AI summaries in documentation search

Developers searching AWS documentation often had to open several pages to piece together one answer.

Leadership had committed to an ease-of-use improvement for the year. Generative AI was the obvious tool, but a wrong answer on a customer-facing site is costly.

• Put an AI-generated summary at the top of search results.
• I wrote the decision doc that set scope and trade-offs, and paired engineering with applied science on summary quality.
• Roll out in phases and widen exposure only when quality held up.

• Each phase had a quality check before we widened it.
• The leadership commitment had a fixed date, and we tracked against it from the start.

• Delivered on the committed date.
• Later AI summarization features on the documentation site were built on this work.