In our previous stacks of articles on Generative AI, we’ve covered a diverse range of topics 一 if one dived deep to explain the cost-effectiveness of Generative AI for ITSM, the other went on to talk about how Generative AI can reshape ITOps in the future.

Given its immense potential to create unique content from scratch, Generative AI can expand content generation across industries with varied perspectives.

Today, we will discuss content generation for IT Support Documentation with Generative AI.

IT support documentation is essential for IT knowledge workers to maximize integrated knowledge bases that help run IT operations smoothly.

In fact, ITSM management, end-to-end IT service delivery,employee productivity and efficiency, and customer experience largely depend on comprehensive employee IT support documentation.

But, it isn’t easy to manage the end-to-end production of IT Support documentation.

Sometimes, the publication of documentation on the intranet or company websites gets delayed due to the complicated nature of production.

Generative AI provides astounding scale to the production, accessibility, and application of IT support documentation in the enterprise context.

In this article, we deep dive to explore Generative AI in making IT support documentation a breeze while providing ample ways to overcome the existing challenges.

In the report, ‘The economic potential of Generative AI: The next productivity frontier,’ McKinsey has claimed that Generative AI could unleash 63 use cases across 16 business functions.

Generative AI is likely to fetch economic value worth up to $4.4 trillion annually if applied across business applications.

One that could contribute to these massive economic benefits is improved labor productivity.

We can certainly relate the productivity gains to documentation generation, which has direct implications for cost reduction.

As per McKinsey, there are multiple ways Generative AI can be used for content documentation across business functions,

• Risk model documentation in banking

• Customer documentation in pharma

• Regulatory compliance documentation in every industry

• Commercial documentation in marketing

• Software engineering documentation

Since content creation is one powerful capability of Generative AI, the use case is also effective for IT support documentation.

Employee IT support documentation is closely related to a set of instructions, procedures, or best practices for internal employees to keep an IT infrastructure and environment running while ensuring the good health of the IT systems.

At the core, employee IT support documentation aims at improving IT service delivery, user productivity, regulatory compliance, and driving business success.

Common use cases of IT support documentation include creating new products, troubleshooting existing or new IT issues, assisting in user onboarding, and helping users adopt business products.

Some examples of documentation for employee IT support are,

• User manuals

• FAQs

• Knowledge bases

• Wikis

• Other learning resources

It is imperative to share knowledge across teams so they can learn fast and apply the best practice to optimize resources and drive improved results.

If knowledge is disorganized or they are not documented, it is tough to disseminate consistent knowledge across teams to address a specific issue.

Say a bug issue in a software application that an expert fixed appears again. If it is not documented, diagnosing symptoms and determining the corrective steps would be repeated. Troubleshooting steps may be error-prone.

But a documented troubleshooting guide makes handling an incident faster and more seamless.

Image description: Atlassian IT support documentation for developers and community

Source: Atlassian

As a result, documenting IT procedures helps reduce the impact of downtime and enables real-time problem-solving consistently with an improved focus on regulatory compliance at the workplace.

IT documentation perhaps helps customers get along well with the product and maximize product output for their business functions.

Image description: Workativ customer onboarding documentation

For example, if any customer uses the Workativ conversational AI platform for automating IT or HR support, they can make great use of knowledgebase resources to learn steps to create an issue within the collaboration channels, such as MS Teams or Slack, to solve employee issues and improve their experiences.

Consistent and standardized IT support documentation is needed for any enterprise service or solution provider.

But the adversity emerges for an organization as they lack ample resources to work consistently to build effective documentation.

• Delayed production of IT documentation

Technical documentation is a time-consuming activity. The process may take several months, if not years, from ideation to strategizing and development to publishing.

The direct impact is the product is ready to hit the market, but the documentation is incomplete.

• Lack of real-time revision

Software suites or applications go through many changes over time for seamless adoption and user experience.

The challenge is if the technical writers are available to capture the latest change in the product, the product engineers are hardly available. Besides, the pain of getting approval from subject matter experts is another level of challenge.

• Inappropriate knowledge delivery

Sometimes, a product update needs less than a minute to make a change. Unfortunately, this iteration does not happen because employees are busy with their specific jobs, disseminating wrong information and impacting user experience.

• Inconsistent documentation

This happens when technical writers working on content creation do not align properly.

As a result, content layout, design, and formation lack consistency and restrict readability.

• No uniformity in the design structure

There are chances to have IT documentation disorganized, meaning they do not follow proper steps for a particular procedure and even lack illustrations or diagrams.

Generative AI is a distinct area of machine learning and natural language processing built on a huge language corpus or large language model to generate any type of content using prompt engineering.

Generative Artificial Intelligence can unleash immense possibilities for CIOs or IT managers to create new content from scratch without exerting much effort or manual input.

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How Generative AI works to create IT support documentation

The process of creating IT support documentation is the same as other types of content, such as text, emails, images, songs, codes, etc.

In an LLM-powered interface, when an input is provided, Generative AI processes the large language model to establish a relation between the query and desired output.

The best thing about Generative AI is it helps improve search results in the language model based on semantic or neural search rather than a keyword search. As a result, Generative AI searches for the most relevant response to the query and generates accurate information.

Below is the representation of how text generation happens in the Generative AI playground for users, where they just need to use plain language like English to get the information. However, Generative AI can understand multiple languages.

So, when applied to IT support documentation, Generative AI can boost productivity and faster time to market.

Brainstorming ideas to create IT support documentation

IT support documentation is a complicated process when it comes to structuring its style and look and feel.

Using just a few prompts, the technical authors can create an outline or a document structure to know how the flow can remain consistent.

Say you want to create IT support documentation on ‘Ticket Escalation.’ Using Generative AI provides real-time solutions to help you visualize how a document should look with the right information flow.

