At ScreenSteps, we talk a lot about an approach called Find and Follow.
The idea is simple: employees should be able to quickly find the right answer and easily follow the instructions so they can complete their work correctly.
But that second part, follow, is where a lot of documentation falls apart.
Employees might be able to find a document. But when they open it, they are met with long paragraphs, scattered screenshots, background information, and every detail someone knew about the topic.
Technically, the information is there. Practically, it is hard to use.
And when employees cannot easily follow the documentation, they either make mistakes, interpret the process differently, or give up and ask someone else.
That is not Find and Follow... that is Find and Figure It Out.
Think about someone working in financial services.
A customer asks them to add a beneficiary to an account. In that moment (which we call The Moment of Performance), the employee does not need a long explanation of everything related to beneficiaries. They need to know what to do next.
Now, there is a place for background knowledge. If the employee does not know what a beneficiary is, why someone would add one, or what the implications are, they need a foundational article, a short training video, or some kind of conceptual explanation.
But once they understand the concept, they need something different.
Now, they need a procedure. They need a job aid that helps them complete the task confidently and consistently.
That procedure should be:
Easy to scan
The goal of documentation is not to document everything you know.
It's to help the employee do the job correctly, consistently, and confidently.
Turning wordy documentation into usable job aids is one way ScreenSteps helps organizations improve their documentation.
Inside ScreenSteps, you can take existing information and run it through built-in AI prompts that help transform that content into something more usable.
For example, you can take a long, wordy procedure and have ScreenSteps help turn it into an article, guide, or job aid that is more:
Actionable: The content focuses on what the employee needs to do.
Easy to follow: The steps are clear, organized, and written in a way that supports the workflow.
Easy to scan: The article uses headings, bullets, bolding, and concise language so employees can quickly find the part they need.
The AI helps remove fluff, reduce unnecessary explanation, and separate background knowledge from task-based instructions.
That matters because employees usually use procedures while they are in the middle of doing the work. They might be helping a customer, working inside a system, processing a request, or trying to avoid making a mistake.
They do not have time to read an essay.
They just need a guide they can follow.
This is a fair question. Sometimes people ask, “If AI can help improve documentation, why do we need ScreenSteps? Couldn’t we just use ChatGPT or Copilot?”
The answer is: yes, you could.
If your main goal is to create a few better documents, and you are the only person responsible for creating them, ChatGPT or Copilot might be enough.
You could take an existing procedure, paste it into ChatGPT, ask it to make the procedure clearer, and then copy the result into Word, SharePoint, Google Docs, or whatever system you use to share documentation.
For a one-person documentation workflow, that can work.
But that is not the same thing as building a knowledge operations system for your organization.
And that is where the difference starts to matter.
Creating documentation is only one part of the job.
Once you create the document, you still need to manage everything around it.
You need a place to store it.
You need a way for employees to find it.
You need a way to keep it up to date.
You need a way to know whether employees are using it.
You need a way for employees to give feedback when something is wrong.
You need a way to notify people when procedures change.
You need a way to keep documentation consistent when multiple people are contributing.
That is where using only ChatGPT and Word starts to break down.
ChatGPT can help you create or improve content. But it is not your knowledge base. It is not your authoring workflow. It is not your change management system. It is not your analytics dashboard. It is not your feedback loop. It is not the place where employees go to find and follow approved procedures.
So the real question is not, “Can ChatGPT write a better procedure?”
It can.
The better question is, “What happens after the procedure is written?”
Another challenge shows up when multiple people start creating documentation.
If one person is using ChatGPT, another person is using Copilot, another person has their own custom GPT, and another person is writing manually, you can quickly end up with a lot of variation.
One article might be formatted one way.
Another might be written in a different style.
Another might include too much background information.
Another might skip important steps.
Another might be optimized for training, while another is optimized for doing the job.
Even when everyone is trying to create good documentation, the results can become inconsistent.
And inconsistent documentation is hard for employees to trust.
One of the benefits of ScreenSteps is that multiple people can create, author, optimize, and manage documentation inside the same system. They are not each inventing their own process or relying on separate tools. They are working from a shared platform with shared expectations for what good documentation should look like.
That makes it easier to create documentation that is consistent, usable, and aligned with the way your organization wants employees to work.
If all you need is to generate some documents quickly, then ChatGPT, Copilot, and Word may be enough.
But if you are trying to build a true single source of truth, you need more than a writing assistant.
You need a system that helps you:
That is the difference.
ScreenSteps is not just helping you write a better article. It is helping you create the system around that article so employees can find it, follow it, trust it, and provide feedback when it needs to be improved.
Another important difference is where the documentation lives.
A lot of companies create documentation and then store it somewhere employees are expected to go find it. That might be SharePoint, a shared drive, a document library, or a folder full of PDFs.
But employees do not always work from those places.
They work in CRMs.
They work in web applications.
They work in ticketing systems.
They work in internal tools.
They work while talking to customers, processing requests, and making decisions.
So the more friction there is between the employee and the answer, the less likely they are to use the documentation.
ScreenSteps helps push content closer to where employees are doing the work. That means the procedure is not just sitting in a document repository. It can be available at the moment the employee needs it, in the context where they need to use it.
That is a major part of making documentation usable.
It depends on your goal.
If your goal is simply to create a few better documents, then you may not need ScreenSteps.
You can use ChatGPT or Copilot to clean up your content, make it more concise, and turn long paragraphs into clearer steps. Then you can put those documents wherever your organization stores information.
That can be a perfectly reasonable approach for a small team, a one-person documentation effort, or a simple documentation project.
But if your goal is to reduce tribal knowledge, improve consistency, support multiple contributors, manage updates, track usage, collect feedback, notify employees of changes, and give people one trusted place to find and follow procedures, then you need more than ChatGPT and Word.
You need a system.
That is what ScreenSteps provides.
ScreenSteps helps you capture, create, optimize, collaborate on, manage, publish, track, notify, and deliver documentation to the people who need it.
Because the real goal is not just to create documentation faster.
The real goal is to help employees do their jobs correctly, consistently, and confidently without having to rely on tribal knowledge.
That is what Find and Follow is all about.