The Society for Technical Communications (STC) India chapter held the World TechComm Day 2026 celebrations simultaneously in Pune, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Mumbai on 6 June 2026.
I went to the venue with Rakesh ettan in his car, Hatchi. We reached on time and met up with some former colleagues. One of my former colleagues was also presenting.
Building a Strategic AI Roadmap
The first session that I liked was on Building a Strategic Artificial Intelligence (AI) Roadmap for Technical Communication by Snehal Yerawadekar of Philips. The talk was about implementing AI in a technical communications team within a highly regulated sector – medical devices.
Snehal began by talking about why AI matters in technical writing. She says that product and content complexity, faster release cycles, localization demands, and higher customer expectations. AI enables TechComm teams to meet this demand.
She continues that an AI strategy must provide business value (align the AI strategy with the business unit strategy), focus on the key aspects (turn the priorities in the business unit into measurable outcomes), keeping with the trend (anticipate and adapt to the latest trends and review organizational policies and change existing business models to advance the TechComm team), and Collaboration.
She then spoke about having an AI ready team (with an AI mindset), manage processes with Management, and leveraging technology by using solutions that align with the strategy. She then went ahead about how she used these principles to implement an AI strategy in Philips and the future projects that they are working on.
Shifting Style Guides to AI Skills
The second talk I want to talk about is Editing at AI Speed: Shifting Style Guides to AI Skills by Amruta Hungund at Salesforce.
She begins by saying that human is at the center at Salesforce. It is AI + human. She says that all the style guides that technical writers so adore must be rethought of as a rules engine for AI.
She says there are two types of checks one does against a style guide. One is deterministic checks (which are yes/no rules) like spell check, grammar rules, punctuation rules, mandatory format requirements etc., AI can fix these easily without needing a human in the loop. For probabilistic checks, like context and meaning, nuanced tone adjustments, logic flow and arguments, etc., it is better to have humans in the loop.
She says that the Rules Engine does not need conversational essays on brand philosophy, basic grammar remediation, sometimes rules etc. She suggests that rules must have a list of negative constraints, versioning, product names, voice and tone, sentence simplification, etc.
The style guide must then be optimized for the use as an AI rules engine. This means having conditions like “max_words_per_sentence”: 25 instead of “Avoid overly long sentences to ensure readability and clear flow.” After optimizing the style guide, she suggests using Google Gems (or your stand-in for skills). She defines a Gem as an addition of a prompt to a rules engine.
She also suggests using a Gem to collect data from the style guide to optimize the Gem.
She asked what was the job of human in the loop – governance, conflict resolution, and understanding the larger context.
She suggested a podcast towards the end of her talk – The Culture of Writing podcast. Episode 30, in particular. But, it is a Salesforce channel podcast.
Quiz
I was part of a team that won a quiz. Mugdha (who took my interview at my present workplace), Rakesh, and I were in the team.
We wrote answers in the first round on a piece of a paper as a team. After we submitted the paper, we ended up as one of four teams that was part of an oral round which we topped after breaking a tie-breaker.
Overall
We loved the tea and snacks at the venue. This was my first networking event as a technical writer and felt that it was quite well organized and I enjoyed the quality of people and conversations we had. I didn’t take any photographs. Will add them if I get them with due credits. 🙂
Snehal wrote this nice appreciation post on LinkedIn.
