Sunday Keynotes

 Jack opened the conference by noting that it was both the 21st year of LavaCon and that between in-person and virtual attendees, it was the largest LavaCon ever. 

Then a Taiko drum performance enthralled the audience, each of whom had their own set of drumsticks to participate. 

Beyond the Horizon: Make AI Work for your Enterprise Content

Adobe's Stefan Gentz came with AI-based slides generated from JSON to demonstrate the possibilities of AI. 

At last year's LavaCon, AI was just a rumor, a rumor of something big. In the past year, it has had a huge impact on all industries. But Gentz claimed that AI is just cool, that it's just a tool. 

So the question is how we can use enterprise AI to create content.

Potential is (almost) limitless. Can help us create content better and faster. It can create complex structure from raw data. It can improve content quality. It can summarize, rephrase, and more. 

But...

AI "hallucinates." But Gentz suggests that's where creativity springs. It loses context and focus fast. And it does not have a world model, which might be an unfair argument because that's true for many of us. It won't make us jobless, but it will make many jobs change. 

Shifting the Spotlight: Elevating Content’s Impact on the Customer Experience

Heretto's Scott Abel told us that the role of content in self-service. Content powers service customer experiences. Without content, you can't have customer experience. It needs to be atomized, optimized, and personalized. 

Self-service allows users to get answers to questions without help from anyone else. When there is good service, we don't notice it. 

Leaders don't always see the connection between the content we're creating and the experience they want to deliver. They don't always know that we're the people who should help them reach their goal. 

Showcasing our work is important; we need to toot our own horns. Everyone here is a content hero. 

We have value outside work Content Rules contributed to improving medical articles on Wikipedia. A group Tech Writers Without Borders improved Covid information that was used worldwide. 

Recognition occurs only when other people are familiar with what you do.

 Creating the Content Experience Beyond the App

 Jo Ward, of Salesforce, claimed that there is a role for content professionals in this new world of AI. We will be freed up to create more strategic content. 

A good content experience is critical to the customer experience. 

For a better content experience: understand customers' job, understand product, rigorously prioritize, use research & data.

Content strategy is intentional content development based on customers' jobs to be done. 

At Salesforce, we map and gap, prioritize and plan, and iterate and improve. This is done within a content strategy planning framework. And it can be turbocharged with AI.