Elmer Thomas and Maria Bermudez (Twillio): The Robots are coming for your job, and that's okay

This talk was presented at the AI The Docs 2025 online conference. We are thrilled to share the recording and the summary with you. 

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presentation

Elmer Thomas (Principal Developer Educator at Twilio) and Maria Bermudez (Documentation advocate at Twilio)

Summary

How can a small documentation team use AI to reduce repetitive work, maintain high-quality content, and scale their impact without replacing human expertise? 

In their talk, Elmer Thomas (Principal Developer Educator at Twilio) and Maria Bermudez (Documentation advocate) show how their small documentation team is using AI to scale impact without compromising quality. Supporting hundreds of product teams meant constant pressure: incomplete first drafts from engineers, repetitive grooming tasks, and the risks of AI hallucination. 

Their answer was the Docs AI Buddy: six focused agents designed for repeatable, low-creativity work (like editing, alt text generation, jargon simplification, SEO support, content outlining, and Slack triage). Instead of one “megabot,” each agent solves a specific pain point, freeing people to focus on higher-value work such as mentoring and reviewing. 

To safeguard quality, Twilio built strong guard rails: a custom GPT trained on their style guide, automated linting and CI tests, GitHub PR reviews, and a final human check before publishing. This layered approach addresses hallucination, bias, and misalignment risks. 

The results: AI handles 80–90% of the work, saving hours each week while maintaining trust in the docs. Their playbook for others is simple: 

1. Identify the pain point slowing you down.
2. Automate a single, repeatable, rule-based task.
3. Ship, measure, and refine weekly with user feedback. 

Looking ahead, Twilio plans to optimize docs for AI consumption, expand automation into PR reviews and Jira prioritization, and experiment further with Copilot. Their core message: AI isn’t here to replace people, it’s here to make small teams unstoppable.