes, bikes, reads, conlangs, and makes things from wood.
DITA & OpenAPI in Sync — Content Bridges with iiRDS
Technical writing and software development often operate in silos.
With shorter product cycles, this leads to late or mismatched API documentation or delayed software releases.
This talk shows how iiRDS – like DITA, a standard for modular documentation – becomes the content backbone of a workflow that combines speed and quality:
content is continuously generated from OpenAPI/source code, then curated in DITA (incl. conref/conaction) under clear standards and processes.
A build transforms the result to iiRDS, publishes it via a Content API, and links it unambiguously to endpoints and parameters.
Swagger and similar tools fetch the right docs at runtime—avoiding release delays while improving governance and measurable quality.
With pragmatic examples, we illustrate how real collaboration between writers and developers helps
break down silos so “ready to market” also means documentation ships with the software.
Markus Wiedenmaier, c-rex.net
Markus Wiedenmaier is CEO of c-rex.net LLC and a founding member of the iiRDS Consortium. A process- and data-driven expert at the intersection of technical documentation and engineering, he brings deep DITA and iiRDS expertise. He focuses on end-to-end automation of technical documentation – spanning authoring, translation, publication, and personalized delivery. c-rex.net provides a central data hub that enables these system-agnostic workflows across the product lifecycle.
Process-Driven Backbone: iiRDS, the Open Standard for TechDoc & Engineering
Technical documentation spans the entire product lifecycle—from development through installation and use to service.
It is authored independently of where it originates: in tech-doc teams, in engineering, in PLM, in wikis/repos, or as supplier PDFs – topic- or document-oriented, across diverse tools and formats.
Yet users expect a consistent, contextual experience: only the content that matches their role, product variant, and entitlements (purchased modules) – dynamically extendable like legacy CHM packages, but open and future-proof.
We show how iiRDS – an open, vendor-neutral standard – enables a system-independent backbone that connects this diversity source-agnostically: with a clear metadata and content contract, stable processes (Create → Enrich → Validate → Package → Publish → Feedback) and linked-data relationships for context-aware delivery.
The result is personalized, variant-accurate, and consistently findable static documentation – no matter where it is authored and with measurable benefits for both users and the organization.
Markus Wiedenmaier, C-REX; Harald Stadlbauer, NINEFEB; Lief Erickson, Intuitive Stack
Markus Wiedenmaier is CEO of c-rex.net LLC and a founding member of the iiRDS Consortium. A process- and data-driven expert at the intersection of technical documentation and engineering, he brings deep DITA and iiRDS expertise. He focuses on end-to-end automation of technical documentation – spanning authoring, translation, publication, and personalized delivery. c-rex.net provides a central data hub that enables these system-agnostic workflows across the product lifecycle.
Harald Stadlbauer is General Manager of the NINEFEB Group of companies, dedicated to the advancement of Technical Communication, like Technical Documentation as well as eLearning to the intelligent delivery of it. He is actively engaged in developing iiRDS further as well as contributing to the AAS (Asset Administration Shell) submodels of the IDTA (Industrial Digital Twin Association).
Lief Erickson is co-founder of Intuitive Stack, a content strategy consultancy for businesses with outdated technical documentation practices. He holds a master’s degree in Content Strategy from FH Joanneum (Austria), where he also teaches information architecture. With expertise in taxonomies, search optimization, and ContentOps, Lief has held roles as a technical writer and information architect. At Intuitive Stack, he helps organizations modernize their content strategy so they can focus on their next innovation.
The AI-First Website Design Framework
With the advent of features like web browsing and complex reasoning, conversational AI platforms like ChatGPT are rapidly changing how users research topics, learn new facts, and evaluate products and solutions. One-third of U.S. adults report using AI assistants to help with everyday decisions, including purchase recommendations. Retailer traffic from AI is increasing 1,200% year-over-year. Content strategists who ignore this change will be left behind, and those who adapt to this shift will be successful.
The rise of mobile-first web design in the early 2010s was a response to the ubiquity of smartphones and their impact on consumer behavior. Given the rapid uptake of AI as a consumer tool, this presentation proposes an AI-First model for web architecture, where content is optimized first for AI consumption, then progressively enhanced for mobile and desktop affordances. We highlight the differences between how various AI platforms ‘see’ content, provide templates for AI-first web pages, and discuss the experience of implementing this strategy with a technology company redesign.
Jim Wrubel & Lauren Golembiewski, Orchestra AI, Inc.
Jim Wrubel’s career spans 25 years at the intersection of technology and marketing, building tools to help companies craft and share compelling narratives online and make sure they’re reaching the right people. Over this time he’s worked in a variety of industries including SaaS, Ecommerce, deep learning (AI & machine learning), defense, ed tech, and cybersecurity, including taking two companies to exit as a C-Suite executive.
