Useful to humans and AI

Nearly every Information & Referral (I&R) organization maintains a Style Guide.

What is a Style Guide?

For the uninitiated, it is a "collection of recommended best practices" for the content and structure of your resource data. It's usually written and maintained by the more experienced and respected staff members to codify how they want resource database curators to perform their daily work.

You'll normally see prescriptions and examples for every record type and field type that either suggest or require the format and type of content that should be  present.

Most I&R's will update their Style Guide every few years to reflect emerging best practices, ideas, cultural shifts and vocabulary. And then begins the long process of applying those changes to their entire resource database.

Style Guides are quite useful to Yanzio's AI

One of first AI Assistants we built is the Style Guide Curator. We interpret each I&R's Style Guide into AI instructions, and then evaluate every record and field for conformance to its guidelines.

We're suddenly learning new ways to improve Style Guides

A surprising outcome, both to Yanzio and to our clients, is that once people see the recommendations from our AI Assistants, they realize they want to update their Style Guide. Common epiphanies include:

• tightening the language to make the recommendations and examples more clear and prescriptive
• Adding more examples to capture the breadth of the service types in the database
• Rethinking grammar and formatting rules for things like times (in hours of operation)
• Avoiding generalizations like "one-stop shop" and "offering a range of community services"

Those improvements can be more rapidly incorporated

Once they make those changes, Yanzio modifies the AI instructions for their data, re-runs our AI Assistants, and they instantly get to see where they need to make changes in their records to apply the new Style Guide changes.

Bringing harmony to multi-partner I&R networks, like US states and Canadian provinces

We're working with several state and provincial networks of I&Rs to harmonize the disparate Style Guides of their members into a single definitive Style Guide for all of them to use. You can imagine that the process of aggregating and debating the blending of 10 or 20 such Style Guides would be a lengthy, tedious and even contentious process.

By using Yanzio's AI, we're able to synthesize the Style Guides and, through iteration and review, get most of the way to a final product. Yes there will still be review and discussion about the final version, especially to resolve guidelines that may conflict with each other from different member Style Guides. But we anticipate months can be shaved off this process.

And then, once the synthesized Style Guide is done for the network... you guessed it... we incorporate it into the AI instructions for each of the member I&R organizations in the network, and they instantly see which records and fields need updating to align with the new Style Guide.

I shouldn't be surprised - this is exactly the kind of outcome that Style Guides are supposed to create. But it illustrates how AI can significantly improve and accelerate incorporating their guidelines across large numbers of I&Rs.