This week we feature articles from Simon Willison, and Michael Iantosca. Additional reading comes from Stella Jo, Paolo Perrone, David Pierce, and Michael Hunger. News comes from Coveo, data.world, Couchbase, and TransPerfect. Our next issue arrives March 19. All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index Opinion / Analysis Content management considerations for generative AI RAG “Few generative AI […]

With SPARQL, of course.

Coveo announced three advancements to augment AI, GenAI, and Agentic AI projects: Coveo for Agentforce, and expanded suite of Coveo APIs and the Coveo Agentic AI Design Partner Program. Coveo for Agentforce natively integrates into Salesforce, grounding AI agents in contextually relevant, enterprise-wide knowledge—wherever it resides. Coveo for Agentforce is focused on enhancing deployments for large, complex […]

This week we feature articles from Alissa Cooper, and Simon Willison. Additional reading comes from Hamel Husain & Greg Ceccarelli, Hannah Mayer, Lareina Yee, Michael Chui, &  Roger Roberts, Daniel Tunkelang, and Project Liberty. News comes from Contentstack, IBM & DataStax, MongoDB, Foxit, and Adobe. Our next issue arrives March 12. All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index Opinion […]

Photo by Glenn Carstens-Peters on Unsplash

You're in luck if your content strategy could use a tune-up—or a complete overhaul. The content experts at Comtech Services are offering three upcoming training workshops to help you sharpen your skills and streamline your content operations. Whether you prefer instructor-led, in-person training or the convenience of virtual learning, there's an option that fits your schedule.

From harnessing AI in content strategy to building effective taxonomies and mastering advanced reuse strategies, these workshops will help you work smarter, not harder. Keep reading to find the session that's right for you!

Incorporating AI into Your Content Strategy

📅 May 6 – June 24, 2025
🔗 Details: https://comtechservices.com/training/ai-content-strategy/

If AI hasn’t yet infiltrated your content strategy, it’s only a matter of time. (It’s already in your inbox, your search results, and probably judging your Spotify playlists.) This workshop teaches you how to harness AI, ensuring your content operation gets more intelligent, faster, and slightly less soul-crushing. You’ll explore real-world applications of AI in content creation, management, and governance.

This workshop is available both in-person and online. Save 10% off the registration costs when you use discount code — TCW — at checkout.

Creating an Effective Taxonomy

📅 May 7 – June 25, 2025
🔗 Details: https://comtechservices.com/taxonomy/

Some people are naturally organized. Then there are the rest of us who have 47 open browser tabs and still can’t find the document we just downloaded. Taxonomy is the secret to a well-structured content world, and this workshop will teach you how to create order from chaos. If you’ve ever muttered, “Why is everything so hard to find?,” this one’s for you.

This workshop is offered online. In-person workshops for teams can be scheduled for 2 days onsite. Contact CIDM for details.

Save 10% off the registration costs when you use discount code — TCW — at checkout.

Advanced Reuse Strategies (India Standard Time)

📅 May 8 – June 26, 2025
🔗 Details: https://comtechservices.com/training/dita-reuse/

This one’s for the DITA diehards—those who get unreasonably excited about structured content and the thrill of reusing components across multiple deliverables. If your idea of a good time involves maximizing efficiency and reducing redundancy, this workshop will teach you advanced reuse techniques to make your content work twice as hard, so you don’t have to.

Plus, this session is scheduled for India Standard Time, making it ideal for global professionals who want to improve their DITA skills.

This workshop is available both in-person and online.

📌 Pick your workshop, register now, and get ready to make your content work smarter.

The Content Wrangler is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Couchbase, Inc., a developer data platform for critical applications in our AI world, launched Couchbase Edge Server, an offline-first, lightweight database server and sync solution designed to provide low latency data access, consolidation, storage and processing for applications in resource-constrained edge environments. Edge applications that rely solely on cloud databases can be slowed down due […]

data.world, an enterprise data catalog for the modern data stack, announced the public beta launch of Archie Chat, an AI-powered catalog assistant that improves how users interact with their enterprise data catalog. Archie Chat helps users find answers to their questions quickly through natural language conversation, driving catalog adoption and enhancing data discovery across organizations. […]