Lauren Golembiewski is a full-stack designer with over 15 years of experience bridging design and technology. She works with both startups and enterprise teams to create user experiences that are as effective as they are engaging and grounded in clear documentation and scalable systems. Her career spans early-stage product launches, growth-stage redesigns, and enterprise transformations, giving her a perspective on how design practices need to evolve to meet shifting user and business demands.
At the core of her work is a belief that thoughtful design systems and well-communicated processes don’t just make products better. They make teams faster, more aligned, and more creative. She enjoys collaborating with peers to explore new ways design can shape how we build, manage, and share information.
Deploying Docs to AI
Everyone’s talking about AI, but few know how to actually get their content into it—without chaos.
In this session, we’ll walk through simple, scalable, and repeatable approaches to integrating your existing documentation directly into AI experiences.
In this session, attendees will:
- Learn straightforward methods for integrating your technical content into AI tools.
- Understand how structured content (like DITA) makes AI integration scalable, governable, and future-proof.
- See real-world examples of AI-ready documentation powering bots without copy-pasting or chaos.
- Leave with a practical blueprint to start connecting your docs to AI today—not “sometime in Q4″.
Patrick Bosek, Heretto
Patrick Bosek is a co-founder and CEO of Heretto, an industry-leading SaaS solution for content operations. Since beginning Heretto in 2005, Patrick has worked on a wide range of projects all focused on improving authoring, production, and distribution of content. Patrick is a software industry professional specializing in developing, productizing, and solving problems with product content software. He is a skilled developer, thoughtful manager, and passionate customer advocate.
Building Content Operations from Scratch: One Content Architect's Story
Using DITA specifications, Markdown files, and static site generators, attendees get the chance to hear how one Content Architect stood up and matured a content pipeline for a 100M, start-up venture at IBM, all during a global pandemic. The presenter walks the audience through how they designed and architected a content operation that could launch quickly, scale across unknown markets, and still work years later as the product found consistent revenue.
The presenter shares insights on how they adapted DITA specifications to Markdown, used different information architectures for tricky use cases, leveraged static site generators for publication, and implemented OpenAPI specifications for API documentation.
Jessica East, Arrive
Jessica East earned a Bachelors in French and Professional, Technical, Scientific, and Business Writing from Missouri State University. Her studies included attending University Laval in Quebec, Canada, St Mary’s University in Besancon, France, and writing for Rabbits USA Magazine as an editorial fellow at BowTie,Inc in Irvine, California.
After working in marketing for several years, Jessica pivoted to technology, starting in proposal writing at a small software company in town. After a year, she moved to Mastercard as a Technical Writer, focusing on content transformation in an Agile environment, eventually landing at IBM as a Content Architect, focusing on docs-as-code pipelines and 0 to one product docs.
Currently, Jessica studies Behavior Analysis at University of Cincinnati and works at Arrive as a Content Manager, focusing on internal content operations and strategy for product engineering.
The Force of Knowledge Graphs: Understanding Structure Relationships Through Star Wars
Knowledge graphs are transforming the way we organize and retrieve information, enabling intelligent search, semantic understanding, and AI-driven insights. But what exactly is a knowledge graph, and how does it work? In this session, we’ll demystify knowledge graphs by using a galaxy far, far away—Star Wars—as our guide.
Through the lens of the Star Wars universe, we’ll explore how entities (characters, planets, starships) and relationships (Jedi training, Sith apprenticeships, galactic alliances) form an interconnected web of knowledge. Attendees will learn the fundamentals of knowledge graph structure, ontology development, and query capabilities using relatable examples from the saga.
Whether you’re a Padawan or a Jedi Master, this session will equip you with the knowledge to harness the Force of structured data.
Attendees can expect to hear:
• Basics of knowledge graph structure
• Strategies for ontology development
• How knowledge graphs power applications like search engines, recommendation systems, and AI-driven analytics
Brianna Stevens-Russell, Comtech Services
Brianna Stevens-Russell has been a consultant at Comtech Services for ten years. She specializes in helping clients with their DITA implementations. From information modeling to DITA Open Toolkit publishing transforms, she works in all parts of a DITA environment. In addition to consulting with individual companies, she also enjoys training professionals to learn these skills and become the experts within their teams.
The Carbon Cost of Content: Unmasking AI's Environmental Footprint
We will unpack how the compute-intensive nature of training and running large AI models exacerbates resource consumption, specifically focusing on the massive demands for electricity and water by the global network of data centers. McGovern’s work highlights the resource strains on local communities and the hidden toll of e-waste and hardware manufacturing. Furthermore, Bonsignore’s insights on sustainable content strategy offer a practical framework for the technical communication field.
