I've written about how you can use generative AI like ChatGPT to help streamline various writing tasks. I still use many of those strategies in my content creation. While exciting, what I found more intriguing is having AI use the knowledge created by an organization to create a new conversational user experience.

Technologies that do this are emerging and they are very exciting.

In this article, I’ll share a bit about two tools that I have experimented with. I will also share takeaways for how you can prepare your content to take advantage of these types of technologies should you choose to adopt one.

Emerging AI powered tools powered by your content

ChatGPT and the like are powerful tools due to their ability to process significant bodies of content and share back meaningful responses to user. But, we don’t have control over the knowledge base that many of these generative AI chat tools have. What if we did.

Having spent time with tools like Zapier’s Chatbot and Notion’s Q/A, I’ve seen first hand how these emerging technologies can activate nonprofit content. These tools use your content as the knowledge base for AI chat experiences. They have the potential to transform how a small and mighty team can engage stakeholders and manage internal information. They deliver experiences where people can chat with your organization, leveraging AI to converse and share back responses of your content.

I recently tested out two tools that use your content to power AI driven chat experiences. One has an internal focus of being something for your staff while the other serves any audience including your website visitors.

Case 1: Internal chatbot knowledge base

Notion is among many things a knowledge management tool. You can use it with your team to host your internal knowledge base, manage projects, and more. Notion’s Q/A tool uses the content that you've added to Notion as a primary source. When you query the AI, it will attempt to respond using the content you have entered into your Notion workspace. This is really exciting as an internal tool.

Let’s say your organization has documented a host of FAQs and SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) that detail how your organization operates. The Q/A tool allows you to ask questions and get responses driven by your internal content.

What an amazing resource for new or veteran team members. Imagine the time savings when asking for help in a chat compared to having to navigate or search for the page and then find the right section of content within that page to answer your question.

Case 2: A public facing support chatbot

A chatbot that lives on your website, powered with your content and ready to answer questions of your site visitors. This is what Zapier’s Chatbot feature offers. Zapier is know for it's automation and integration features. It helps connect disparate tools to share data and save time through creative integrations. Their tool allows you to create an automated chatbot that uses your content with AI.

The Chatbot lives on your website. Imagine someone in need of your services asking a question and getting an informed and well crafted response. A response that can share links to a thoughtful next step or resource.

Want to give their chatbot a try? Visit the Chatbot marketing page and use their Chatbot to learn more about the Chatbot … that is a mouthful. It is a pretty impressive example.

The role of content in AI-powered chat

These two tools highlight opportunity to use your content in AI powered experiences that support your mission. If this is intriguing to you, a good next question is, what can and should you be doing now to prepare your content?

These tools generate responses and provide insights based on the information they access. The Notion solution uses the content added to notion. Zapier's Chatbot gives you an opportunity to share content through a structured file or via their Tables feature. I tested the table feature. I added content to it manually, though it could be populated through an automation.

Effort to provide content to an AI experience may require repurposing and creating a separate body of work. But there will also be opportunities to automate how your content can be added.

In all cases, the thinking you might apply to repurposing your content will likely be impactful outside of any AI tools as well.

So let's get to it.

Your content must be people first, well-structured and maintained, and easy to understand for it to be effective.

Creating people-first content to power your AI

Effective content for AI-powered chat solutions is written for the people it is seeking to support, engage, and/or uplift. It is content that considers your audience’s needs and challenges.

Do you have your key target audience persona’s documented? If not, this is an important first step. Creating audience personas to use as a reference helps make sure you are keeping your key audience details in mind, always.

When drafting or editing your content, refer to your personas.

• Who is this piece of content for?
• Does it offer a takeaway that meets the needs of the target audience?
• Is the tone, writing style, and length appropriate for your target audience?

You might want to consider an FAQ-like structure to your content. People will often ask a question to start a chat. Formatting your content with a question and answer structure makes a lot of sense.

Thinking about the questions your audience(s) asks can be a great source of new content ideas as well.

Structure and maintain your content

How you structure your content helps increase readability and understanding.

• Use headings and subheadings to establish a content heirarchy. This helps showcase how paragraphs related to each other and the content entry as a whole.
• Use bulleted and ordered lists to highlight action steps and key details.
• Note related content by adding links for further reading.
• Keep your content current. Make sure it represents the most relevant information and is not outdated and stale.

Writing style

Your audience would use an AI chat to solve a problem or need. You want to make sure the content they receive in a response is direct and actionable.

• Avoid jargon, branded language and terms. Keep your language simple. This will improve AI’s and audience’s ability to understand your content and resulting response.
• Keep sentence structure simple and strive for an approachable reading level.

Preparing for AI integration

I am excited about the possibilities of AI powered chat experiences that use an organization's content. Notion’s Q/A leverages your knowledge base content in Notion to help with day to day guides, procedures, and policy. Zapier’s Chatbot is flexible to work with internal and external audiences to activate your content in new user friendly ways. These are just two examples that we have spent time with alongside a growing marketplace of options that are emerging.

I hope these tips to optimize your content for AI-powered chat experiences are helpful. They are good for AI but also apply more generally. From search engine optimization to usability, people focused, well-structured, and maintained content is good always.

By applying these tips you can ensure a smoother integration of your content to AI tools and better engage with your audience. Start preparing your content now to take full advantage of these exciting technologies.

Takeaways

1. A user-first approach ensures content meets audience needs and aids AI integration.
2. FAQ-like content is effective for external and internal AI-powered chat experiences.
3. Preparing content now ensures smoother AI tool integration in the future. This and you will gain other benefits such as improvements in SEO and usability as well.

Interested in talking about your website strategy and chatbots for your future, contact us.