Everybody seems to have an opinion about AI in tech docs. Some people think it’ll save us. Others think it’ll replace us. Some appear to think that asking ChatGPT to rewrite a paragraph is the same thing as having an AI strategy, which is adorable in its own way, but not a reality.
That’s why the 2026 State of AI in Technical Documentation report is worth a look.
The report offers a useful overview of the findings, including how technical writers are using AI currently, which tasks they support with it most often, and where adoption is still getting hung up on entirely reasonable concerns like trust, governance, and integration.
The findings are based on responses from around 400 technical documentation pros, and nearly half of those respondents have more than 21 years of experience in the field. In other words, this is not a pile of hot takes from people who discovered documentation last Thursday.
The overview makes one thing clear: AI use is no longer theoretical for technical writers. A large majority of respondents report using AI either regularly or occasionally, with current use concentrated around editing, drafting, rewriting, and summarizing content. At the same time, interest is growing in more operational uses, such as metadata tagging, content classification, terminology work, and content reuse. That gap between what teams are doing now and what they want to do next is where the interesting story lives.
Which is why the full report matters.
The summary gives you the headlines. The full report gives you the texture, the context, and the evidence you’ll want when somebody at work says, “So what should our documentation team be doing with AI?” It’s much nicer to answer that question with research than with the professional equivalent of shrugging in business casual.
If you work in tech docs and you’re trying to separate signal from nonsense, request the free report.
