Best Practices for Writing for Machine Learning
In 2022, machine learning has made significant inroads into enterprise applications, including knowledge management systems for market and competitive intelligence. Given this technology reality, the content indexed and stored in such systems needs to be “machine learning friendly.” Documents need to be written in such a way that an algorithm can read and digest them, as Northern Light does with our automatically-generated Insights Reports.
Across our universe of 250,000 market intelligence professionals using traditional search processes (manually scanning up and down a search result page), users on average, download and read only one document per search and therefore fail to acquire the insights from the documents they do not download. However, when users start by reading the machine-authored Insights Report – a summary of important ideas within each document – they have access to insights from all the best documents on the search result instead of just one. And interestingly, users end up downloading and reading more documents when the truly important passages from all of the best documents are presented to them, so the Insights Report becomes an important vehicle for additional content consumption.
How Automated “insights Reports” Are Created
Northern Light’s machine learning works as follows to automatically summarize the important ideas in the documents on a search result:
Below is a sample search result and then the automated Insights Report written by Northern Light machine learning algorithms on that search result.

Writing for the Machine
Here are Northern Light suggestions for writing market intelligence reports in the Machine Learning age.
With the incorporation of machine learning into knowledge management applications, it has become necessary to create market and competitive intelligence research content for consumption by the human reader and the AI algorithm. While the human brain and computer function differently, it is possible to write documents in a style that works for both. The tips enumerated above are a guide to a writing style and structure that will maximize the reach and impact of your research documents.