Scott Abel is Content Strategy Evangelist at Heretto, founder of The Content Wrangler, and an expert in technical documentation management. He hosts a webinar series, writes for industry pubs, authors books, and speaks at events worldwide.

Make Inference Visible: Designing Content for Machine Reasoning

Have you ever confidently misunderstood a situation? As humans, we constantly rely on implicit clues and past experiences to fill in missing information. We read between the lines.

When AI does this with our enterprise content, we call it a “hallucination.” But the machine isn’t hallucinating; it’s simply making an educated guess because we left critical relationships implicit.

In this TED-style keynote, we’ll explore why human-friendly documentation is no longer enough. Humans forgive ambiguity; AI agents execute it. When we feed ambiguous content to AI systems, they operate with unprecedented speed and flawless execution. But without explicit blueprints, they build solutions exactly as instructed—not as intended.

To bridge this gap, technical communicators must master a new metric: the Inference Load. We’ll introduce the TRACE framework (Tasks, Roles, Actors, Conditions, Events), a practical methodology to systematically eliminate hidden assumptions in your documentation. Discover how to design for our newest audience—machine readers—and learn how to step into your ultimate role: deciding which relationships AI no longer has to guess.