S8E7 The Work AI Cannot See with Vinay Payapilli

AI can summarize meetings, monitor repositories, categorize support tickets, and generate instructions. But automation does not eliminate the need to understand what customers are trying to do—or what happens when a product enters the real world.

Vinay Payapilli joins me to examine the assumptions beneath the rush to automate technical communication. Drawing on 26 years in the profession, he explains how mapping documentation’s critical path changed the problem his team was trying to solve. The largest delays were not in writing. They were in recovering context from scattered conversations and waiting for knowledgeable people to review the result.

That distinction leads us to a larger question: What must be understood before any part of the work can be handed to AI?

A system can describe the steps encoded in software. It cannot observe a cashier memorizing a sequence of keystrokes because reading the interface takes too long. It cannot know that customers are misusing a delete button because the product gives them no reason to stop. And it cannot decide, without human context, whether the customer needs another article or a better product.

Our conversation moves between documentation practice and the wider uncertainty surrounding AI:

• The difference between generating instructions and helping customers make decisions
• How AI can surface patterns that manual analysis misses
• Why customer workarounds may never appear in support data
• The role of technical writers in questioning product decisions
• Why rapid prototypes distort leadership’s expectations of delivery
• What drives the demand for an organizational “AI story”
• How practitioners can respond to disruption without pretending to predict the future

Vinay’s message is neither resistance nor blind optimism. Use AI. Experiment with it. But go deep enough into the product, the domain, and the customer’s reality to recognize what the technology cannot know on its own.

Season 8 of Inside Tech Comm is sponsored by LavaCon. Use discount code ITC26 to save $200 on registration for LavaCon 2026.

Show Credits

• Intro and outro music - Az
• Audio engineer - RJ Basilio

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