Why bother having Copilot write documentation ahead of time? For the people who need it, they can just ask Copilot the one targeted question they have in that moment and it will serve them a textual answer to exactly that.

Having an AI write docs which are then saved and served strikes me as in the same uncanny valley as fax machines. It's a halfway step that doesn't understand the full import of a new technology. In that case, what you really want is emailing PDFs around and docusigning.

With AI documentation, let users request the docs they need on-demand.

Might depend on the target reader of the doc... if it's another engineer consuming APIs or libraries, yeah, they can just use Copilot or other to answer in real-time, no published doc needed.

But if it's a customer? They might not have access to Copilot at all, or whatever AI tool they use might not have access to the source code or other material used to gen the doc.

A lot of times its for audit purposes. You have to show a mature documented program etc.

Other times it's simply for reference purposes. So if you're talking about current enterprise architecture, the AI itself needs something to reference in order to answer.

There are many reasons ultimately.