Bringing governance to AI content strategy: how BILL scaled with Writer

The journey of bringing Writer (an enterprise, generative AI platform) to BILL was much more than rolling out another content design tool. It marked a cultural shift and redefined how BILL viewed, created, and governed content across different functions across the company.

For those organizations who understand the value of content design, they know it’s not just an add-on at the end of the product development lifecycle. Instead, content design is seen as a key, strategic lever for delivering the user experience and driving business growth. At BILL, we implemented Writer to help elevate content’s role as a strategic partner.

To understand the impact of Writer at BILL, I’ll start with where we began, trace the steps we took, and look at what the future of content design has in store.

The early days of one content writer

When I joined BILL in 2019, the entire product content practice was supported by one person. Yes, one person! She had been doing all the content for four years, supporting multiple product domains at a growing fintech startup.

Okay, maybe she wasn’t writing all the content, but having one content designer supporting eight product designers plus another nine product managers was clearly unsustainable. Her dedication was incredible (and commendable), but as BILL expanded, it became clear that content needed more than a pair of hands. It needed a real strategy and a system that could scale.

At the time, content requests were coming in through JIRA tickets. This meant that content support was reactive and requests were often submitted last minute. There was no prioritization or visibility across teams, and content’s role was seen as fixing words, rather than driving the narrative across product flows.

I needed to flip that script… and fast. Content needed to be at the table early—helping define how products work—not just tweaking copy here and there.

Setting a mission and vision for AI content strategy

Before we could bring in Writer, I had to get clear on what I was trying to achieve. I created a mission and vision for product content at BILL, whose mission as a company is to make it simple for small and midsize businesses to connect and do business. Under our company mission, I created a product content mission and vision that became our guide for every decision we made:

• Mission: To help customers get things done quickly and painlessly by creating content that’s useful, straightforward, and brings continuity to the product experience.
• Vision: We’re big-picture thinkers who tell stories and build frameworks that meet customers where they are, delivering the right content at the right moment.

Consolidating three disparate content style guides

From my perspective, the true product experience is made up of three key areas:

1. Marketing: This is what I call the pre-product experience; it’s all the content that the customer interacts with before they sign into the product.
2. In-product: This is all the content the customer sees in the experience after they sign into the product.
3. Customer Support: Last, but certainly not least, this is all the content in the customer follow-up experience.  

One of the first things I uncovered was that each function had their own content style guide. This meant different voices, different standards, and an inconsistent content experience for BILL customers.

You’d see one team say “Sign in”, while another used “Log in”. These small inconsistencies added up and made the product feel disjointed. Customers notice when things are inconsistent and don’t line up. That chips away at your brand, leading to both confusion and mistrust.

Enter the Content Committee

To start bridging the gaps, the very first thing I did was created a Content Committee Slack channel. I had only been in my role for two weeks, so I didn’t know too many people. I invited those team members whom I had 1:1s with from marketing, product, and customer support. And I asked them to add anyone they knew who was involved with writing content.

The channel’s description said it all: “For the greater content good!” This was our starting point for collaboration and transparency.

The Content Committee became more than just a Slack channel and quickly evolved. You wouldn’t believe the appetite people had for content accuracy, alignment, and consistency. We met monthly to share updates, talk through style decisions, and even hear from guest speakers. Over time, we added new voices like our risk, operations, and engineering teams. Content was becoming part of everyone’s job, not just something for writers to handle alone.

Enter Writer, a generative AI platform

With the Content Committee in place, I turned to the next big challenge. How could we ensure content was consistent and high-quality, even as more teams and people got involved? That’s where Writer came in. Bear in mind this was in the throes of Covid during the summer of 2020, way before generative AI was cool and before ChatGPT made headlines. Writer wasn’t even called “Writer” yet. At that time, they were called Qordoba.

We needed a platform that would unify our style and make it easier for everyone to create consistent content. Writer was the clear choice compared to others. It offered the power and flexibility we needed, plus the security and compliance our information security team required.

