Smart / Datafied / Autonomous: How Artificial Intelligence Creates New Roles and Tasks for Technical Communication

Artificial intelligence is often mystified as a “black box” technology that does its work miraculously in creating self-driving vehicles, robots and intelligent processes.<br><br>In reality, AI is a burgeoning academic discipline, and a sociotechnical practice of implementing different computational techniques to augment human activities by non-human actors. The implications of AI are far-reaching and require us to consider how the autonomy of AI can help better address users but also creates opportunities for technical communicators to see their value in being user advocates. In this session we seek to demystify the work that artificial intelligence does by rethinking the roles of technical communicators while also introducing a practice of using AI to understand the user(using Google Analytics).