Rules for AI: Why You Need Guidance, Governance and Guardrails for Enterprise Content

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in content creation has become the new normal. Already in 2023, Gartner stated: “By 2026, more than 80% of enterprises will have used generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) application programming interfaces (APIs) or models, and/or deployed GenAI-enabled applications in production environments, up from less than 5% in 2023.”

While many enterprises already use generative AI in their content production, some of them don’t use the full potential of AI technologies, Harvard Business Review reports. According to “Becoming an AI-fueled organization – Deloitte’s State of AI in the Enterprise, 4th Edition”, 71% of survey participant’s organizations haven’t “identified and largely adopted leading practices associated with the strongest AI outcomes” yet.

AI content creation tools help with writer’s block and improve productivity, but not all are suitable for businesses. To use AI in your business, make sure your AI content generation follows regulations and your writing standards.

Guidance

To take advantage of AI in your organization, you need to help your writers use generative AI the best way possible. There’s two guidance types, and both are important for the human in the loop:

1. Writer guidance
2. AI guidance

Let’s look at AI guidance later and focus on writer guidance for now. As part of your content strategy, you’ll probably have writing standards for different audiences and types of content. These writing standards are established guidelines that make sure all content is high-quality, clear, and on-brand. But having writing standards isn’t enough: To scale your content strategy, you need to actively guide your writers. 

It’s time to make sure that following your standards isn’t an afterthought, but rather part of the process. 

Offering writing standards and guidance is a great first step. The next step is to understand how people respond to guidance and improve your content. To do so, monitor it regularly and adjust writing standards as needed. And in doing so you’ll enter the realm of content governance.

Content Governance

Content governance refers to the people, processes, and systems that you have in place alongside your content supply chain.

These entities can be different for each company, but here are some examples:

• In your organization every piece of content needs to be peer reviewed by someone else before it can be published. 
• You have an enterprise style guide or any number of other guidelines that you try to enforce. 

All of those procedures, and the corresponding rules are part of your content governance. And they’re critical for content quality and consistency.

The challenge with content governance 

In everyday content production, content governance can fall short for a variety of reasons. For example:

• Writers ignore your style guide. 
• The team of editors you’ve hired to review your content doesn’t have the bandwidth to look at everything. 

As a result, things slip through the cracks. Publishing content that’s outdated, incorrect, or misaligned has serious consequences. These consequences may include product misuse or compliance problems. Even small mistakes have the potential to lead to these issues.

Even with the best laid plans, there’s risk — especially in large, globally distributed enterprises with high content velocity. 

In regard to content velocity: 64% of all enterprises are looking into generative AI to boost their content supply chain. Generative AI has benefits, but it needs to follow your organization’s rules, writing standards, and guidelines to meet your requirements. 

This means that Artificial Intelligence in content creation must follow the specific guidelines set by your organization. By doing so, you can make sure that the output generated by the AI aligns with your needs and expectations. We’re speaking of AI guardrails for writing standards.

AI guardrails for writing standards

We describe guardrails as the systems, workflows, and technologies that stop content contributors from making mistakes when they ignore a guideline. When generative AI creates content, it’s important to have rules for AI that make sure it’s used in the intended way. Next to AI frameworks that provide AI guidance, there’s also AI guardrails for writing standards. 

AI guardrails for writing standards are a set of capabilities that make sure that AI-generated enterprise content is safe and compliant with both regulations and company standards. 

In short: AI guardrails for writing standards are content governance for AI-generated content in action.

The 5 elements of AI guardrails for writing standards

1. LLM Population: The quality of the content you put into your LLM directly affects the quality of the output. By implementing content quality assurance, you can make sure that the content used to fine-tune your LLM meets the standards set by your business. This significantly improves the performance of your model.
2. AI Content Generation: Before your writers get involved, you can check the quality of the content generated by your LLM. Acrolinx integrates into your generative AI workflows, allowing you to assess, score, and improve the content as it’s created. This guarantees that the content follows your enterprise style guide and writing standards.
3. Writing Assistance: Generative AI is nothing without the human in the loop. Thus, AI guardrails need to come with a great user experience to be widely accepted. The guidance needs to be actionable and insightful, so it’s a real help for writing and editing content. 
4. Automation: Automatically checking content at multiple stages of the content supply chain is crucial, especially for AI-generated content. Automation makes sure you reach 100% editorial coverage without investing additional resources. The more content is produced with a high velocity, the more crucial automation is for your organization. With automation, you can even check the following:

1. Published content
2. Content that’s currently in development

We’ve discussed how important it is to only use high-quality LLM input. By doing so, you ground your LLM to capture your unique enterprise style, tone, terminology, and brand guidelines. Read our guide and learn how to tune your LLM using only your best writing — that’s your clearest, most consistent, and totally compliant content.

Without guardrails, content governance is at risk. Missing content governance leads to issues like inconsistent terminology, poor readability, or non-inclusive language. All of these issues come with risk for your organization. This is why guardrails are essential for human and machine-generated content.

Implementing the three pillars of successful content

Knowing that you need all three, guidance, content governance and guardrails, bringing them to life might seem challenging. Rest assured: As an enterprise, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel to achieve content governance through guidance and AI guardrails.

Instead you can rely on AI-powered content governance software that captures and digitizes your style guide to make your writing standards, standard: Acrolinx!

Acrolinx governs new and existing content written by people and generative AI. Whether your company has written 100,000 words or billions (like our customer Microsoft), Acrolinx makes sure each one reflects your style guide. Customers enjoy massive efficiency gains without sacrificing standards through AI-powered live writing assistance, automated reviews and quality gates, and analytics comparing content quality with performance.

Ready to learn more about guidance, governance, and guardrails for enterprise content? Let’s talk