TransPerfect, a provider of language and AI solutions for global business, announced its new TransPerfect for Zendesk Support App for translation within Zendesk’s Agent Workspace. The app enables users to easily and instantly translate messages and ticket conversations while integrating seamlessly with the GlobalLink Now API, providing businesses with a solution for cost-effective multilingual content […]

Contentstack, a digital experience platform, announced the launch of Contentstack EDGE, an adaptive digital experience platform built for the AI era. Their next-generation digital experience platform (DXP) unifies the company’s headless CMS, recently acquired real-time customer data platform Lytics, personalization, automation, AI, and front-end hosting capabilities. Together, Contentstack EDGE is capable of delivering adaptive experiences, […]

IBM announced its intent to acquire DataStax, an AI and data solution provider. DataStax’s technology will enhance IBM’s watsonx portfolio of products accelerating the use of generative AI, helping companies unlock value from vast amounts of unstructured data. The acquisition also builds on IBM’s commitment to open-source AI. DataStax is the creator of AstraDB and […]

Foxit, a provider of PDF and eSignature products and services, helping knowledge workers to increase productivity and do more with documents, today announced the addition of multi-document analysis to its AI Assistant feature within its mobile apps for iOS and Android. This new and unique capability enhances the AI Assistant’s functionality, enabling users to analyze […]

Adobe announced it is bringing Photoshop to mobile and expanding the web experience, with Photoshop on iPhone available today and Android coming later this year. The new mobile app is designed for a new generation of image and design enthusiasts to the potential of Photoshop in an easy-to-use mobile interface. Photoshop’s new app brings existing […]

MongoDB, Inc., a database for modern applications, announced it has acquired Voyage AI, a provider of embedding and reranking models for AI applications. Integrating Voyage AI’s technology with MongoDB will enable organizations to easily build trustworthy, AI-powered applications by offering accurate and relevant information retrieval deeply integrated with operational data. The risk of hallucinations has […]

A few years ago, I attended a technical writing conference where a panel of well-known documentation consultants held court. They spoke with the confidence of people who had seen dark things like entire documentation systems erased by an intern who "didn't think it would actually delete." They debated metadata strategies the way some people argue about politics at Thanksgiving. The kind of deep, expert-level discussion that makes you feel both inspired and slightly inadequate.

But looking around the room, I noticed something unsettling. Most of these experts who shaped how documentation is done in the modern age were in their late fifties, sixties, or even seventies. Some had already started scaling back, slipping into partial retirement, consulting "only on projects that truly interest me" (translation: no, I will not fix your broken website again).

The Content Wrangler is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

And that's when it hit me: What happens when they all retire simultaneously?

Photo by Rita Morais on Unsplash

Unwritten Rulebooks (No One Bothered to Write Down)

For decades, these folks have been the unofficial keepers of the industry. They're the ones who fought for structured content before anyone even knew what that meant. They convinced entire companies that documentation should be more than a last-minute Word doc someone slaps together at 4:59 PM on a Friday.

They are the people who:

• Invented the standards we take for granted.

• Wrote the books we pretend we've read.

• Taught the courses that made us believe we could actually do this job.

But here's the problem: so much of their expertise lives in their heads. And those heads are dangerously close to being retired and relocated to a beach somewhere, never to be troubled by another information architecture crisis.

The 'Figure It Out Yourself' Future

If you think about it, the technical documentation industry is oddly fragile. Companies often don't invest in documentation until something goes horribly wrong—like a software release so unintelligible that the support team quits en masse.

Now imagine that, on top of that, all of the industry's best consultants and educators vanish.

Who steps in to:

• Train the next generation of documentation leaders?

• Convince CEOs that investing in structured content is worth it?

• Stop a well-meaning but disastrously uninformed team from using Microsoft Excel as a knowledge base?

It's not that there aren't younger people in the industry—we don't have nearly enough of them in leadership positions. Right now, a frightening number of companies rely on a single documentation expert to hold things together, and that person's retirement is, at best, a vague "someday" that no one plans for.

The Mass Exodus: A Crisis in Waiting

Picture this: a year from now, a dozen of the most well-known documentation experts simultaneously retire. Suddenly, there's a void. Companies that rely on these experts for training and strategy start scrambling. Who else understands content governance at scale? Who else can convince a room full of executives that documentation is a business asset, not a cost center?

