Amber Swope is an internationally recognized DITA expert and information architecture consultant. With more than 20 years of experience in information development and DITA, Amber aids organizations in creating opportunities through IA. She helps teams build scalable IA solutions to future-enable their content and mentors team members to advance the IA as it evolves to meet new business needs.

How to Best Leverage Your Most Challenging Employee

Co-presented with: Dan Schommer

Leadership comes with challenges, and few are more persistent than managing the willful team member who resists every change, questions every decision, or undermines team dynamics. Whether you have inherited an established team, grown one within your organization, or stepped into a new role with unfamiliar faces, these employees are part of your reality. Rather than avoid or dismiss them, successful leaders learn to understand and leverage what drives resistance.

In this presentation, Amber Swope and Dan Schommer share practical strategies for managing difficult employees on your own team. Drawing on years of building and leading teams through transformation, they will equip you with approaches to assess talent, understand motivation, and turn resistance into constructive engagement.

In this session, you’ll learn how to :

• Recognize the difference between valuable skepticism and destructive resistance.
• Understand what drives difficult behavior in team members.
• Develop strategies for engaging resistant employees toward productive collaboration.

Inclusive Content In The AI Era: Bias, Culture, And Who Gets Left Behind

Dipo Ajose-Coker Solutions Architect RWS Group (Moderator)
David Alley, SVP, Tridion & Fonto, RWS
Leslie Farinella, President, Content Rules
Erik Bremer Sr. Director, Global Content Engineering, Dell

Bias is inherent in our everyday lives. But when AI becomes part of the content toolchain, it can scale clarity, or it can scale confusion, exclusion, and risk.
The difference is rarely the model. It is the choices we make about data, labels, objectives, review, and what we consider “good enough” when customers live in different cultures, languages, and contexts.

This panel makes inclusive content practical for content leaders adopting AI. We will unpack the “bias supply chain” from authoring and training data through summarization, translation, and delivery. We will share examples of how cultural expectations differ, why that matters for customer experience, and what governance and review patterns reduce harm without slowing everything to a crawl. You will leave with a simple checklist you can apply in real workflows, plus a clear sense of where human review is non-negotiable (bias points to test, cross-cultural QA prompts, “red flag” outputs, mitigation options).

In this session, you’ll learn how to:

• Spot the “bias supply chain” in content operations—authoring, training data, retrieval, summarization, translation, and delivery.
• Run a lightweight “inclusive content risk assessment” that fits real deadlines.
• Handle cross-cultural variation without creating 200 versions of everything (and without pretending one global tone fits all).
• Put human review where it reduces risk the most, not where it feels comforting.
• Set governance that supports teams instead of policing them.