Inside Tech Comm with Zohra Mutabanna

Technical communication has moved from manual printing presses to AI agents, but the hardest parts of the work have not disappeared. Someone still has to think critically, ask the right questions, exercise judgment, understand the product, and recognize what users actually need.

Ramesh Aiyyangar, founder of Tech Write Pro and the Institute for Technical Communicators of India, joins me to reflect on nearly four decades in co...

What happens when there is no single version of a product—and therefore no single version of its documentation?

In this episode, Fabrice Lacroix from Fluid Topics joins us to explore how made-to-order and highly configurable products are changing the way technical content must be structured, managed, and delivered.

We look at why traditional document-based approaches begin to break down as product variants multiply, and why gra...

AI can retrieve and generate answers, but the quality of those answers still depends on the information beneath the model. If content is poorly structured, weakly governed, or divided into the wrong units, a more capable LLM does not automatically solve the problem.

Patrick Bosek, co-founder and CEO of Heretto, joins me to examine how structured content shapes AI context. We begin by defining structured content and comparing...

AI can summarize meetings, monitor repositories, categorize support tickets, and generate instructions. But automation does not eliminate the need to understand what customers are trying to do—or what happens when a product enters the real world.

Vinay Payapilli joins me to examine the assumptions beneath the rush to automate technical communication. Drawing on 26 years in the profession, he explains how mapping documentation&...

Documentation is not just support material anymore. It is quietly becoming a product surface, a competitive advantage, and in many cases the raw fuel that AI systems use to help customers get work done.

I’m joined by Niko Berry, a former technical writer who now works in product management at Contentful. We start with his move from technical writing into product management and the skills that carried over: technical st...

Technical writers do work that can influence products, customers, and business outcomes. Yet we can still find ourselves described as the people who make things look good or “do the documentation.”

In this episode, I talk with Nibu Thomas about changing that narrative.

Nibu’s own career has moved through several S-curves—from manufacturing and quality-focused work to documentation leadership, marketing, and go...

Video feels like the “obvious” way to teach software until you’re the one stuck updating walkthroughs after every release. We sit down with Sagar Garuda, founder and CEO of Zenious, to talk about the real bottleneck behind product education videos: the editing, the reviews, the sync work, and the high cost of keeping content current when a SaaS product changes fast.

We follow Sagar’s path from enginee...

What if we stopped thinking about AI simply as a tool for doing our existing work faster—and started treating it as a new material for designing experiences?

In this episode, I talk with Josh Clark and Veronica Kindred, co-authors of Sentient Design, about what happens when intelligence moves beyond the chatbot and becomes part of the interface itself.

Josh and Veronika define sentient design as the practice of creating intelli...

We talk with Lindsey Rix about moving beyond AI anxiety and experimenting with what AI can actually make possible for technical writers.

Drawing from her presentation, Content Is the Strategy, Lindsey shares how she moved from experimenting with custom agents and AI skills to working with developer-adjacent tools, source code, and MCP connections. She explains why she starts with the problem rather than the tool, how AI is helping h...

We talk with Sharon Burton, editor of Women in Technical Communication, about how women’s stories reveal the real history of technical communication and why our work is bigger than “typing words.” We connect documentation to revenue, customer stickiness, and institutional knowledge while facing the disruption and cost realities of AI. 

Episode highlights:

• Sharon’s path into TechCom and how the...

We explore how to navigate bias, claim space, and thrive in systems not built for women and minorities. Kae Williams shares practical ways to build influence, handle microaggressions, and reach senior leaders with competence and calm. We touch upon these topics:

• mapping systemic patterns that reward proximity over performance
• tying work to business goals to earn visibility
• one‑on‑one networking and cross‑team collaboration
• scripts ...

We ask Julie Trostad how authors can protect their work in an AI-first world and where ethics, law, and new licensing models meet. From content fingerprinting to smarter metadata, we map practical steps, real risks, and hopeful paths for fair compensation.

We start with the foundation: what intellectual property actually protects, how work-for-hire changes ownership, and why attribution still matters. From US lawsuits that p...

The AI tools arrived, the dashboards lit up, and the ROI… didn’t. Monica Marquez of Flipwork unpacks what actually drives meaningful adoption—and what kills it. The short answer: people and process, not just platforms. The longer answer: psychological safety, shared playbooks, and a clear path from micro efficiencies to measurable impact.

Monica walks us through the mindset shift from fearing replacement t...

We kick off the new season by breaking down the “contractor mindset” for writing prompts — the key to getting AI to deliver to spec, not with unnecessary “flair.”

Chuck Nealis joins us to explore how to write high-impact prompts through the lens of storytelling. We dig into the simple but powerful guardrails that help navigate AI’s context window. Because as conversations grow, crucial constraints...

We unpack how structured content and metadata make AI useful, reliable, and traceable across complex organizations. Regina and Max join us to connect strategy and tech, from RAG fundamentals to governance that bridges silos and boosts trust.

Some highlights:

• How to define AI readiness
• Making metadata part of authoring, not an afterthought
• Why component content + semantic markup matter
• Data fabrics, ontologies, and harmonized vocabul...

Manny graces our show once more to share insights on audio synthesis, a technology that has evolved far beyond robotic voices into sophisticated AI systems. It has made documentation more accessible and enhanced technical communication workflows. Manny and I discuss practical applications, implementation strategies, and ethical considerations for incorporating audio synthesis into documentation.

Key takeaways:

• What is audio synth...

What happens when AI meets technical writing? It's not the end of the profession—it's an evolution that opens exciting new possibilities for skilled communicators.

Kartika Raman, Lead Technical Writer at Salesforce, shares her journey from database administration to technical writing and now to the cutting edge of AI content creation. She explains how the fundamental nature of AI systems—probabilistic rather than...

Jack Molisani returns to discuss how technical communication careers are evolving with generative AI. He shares practical advice for navigating the changing landscape with pro tips in this era of resume robots and chatbot interviews, while emphasizing that human expertise remains irreplaceable.

• A resume should be a personal communication from you to the reader, not an AI-generated document
• Stop applying through applicant tracking...

Kicking off our season, Manny Silva discusses how agentic AI is transforming technical documentation workflows and explains why human expertise remains essential despite technological advancements. AI agents are tools that extend our capabilities rather than replace technical writers' core skills. Learn why!

Some takeaways from this interesting discussion:

• Definition of agentic AI as applications that take actions based on the to...