Blog
May 23, 2025
As Organizations Embrace AI, the Humble IT Knowledge Base Is More Important Than Ever
IT Management,
Confluence
IT knowledge bases used to simply cover basic information and provide context to a user in page format as needed. Now, they are “always on” as an input for internal AI. Success metrics are no longer limited to pageviews.
AI unlocks new opportunities to optimize workflows and automate more than ever, but you need clear documentation of the current state to understand these opportunities.
The Changing Role of IT Documentation Systems
The core value of IT documentation remains the same: it helps you ensure that work is done properly and efficiently. However, its use has expanded beyond acting as a source of truth for human users to being foundational to the workflows, processes, and humans within an organization.
Increased Complexity of IT Systems
Clear documentation is more important than ever as IT systems within most organizations become more complex. But what’s causing that increased complexity?
Tool Proliferation
Knowledge workers use more tools to get things done than they did just 5 years ago, and the work that goes into managing and using each of these tools independently increases complexity in itself—not to mention learning how they all work together in your system.
Security
With increased threats from malicious actors and changing industry standards, IT teams face higher demands for compliance and security than ever before. Meeting these requirements often calls for complex and multi-faceted solutions.
Flexible Architecture Decisions
Organizations today are more likely to embrace hybrid or multi-cloud environments than they ever have before. Each team has different needs that are best met by different tools, so data is no longer stored in a single place.
IT Documentation Powers Internal AI Tooling
Even as IT systems become more complex, many IT teams are making an effort to focus their work on the most important tasks by automating tasks that are more manual and repetitive.
AI can also help users self-serve and even action tasks that previously might have required 1:1 support. For example, a chatbot could help a user reset their password or troubleshoot an app that isn’t working correctly.
Your users may still need to reference a page to learn how to reset their password, but the primary value of that document will actually be in supporting the AI agents or workflows that can now complete the task without human support.
Since the foundation for your agent is your team’s documentation, better documentation means your agent will serve higher-quality, more accurate responses, and you’ll be able to implement automations faster. Poor documentation is more likely to create faulty responses and inefficient processes.
As Your Users Adopt AI, Clear Policies are Paramount
AI can handle routine and repetitive tasks, but there may be scenarios where AI is still seen as too risky or scenarios involving certain types of data that can't be shared with AI.
This leaves knowledge workers to handle higher-order decisions, but they still need context to make those decisions.
Protecting your organization while still embracing the opportunities AI provides requires alignment and clear communication, along with documentation that can serve as a resource for both humans and AI tools.
Optimizing Your IT Knowledge Repository for the Age of AI
Standardize Your Documentation Structure
To make your AI tools as effective as possible, you’ll need to make sure your documentation is structured in a way that makes it easy for them to find relevant information. (This isn’t just helpful for AI; it’ll help your human team members find and update content faster when they need it, too!)
Here are a few ways to make your documentation’s structure more easily searchable:
- Developing a clear page hierarchy
- Appropriately tagging and indexing content
- Creating and aligning documents to templates
- Using consistent naming conventions
More documentation best practices
Design for Both Humans & AI
Your team’s AI tool of choice can read through a wall of text quickly and easily, but your human team members will be able to find information faster if you prioritize clarity in your content.
There are certain ways to make content more easily digestible: short sentences and paragraphs, headings, lists, tables, and more. To learn more about how to make each page shine, check out our Confluence formatting guide.
Another way to make sure information is easy for both humans and AI to understand is through visuals. For example, if your documentation guides a teammate or a user through a complex process, they will be able to understand and carry out that process much faster by looking at a flowchart than reading step-by-step instructions that don’t illustrate their actions.
There are countless ways to incorporate visuals into your IT documentation, but if you’re working in the Atlassian ecosystem, your best option is a tool like Gliffy which directly integrates with Confluence.
Using a fully integrated diagramming tool means you create and save your diagrams without ever leaving the Confluence page you’re working on, and all information contained within your diagrams is fully searchable. You don’t have to upload static images from external sources or use a connector tool to make sure your diagrams stay updated.
How to Create Diagrams in Confluence
Schedule Maintenance and Governance Processes
You don’t want your AI agent serving outdated information to a user or finding conflicting information in different sources. Auditing and updating content at a cadence, such as quarterly, is important to making sure it can continue to deliver high-quality results.
When your content is properly structured and tagged, it should be easy to find what needs updating quickly. Keeping track of a clear revision history can also help you remember what has been updated when. This isn’t just for page content—with Gliffy, you can see detailed revision history for each diagram and revert to previous versions if necessary.
Treat Documentation as Critical Infrastructure
Encourage your team to document as they go, emphasizing the importance of documentation, but make sure they also see its impact in practice. Communicate the value of documentation by showing how AI uses these inputs; ensure this value is visible to get buy-in throughout the organization.
Why Confluence is the Best Place for Your Knowledge Base
There are plenty of ways you can choose to document your team’s knowledge, two common choices being SharePoint and Notion, but if you want to make the most of your documentation as an input for internal AI, I recommend choosing Confluence.
Confluence Integrates Across Atlassian’s System of Work
Seamless integrations with Jira and Jira Service Management as well as Atlassian’s Rovo foundation make the Atlassian platform an extremely compelling opportunity for organizations of any size to connect project planning, tracking, and collaboration for teams across their business.
Confluence Offers Clear Structure
Confluence allows you to pull all your documentation into a single tool with great search functionality and features that easily create clear hierarchies. Atlassian also has a thriving marketplace of apps (like Gliffy!) that extend the functionality of Confluence and make managing your content easier.
See How Gliffy Can Help You Future-Proof Your Knowledge Base
The role of IT knowledge bases has expanded far beyond simple documentation. Today, they are a critical foundation for both human workflows and advanced AI tools, capable of driving efficiency, accuracy, and better decision-making.
By making your documentation clear, structured, and accessible, you can future-proof your knowledge base and unlock the full potential of AI, and Gliffy is here to help.
Ready to take your knowledge base to the next level? Let's chat about how technical diagramming can help you ensure your documentation is built to empower both humans and AI!