KMWorld AI 50 2022: The Companies Empowering Intelligent Knowledge Management

AI continues to rise in importance as forward-thinking organizations strive to elevate services, enhance information access, reduce costs, respond faster to opportunities and threats, and create better products. AI and a host of related technologies such as augmented intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, process automation, and natural language processing are being deployed in areas as diverse as supply chain management, manufacturing, healthcare, medical research, and financial services.

Although definitions of AI and what it can provide organizations vary, a widely cited description developed by Gartner is that AI applies “advanced analysis and logic-based techniques, including machine learning (ML) to interpret events, support and automate decisions and to take actions.” While leaving room for differences of opinion, Gartner points out that in order to capture the opportunity of AI, it is important for an organization to articulate and agree upon a generally accepted definition focused on what it wants AI to accomplish.

With companies across industries today attempting to decrease risk, increase efficiency, make better decisions, and deliver better experiences, AI is on the rise. According to a 2021 McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 56% of all respondents’ organizations had adopted AI in at least one function, up from 50% in 2020. The report also noted that AI adoption since last year has increased most at companies headquartered in emerging economies. Across regions, the adoption rate is highest at Indian companies, followed closely by those in the Asia-Pacific region.

As with the last two surveys, the McKinsey study pointed out, “the business functions where AI adoption is most common are service operations, product and service development, and marketing and sales, though the most popular use cases span a range of functions.” Leading the charge as the top three use cases identified were service-operations optimization, AI-based enhancement of products, and contact center automation. “As AI’s use in business becomes more common,” the report added, “the tools and best practices to make the most out of AI have also become more sophisticated.”

With organizations recognizing the great potential of AI, it is not surprising that the market size is also expected to increase dramatically. According to Grand View Research , the global AI market size was valued at $93.5 billion in 2021 and is projected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 38.1% from 2022 to 2030. “The continuous research and innovation directed by the tech giants are driving the adoption of advanced technologies in industry verticals, such as automotive, healthcare, retail, finance, and manufacturing,” Grand View states.

As part of our efforts to focus attention on the innovative knowledge management vendors that are imbuing their offerings with AI and automation, in this issue, KMWorld presents the KMWorld AI 50: The Companies Empowering Intelligent Knowledge Management. We invite you to explore the companies on this list to understand why they stand out, and to also review the AI Trailblazer section in which executives of these organizations explain the value of their intelligent approaches.

Be sure to join us as we continue to explore AI and a wide range of other knowledge management topics in person at the annual KMWorld conference at the JW Marriott in Washington, D.C., November 7-10. 

AI 50

We encourage you to visit the websites of the companies on this year’s list. In the AI TRAILBLAZER Spotlights, executives share their opinions and how their solutions help customers realize their business goals.

