Content Strategy Insights

Kurt Cagle has been reporting on and participating in the tech world for several decades. He's never seen anything like the pace of change around AI.

His advice for staying ready to work with AI: stay nimble, pay attention to what's going on, don't get tied to any one technology, and always bear in mind that your work will have an impact.

https://contentandai.com/kurt-cagle/

Jarno van Driel is a true pioneer on the semantic web.

Even before you could add machine-readable semantic markup to webpages, he was discovering ways to help search engines understand what web pages were about. Much of that success grew out of his early focus on accessibility and usability.

When semantic markup was introduced, he was among the first cadre of experts on RDFa, Microdata, schema.org, and other semantic practices, and he is to this day one of the most respected practitioners of this craft.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/jarno-van-driel/

"Leading-edge technology" may not be the first thing that comes to mind when you walk into an IKEA store, but maybe it should be.

IKEA is using AI technologies across its vast collection of businesses to deliver better content experiences to its customers.

Tane Piper leads an engineering team at Inter IKEA - the business unit that owns the IKEA brand - that is building their next generation of content and artificial intelligence tooling.

https://contentandai.com/tane-piper/

To conduct a good research-focused interview, you need to cultivate a professional interviewing mindset.

Steve Portigal has been doing this for years, and he has written a book to help other researchers and designers conduct better interviews.

Now in its second edition, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, covers interviewing techniques, of course, but also research best practices, how to document your work, and how to make sense of your discoveries.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/steve-portigal/

The arrival of AI affects every area and aspect of content practice.

In the technical documentation field, Sarah O'Keefe sees three immediate impacts on the work she does for her clients: how AI agents can support technical documentation workflows, the ability to create content with generative AI, and the ways that AI is changing the delivery of technical content.

And wherever she looks in the content and AI landscape, she sees the need for governance guardrails and strategic thinking.

https://contentandai.com/sarah-okeefe/

Modern content projects begin with research to create lifelike customer personas and build detailed customer journey maps. Whether you're on a tight budget or have a team of UX researchers at your disposal, AI can help accelerate and improve the development of these personas and journey maps.

Noz Urbina has developed the RAUX (Rapid AI-powered UX) method to help omnichannel content strategists develop realistic personas and craft effective customer journey maps.

https://contentandai.com/noz-urbina/

Michael Reid is a consultant who helps organizations with their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

A linquist by training, he is extremely attuned to the role of language in his work, which led to his explorations of the privilege given to English-language speakers in our modern, hyper-connected world.

His discoveries can help content professionals of all kinds identify and address the dynamics and biases that arise from the pivotal role that the English language plays in modern digital business.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/michael-reid/

Matt Hayes is a staff content designer at LinkedIn, where he focuses on enterprise experience design and works closely with the design system team.

The content design team at LinkedIn is known in the industry as a small-but-mighty group that makes an outsized impact on their organization.

Among the secrets to their success: democratizating their content guidance, focusing on efficient decision-making, and working closely with their design-systems colleagues. 

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/matt-hayes/

Most of us are learning about AI on the fly and just got started in the past year or two.

Paco Nathan has been working with AI since the 1980s and has been doing digital business nearly as long.

His background in both the technical and commercial sides of artificial intelligence give him a unique perspective on the field that can help newcomers like me and you get oriented to this new landscape.

https://contentandai.com/paco-nathan/

The arrival of decoupled content architectures and headless CMSs creates a new set of challenges for content modelers, authors, administrators, and others who work with content systems.

Lo Etheredge does developer relations for Hygraph, a headless CMS company. Dev rel folks don't typically drive organizational change and stakeholder alignment, but Lo's unique background in social work uniquely prepares them to help customers with the human side of content management.

https://ellessmedia.com/csi/lo-etheridge/