This presentation explores the direct impact on our field:
- Content Bloat. Every piece of digital content has an emission cost. AI-generated content can compound this if not strategically streamlined.
- The Carbon Cost of a Query. The energy required for a single AI query is significantly higher than a traditional search, directly increasing our digital carbon footprint.
- Infrastructure Strain. Our reliance on generative AI drives the demand for resource-intensive hardware and data center expansion, contributing to e-waste and local water scarcity.
Technical communicators must lead the push for sustainable content design. This means applying minimalist philosophy to digital assets and auditing content for maximum efficiency—turning our enthusiasm for AI into a drive for ethical, planet-friendly practice.
Amanda Patterson, Comtech Services
Dr. Amanda Patterson is an AI enthusiast and accomplished technical communicator specializing in developing technical communication strategies for the manufacturing sector. She is a Sr. Consultant at Comtech Services where she focuses on information modeling, information architecture, and GenAI instruction. Her expertise encompasses leading technical writing teams, enhancing process efficiencies, and implementing advanced software solutions.
Beyond Silos: Turning Structured Content into a Shared Language
Content doesn’t live in one department, it lives everywhere. Yet many teams still build and manage it in silos, each using different tools, structures, and goals. The result? Inconsistent experiences, duplicated work, and systems that don’t scale.
In this session, Sandie Markle shares how structured content can act as a shared language across strategy, engineering, design, and marketing. Drawing from her experience leading content operations in food tech and digital publishing, she’ll show how taxonomy, metadata, and governance frameworks bring clarity and alignment to complex organizations.
Attendees will learn how to connect people, process, and platforms through structure, creating unified systems that enable collaboration, scalability, and discoverability. This talk reframes structure not as a constraint but as the foundation for creativity, efficiency, and innovation.
Whether you manage documentation, marketing content, or product information, you’ll leave with practical models to help your team move beyond silos and build content that works across every channel and touchpoint.
Sandie Markle, Blueberri
Sandie Markle has worked with food tech companies, digital publishers, and creator platforms to develop unified content operations that improve discoverability and user experience across channels. Her upcoming book, Create Once, Share Everywhere, explores how structured content transforms creative work into lasting impact.
Sandie advocates for bridging silos, building inclusive systems, and empowering content professionals to think like engineers without losing their creative spark.
Determinability and Probability in the Content Creation Process
When we create content in a professional environment, we want to create content that is accurate and achieves the desired communicative effect.
We want to reach the target audience and write in a way that is understandable and easy to translate.
The key is a defined corporate language. Content must and can be checked on this basis. It therefore makes sense to use generative AI.
But is that enough? This presentation discusses the possibilities and limitations of AI for a review process. It also shows how deterministic and heuristic methods can work together perfectly.
Torsten Machert, Congree
Torsten Machert studied Russian and Spanish at the Humboldt University in Berlin. After spending 20+ years in the CMS industry he joined Congree in 2019 as Senior Consultant.
The AI-Ready DITA Pipeline: Modeling, Metadata, and Machine Understanding
As generative AI becomes a core capability in enterprise knowledge delivery, the structure, semantics, and consistency of DITA content take on new importance. While DITA was originally engineered for human-facing, multichannel publishing, the same discipline that makes it valuable for traditional output can also supercharge AI-driven retrieval, reasoning, and content generation—if the content models and pipeline are optimized for AI consumption.
In this session, Rob Hanna explores how to adapt DITA architectures, taxonomies, metadata strategies, and Open Toolkit publishing streams to better serve generative AI systems. Drawing from real-world implementations, Rob demonstrates how adjusting content granularity, semantic annotation, classification structures, and output transformations can dramatically improve retrieval accuracy, hallucination resistance, and contextual generation quality.
Participants will leave with a clear understanding of how to evolve their DITA models and OT pipelines—not by abandoning DITA principles, but by leveraging them to create clean, structured, AI-ready corpora that maximize the performance of search-augmented generation (RAG), model fine-tuning, and agentic AI workflows.
Rob Hanna, Precision Content
Rob Hanna has dedicated his professional life to improving outcomes for teams embarking on structured authoring projects. Over the past 30 years, he has worked with many large corporations on DITA and CCMS projects to bring their teams into structure and drive operational efficiencies. He has taught metadata and taxonomies at the University of Toronto and private courses on structured authoring, DITA, and information architecture. In 2013, Rob founded Precision Content in Toronto, Canada, to build a team of writers, developers, and IAs to continue his mission to raise the bar in Technical Communication.
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