Rachel Andrew

SESSION

Google has a lot of technical writers using internal tooling and publishing to an internal platform. Most writers work in fairly small teams, or even as sole writers embedded into an engineering team. While we have shared tooling, these teams work in quite different ways, serve different audiences, and often have quite different problems to solve.

As AI swept across the industry and our company, we encountered the same concerns, problems, and opportunities as technical writers outside of Google. Initially, senior writers and leads across the company were trying to figure out what it meant alone. In Chrome I was trying to support my team—those who were excited and those who were worried—while trying to figure out what I thought about it all myself!

Thankfully, I wasn't on my own for long. This talk will share some of what happened when a bunch of technical writers from across the company got together as an "AI for Authors" working group. Together we're finding ways to increase velocity, improve quality, and reduce toil. Much of what we've learned is generally applicable, outside of the Google tech stack, and I hope will inspire you to get together with fellow writers to work together to take advantage of AI.

SPEAKER

Rachel Andrew works for Google as Content Lead for Chrome DevRel working on web.dev and the Chrome for Developers site. She is a front and back-end web developer, author and speaker, author or co-author of 22 books including The New CSS Layout and a regular contributor to a number of publications both on and offline. Rachel is a Member of the CSS Working Group, and can be found posting photos of her cats on Mastodon as @rachelandrew.

Follow her on Linkedin.