Language generation for IT support documentation

Generative AI helps your IT authors rapidly create accurate drafts using prompt engineering techniques in an LLM-powered interface. Leveraging Generative AI removes additional steps to automate the process of content generation.

With minimal review efforts and fine-tuning, your content can be ready to go for publication.

Here’s how Generative helps create new IT support documentation:

• First, it matches several examples in the language model

• Gen AI picks the most appropriate example

• Then, it produces the output in the interface for users to apply to the IT support documentation

Improvement of the current version of IT documents

Say your IT document does not look consistent, has some syntax issues, and contains grammatical errors. You can realize the inconsistency but lack ample understanding to correct the issue. Manual revision may involve assistance from product developers, subject matter experts, delaying the publishing of the document.

Generative AI can produce a better version of the exciting document and helps you automate and accelerate the publication process.

Check the inserted version has text formation, capitalization, and grammatical errors. Generative AI provides the right version of the given prompt.

Organizing design structure

Since Generative AI automates the most complicated technical documentation processes, authors can optimize their time to focus on critical parts of the design structure. As a result, everything remains consistent in every aspect of technical documentation, from tone, style, and flow, to presentation, taking a shorter time to organize, review, and publish.

Augmenting authoring skills

This is one great aspect of Generative AI to help IT authors to build new skills and improve the presentation of technical documentation.

For example, if your organization follows an AP writing style guide to author all technical documentation for your internal users and customers, Generative AI can be a useful tool to learn and develop that skill in a shorter period of time.

Once your authors are ready, they can easily implement the skill and help create contextual documents.

Below is an example of Generative AI following the instruction to produce documents in an AP writing style guide:

Simplification of complex technical documentation

Technical documentation simplifies the understanding of complex steps or procedures for troubleshooting activities or onboarding functions.

Consolidated texts or illustrations are the easiest ways to help users understand the process and take appropriate steps to resolve an issue.

For example, if you want to produce a simplified and consolidated form of steps for Ticket Escalation activity for your internal employees, Generative AI helps create a consolidated form of the steps using summarization or image generation use cases.

The provided steps by Generative AI are the fastest way to create an illustration. You can also generate an AI interface to create illustrations or diagrams for complex steps for users and developers.

Real-time documentation update

Generative AI-powered workflow automation can help you reduce the manual efforts of updating outdated content.

As your product features and use cases may change or add more advanced versions, your existing documents must reflect the same experience.

With the workflow in the backend, whenever an event of changes happens, it identifies the change and implements it in the database. It then corrects the outdated document, replaces the outdated document with the new one, and waits for approval to go live.

This is how minimal resources are tied up, and content updates are done using workflow automation.

These are all about Generative AI use cases for improving IT support documentation. The extended usability of these use cases can be applied to creating different types of IT supportdocumentation.

The possibilities are endless when you have Generative AI to help with IT support documentation.

Generative AI can generate various IT support documentation more flexibly and conveniently.

• Product documentation

Generative AI makes it easy for you to build product documents, also known as user guides, used by users who want to know how to appropriately use a specific product and gain maximum benefits from its features.

Below is an example of a product document from Workativ for its conversational AI platform.

• API documentation

The application programming interface can be created in a more simplified manner using Generative AI. API reference documentation and API tutorials are great resources for developers and the community.

This is how Dwolla’s API documentation looks.

Source: Dwolla

• Support knowledge bases

Customers who use products need support knowledge bases for the autonomous resolution of a particular issue. Generative AI helps create these documents easily.

• SDK documentation

Software development kit or SDK provides essential tips and guides for developers to use features to develop applications or any platform appropriately.

Source: Adobe Commerce

Many other types of employee IT support documentation can be created with the help of Generative AI, such as SOP, whitepapers, FAQs, etc.

• Development of consistent documentation

When developed using Generative AI-powered systems, IT support documentation contains accurate information and fewer errors, helping users optimize resources and drive faster results.

• Contextual help for problem resolution

Generative eliminates mistakes and provides contextual awareness to the technical documentation for employees and customers, enabling real-time problem-solving.

• Integrated collaboration with stakeholders

With technical documentation reflecting consistent information, stakeholders stay on the same page, reducing excessive efforts for knowledge transfers and making discussions productive and effective.

• Optimized utilization of resources

Generative AI automates the process of technical documentation, thus reducing dependency on people top-down. As a result, Generative AI helps accelerate production and reduce costs.

• Reduction of support calls

Generative AI improves documentation readability and context, which helps enhance self-service capability and reduce support calls.

Workativ provides the easiest way to help you build the app workflow automation for conversational AI bots to ease HR and IT support.

The bot engine leverages the power of large language models or, specifically, Generative AI properties to help you rapidly create conversation dialog without spending huge time on the activity.

Besides, you can have the flexibility to upload any size of content to the bot environment to build your enterprise database or IT support documentation, enabling you to deliver efficient KnowledgeAI search capability to accelerate employee support through self-service enablement.

If you want to build your workplace virtual bot that simplifies employee communications and collaboration while enhancing productivity, Workativ is the answer.

Get in touch to learn more about your options to facilitate IT support in the workplace.

Generative AI brings massive opportunity to every business function. Organizations start realizing the benefits of LLM-powered content for various purposes across business operations.

Employee IT support documentation can be transformative using Generative AI use cases.

When it comes to delivering humanized content experience, Generative AI can meet your expectations with its ability to unleash natural language understanding. So, your technical documentation looks more intuitive and meaningful for users to apply conveniently.

Connect with Workativ to learn more about enriching the user experience with Generative AI-driven IT support documentation. You can also book a demo for a real-time experience with Generative AI.