Looking for tips and guidelines for content creation in the context of AI?

[FElizabet]

Together with the authors we were working on content creation guidelines and were considering to have a section dedicated to AI. 

Does anyone have any suggestions or recommendations regarding the subject?

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Hi, 

There is a good session in this post that is worth watching if you haven't already seen it. And also a lot of tips regarding knowledge and Now Assist here.

From personal experience I think it all depends on what your use case is going to be. Do you have an existing knowledge base that you are just going to use with Now Assist, or do you have other AI tools in mind and are starting fresh? 

From personal experience we have had to make some alterations to how we traditionally approached writing articles. Our audience was always just intended to be a human reading an article on a screen, but obviously with AI that has changed. Our articles are now ingested by a chatbot so we've had to make some changes around how articles are structured and formatted. Making sure all images have alt text was a big undertaking, as the bot wasn't reading images. We've also begun to include a short summary at the beginning of all our self service articles, because again this is something that the chatbot seems to work well with.

Looking forward to seeing input from others on this and what changes they may have had to make.

Regards,

Eoghan

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[Jeimegoz]

This would actually be great. A lot of people would learn from this.

[MaryG]

Great question, and the existing replies here are a solid starting point — I'd build on them with a few things we consistently recommend when working with customers on this.

The core of an AI-specific authoring section really comes down to one idea: your article needs to be able to answer a question on its own, without relying on the reader to follow links, expand sections, or interpret images. That changes a few things practically:

Short descriptions matter more than people realize — Now Assist uses them in retrieval, so a vague or blank short description hurts your AI results before a user even sees the article. Treat it like a search-optimized summary sentence.

FAQ-style content needs self-contained answers. "Yes" is not an answer for AI. "Yes, X is required because..." is. Same with Q&A articles — if the answer only makes sense with context from the question, rewrite it to stand alone.

Collapsed/expandable sections are a problem. Now Assist can't read collapsed content, so anything hidden behind a toggle might as well not exist for AI purposes. If it matters, it needs to be in the body.

Tables are hit or miss depending on complexity. Simple two-column tables usually index fine. Merged cells and nested tables don't. If critical info lives in a complex table, add a plain-text summary above it.

And honestly the biggest one — avoid writing articles for a human who will read top to bottom. Write for a retrieval system that's going to pull a snippet and generate a response. That means front-loading the key answer, not burying it in paragraph three.

Happy to share more specifics if it's helpful to know what you're using AI for — Now Assist in AI Search, Virtual Agent, something else?