It's like waking up one day and realizing all the plumbers have retired, and now you're stuck with an overflowing toilet, a YouTube tutorial, and a wrench.

Why We Should Panic (But in a Productive Way)

Before we start accepting our bleak, documentation-free future, let's talk about what we can do:

1. We need structured knowledge transfer.

   • Veteran experts should be mentoring new professionals, writing down their battle-tested strategies, and ensuring they don't take their expertise to the grave (or, you know, to a retirement community in Florida).

2. We need to make documentation leadership attractive to younger professionals.

   • Now, becoming a documentation consultant is like becoming a jazz musician—respected by a niche audience but not a mainstream career choice. We need to change that.

3. Companies need to realize that an expert-level documentation strategy is not replaceable.

   • Organizations should hire documentation specialists before the last experts leave, not after realizing the product is unusable without them.

A Retirement Party We Can't Afford to Ignore

Technical documentation as an industry is at a crossroads. If we don't invest in the next generation of experts—consultants, educators, and documentation strategists—we're looking at a future where companies try to automate away problems they don't fully understand, and the only available documentation training is a two-hour webinar hosted by someone who just discovered Markdown last week.

So, if you're an industry veteran, here's my plea: write it all down before you retire. Mentor someone. Record a video explaining why metadata matters. Start a blog. Write a book (or three). Please do something to ensure that when you finally sign off for good, the rest aren't left googling "How to create a sustainable documentation strategy " and getting a bunch of AI-generated nonsense in return.

Otherwise, the future of tech comm might be one long, desperate, less-than-helpful Slack thread.

The Content Wrangler is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Let’s be honest: your help site probably needs work. Users likely can’t find what they need. The search function may serve up everything except the right answers. And despite your team’s best efforts, critical documentation hides so deep it might as well be on ancient scrolls.

Good news: You can fix that.

Even better news: It won’t cost you a dime to find out which changes will deliver the most bang for your buck.

The folks at Heretto — makers of a powerful component content management system in use by technical documentation teams around the globe, are offering a free help site assessment.

They’ll evaluate your self-service help site using the judging criteria from the Codie Awards, which recognizes the best help sites in the industry.

What Is a Help Site Assessment And Why Should You Care?

A help site assessment is like bringing in a brutally honest friend—except this one knows what they’re talking about. It’s a structured evaluation of your self-service help site, focused on real-world usability instead of “Does this feel right?”

Read more

This week we feature articles from Shayne Longpre, and Hugo Bowne-Anderson & Alan Nichol. Additional reading comes from Deborah Turness, Cory Doctorow, Kurt Cagle, and Michael Andrews. News comes from Perplexity, Sprinklr & Bluesky, Databricks & SAP, accessiBe, and Transperfect. Our next issue arrives March 5. All previous issues are available at https://gilbane.com/gilbane-advisor-index Opinion / Analysis AI crawler […]

From the Perplexity blog… Today we’re launching Deep Research to save you hours of time by conducting in-depth research and analysis on your behalf. When you ask a Deep Research question, Perplexity performs dozens of searches, reads hundreds of sources, and reasons through the material to autonomously deliver a comprehensive report. It excels at a […]

Databricks, a Data and AI company, today announced the launch of SAP Databricks, a strategic product and go-to-market partnership with SAP that natively integrates the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform within the newly launched SAP Business Data Cloud. The partnership combines business data that is in SAP with the Databricks platform for data warehousing, data engineering, […]

Sprinklr, a unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform for modern enterprises, today announced a new integration with Bluesky for insights and content publishing. The partnership allows Sprinklr customers to integrate Bluesky into global marketing and insights strategies.  The rapid growth and engagement levels on Bluesky led Sprinklr customers to ask Sprinklr to help them seamlessly integrate […]

accessiBe, experts in web accessibility solutions, announced the launch of accessFlow 2.0, the newest addition of its AI-powered web accessibility management solutions that help developers address accessibility barriers at the code level. Building on accessFlow 1.0, accessFlow 2.0’s newest features simplify accessibility management, from site inception to production, by identifying issues, delivering actionable insights, and […]