Here’s how we rolled out our AI content strategy:

1. Starting the conversation – I used the Content Committee to kick off discussions about Writer and explore our options. We considered other tools like Grammarly, but Writer quickly stood out, especially for its top-tier security features. After all, we were dealing with people’s money.
2. Building the business case – I made sure to show how Writer could reduce friction, eliminate duplication, and improve the customer experience. It wasn’t just about writing better—it was also about supporting our business goals.
3. Security and compliance – Writer met all our data privacy and security needs, which was critical given the sensitive financial data we handle. Writer was the only tool that met a majority of the strict standards of our information security team.
4. Consolidating content style guides – before we could launch Writer, we had to merge those three separate style guides into one unified, global version. My team worked closely with brand marketing and customer success to make sure everyone was aligned. You can check out the BILL unified content style guide at content.bill.design
5. Rolling it out – the whole process took about five months, soup to nuts. We started with a small number of licenses for team members in marketing, content design, and customer support. We then expanded to other functions as budgets opened up. Even engineering got involved, using Writer to create more consistent, customer-facing technical documentation.

Impact beyond just words

Writer didn’t just help us standardize language. It sparked bigger conversations and elevated the role of content across the organization. Content got noticed and became known as a strategic discipline.

To take our work further, I partnered with the knowledge base content manager (she was part of the Customer Support function) to present our strategy to the executive committee, which included our founder and CEO, Rene Lacerte.

We used the executive committee as a launching pad for leading a company-wide initiative focused on content accuracy and alignment. For the first time, content was seen as a strategic force, not just an afterthought. It reshaped how teams collaborated and delivered value across the organization.

Writer and the Content Committee laid the groundwork for helping to bring content upstream, whether it was in creating technical documentation, writing support content, or writing content for the product. We were showing that content was a key ingredient when it came to building cohesive and consistent user journeys.

Our phases of change

Looking back, I see the work in phases that reflect how content design evolved at BILL.

• Phase 1: Reactive content (Pre-2019) – Content was handled in silos, mostly reactive, and there wasn’t a shared vision.
• Phase 2: Building alignment (2019-2021) – We focused on creating a mission and vision, forming the Content Committee, and starting to unify our voices.
• Phase 3: Scaling consistency (2022 and beyond) – Writer helped us move from fixing inconsistencies to creating a system that would prevent them. We started to treat content as a shared responsibility and a strategic asset.

Where content design is headed next

As I think about what’s ahead, I see a few major themes that need to come to fruition in order for the discipline to endure and thrive in an organization:

• Systems thinking and architecture – integrating standards and guidelines at the design-system level, a content management system for turnkey publishing, and AI-driven tools for driving accuracy and consistency.
• Quantifying value and impact – content will be expected to show how it’s contributing to business results by defining metrics that show tangible business impact.
• Experimentation mindset – I consider this low-hanging fruit, because it’s a surefire way to show content impact quickly and easily. This means bringing leaders on board with data-backed stories of our impact.
• Elevating our voice – through more telling than showing. We must vocally advocate for our discipline and to make sure our efforts are visible and heard. 

And of course, I’d be remiss not to expand on AI.

The continued proliferation of AI will force a reevaluation of traditional roles, skill sets, and creative processes in product design, let alone content design. AI content strategy will redefine not just how we work, but how we think about work.

Content Design will evolve into a more strategic discipline that blends human creativity and oversight with AI-powered efficiencies. The role of a content designer will evolve into strategist, systems-thinker, doer, and people influencer—blending human intuition with AI-driven efficiency.

The content design roles of the future

Content Architect – a strategic role responsible for defining, scaling, and governing content systems and standards. Content Architects will leverage AI content strategy to automate routine content tasks, allowing greater focus on strategy, experimentation, and innovation.

• Key responsibilities:
  • Lead AI content strategy across product lines
  • Define scalable content systems and standards
  • Influence product teams through content thought leadership

Fractional Strategist – Agile, expert, AI-native content designers who are embedded in teams as strategic advisors. Their role is to support product and design teams that are focused on the highest-impact work. This gives product and design teams the ability to tap into strategic expertise—whether it’s to refine product copy, scale content systems, or shape the role of content within the user experience—without the long-term commitment or overhead.

• Key responsibilities:
  • Provide strategic and tactical content guidance 
  • Enable teams to execute effectively by leveraging AI-powered workflows
  • Provide content oversight and offer coaching to product and design teams on best practices

Closing thoughts

Bringing Writer to BILL wasn’t just about launching a new tool. It was about building a culture of content—one where clarity, consistency, and strategy are part of everything we do.

Before I left BILL, the Content Committee was still growing, and Writer was still helping BILL create better, more consistent content. While I was there, we proved that Writer (and content) can drive real impact across the organization.

Writer has been a catalyst for that change, and I’m proud to have been part of it. I’m excited to see the evolution of content design and how it will shape the future of products.