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ABBYY—Powering intelligent automation, ABBYY is working to change the way people work and how companies accelerate business by delivering the intelligence that fuels automation platforms and offering solutions that empower users with the insights they need to work smarter and faster. Accenture—Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud, and security that combines experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries,all powered by a large network of advanced technology and intelligent operations centers. Adobe—A multinational software company that connects content and data, and delivers game-changing new technologies that are democratizing creativity, Adobe is shaping the next generation of storytelling and inspiring new categories of business. Aisera—Aisera offers the world’s first AI-driven service experience solution that automates operations and support for IT, sales, and customer service, making businesses and customers successful by offering consumer-like self-service resolutions to users. Amazon Web Services (AWS)—AWS AI services provide ready-made intelligence for an organization’s applications and workflows and easily integrate with applications to address common use cases, such as the need for personalized recommendations, modernizing a contact center, improving safety and security, and increasing customer engagement. BA Insight—Serving millions of knowledge seekers in a variety of industries, BA Insight works within the enterprise, customer portals, and websites to turn searches into actionable insights, regardless of where content or users reside. Bloomfire—Offering a knowledge engagement platform, Bloomfire provides knowledge management software that enables one central, searchable place for information and insights so individuals and team members can do their best work, no matter where, when, or how they are working. Cognizant—Helping clients modernize technology to be relevant today and ready for tomorrow, reimagine processes with automation, and transform experiences with greater personalization, Cognizant engineers modern businesses so they can anticipate and act, as if on intuition. Coveo Solutions—Believing that relevance and personalization are critical for businesses to win in the new digital experience economy, Coveo is an AI-powered relevance platform whose SaaS-native, multi-tenant solution injects search, recommendations, and personalization into digital experiences. Deloitte—Enabling organizations to achieve desired business results in today's complex, connected world, Deloitte provides AI and analytics services that combine end-to-end AI solutions with domain and industry insight to harness the power of human-machine collaboration. eGain—Infused with AI, eGain’s knowledge-powered software automates digital-first experiences for enterprises and government agencies and is pre-connected with leading CRM and contact center systems to deliver quick value with virtual assistance, customer self-service, and modern agent desktop tools. To Learn More, read Anand Subramaniam, SVP Marketing, eGain's AI Trailblazer Insight. Enterprise Knowledge—Dedicated to providing consulting services in the areas of knowledge and information management, software development, and project management, Enterprise Knowledge focuses on practical and proven solutions to engage end users, ensure systems are designed for them, and address their needs. To Learn More, read Lulit Tesfaye, Practice Lead for Data and Information Management, Enterprise Knowledge's AI Trailblazer Insight. EPAM Systems—EPAM is a digital transformation services and product engineering company whose globally deployed hybrid teams help make the future real for clients and communities around the world by powering better enterprise, education, and health platforms that connect people, optimize experiences, and improve people’s lives. Ephesoft—Using AI, patented machine learning, and proprietary classification models, Ephesoft’s intelligent document processing (IDP) platform turns any document type into structured, actionable data to accelerate business processes and data-driven decisions. To Learn More, read Ike Kavas, Founder & CEO, Ephesoft's AI Trailblazer Insight. expert.ai—Transforming language into knowledge and insight, expert.ai provides patented AI technology and a hybrid approach to NL—which combines symbolic human-like comprehension and machine learning—to address even the most complex unstructured information management use cases. Franz—With dozens of Fortune 500 companies spanning healthcare, intelligence agencies, life sciences, telecommunications, and research, Franz is an early innovator in AI and supplier of semantic graph database technology with expert knowledge in developing and deploying knowledge graph solutions. To Learn More, read Jans Aasman, CEO, Franz's Trailblazer Insight. Genesys—Through the power of its cloud, digital, and AI technologies, Genesys enables organizations to realize Experience as a Service, its vision for empathetic customer experiences at scale, enabling delivery of proactive, predictive, and hyper-personalized experiences to deepen customer connections across every marketing, sales, and service moment on any channel. Google Cloud—In partnership with Google Cloud, business leaders can leverage the power of purpose-built AI solutions such as Contact Center AI to increase operational efficiency and personalized customer care and Document AI to bring AI-powered document understanding to unstructured data workflows. Grazitti Interactive—Grazitti Interative has extensive experience in developing solutions that unlock data insights, increase operational efficiency, and drive customer success, and is the parent company of SearchUnify, which elevates customer support and self-service outcomes through a unified cognitive platform and suite of next-gen support applications. Hyland—Hyland is a content services provider whose platform enables organizations to augment existing solutions and human intelligence with AI and derive more value and actionable insights from data and processes. Hyperscience— Hyperscience (also known as Hyper Labs) offers a human-centered approach to automation that enables a new era of human and machine collaboration to improve organizational agility and turn complex processes into simple, configurable workflows, without the legacy cost and burden of change management. Indico Data—Known as “the unstructured data company,” Indico Data provides the AI- and ML-powered Indico Unstructured Data Platform to help enterprises of all sizes automate, analyze, and apply unstructured data—documents, emails, images, videos, and more—to a wide range of workflows. Infosys—Infosys is a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting that enables the enterprise with an AI-powered core that helps prioritize the execution of change for clients in more than 50 countries to navigate their digital transformation. Inffrd—San Jose, Calif.-based Infrrd is a provider of proprietary and patented intelligent document processing solutions that leverage AI and machine learning to enable enterprises to extract and manage data from semi-structured and unstructured documents in large volumes.

InMoment— With its hyper-modern technology platform, decades of domain authority, and global teams of experts, InMoment uniquely delivers a focus on experience improvement (XI) to help its clients own the moments that matter. Interactions—With flexible products and solutions designed to meet the growing demand for unified, omnichannel customer care, Interactions provides intelligent virtual assistants that seamlessly assimilate conversational AI and human understanding to enable businesses to engage with their customers in productive conversations. Kofax—Customers realize faster time-to-value and increased competitiveness, growth, and profitability by combining Kofax’s cognitive capture, RPA, process orchestration, analytics and mobile capabilities while increasing business resiliency and mitigating compliance risk. Kyndi—Providing AI software that helps organizations answer their hardest questions, Kyndi can analyze long-form text and find actionable insights in a smarter, faster, and explainable way. Lucidworks—Lucidworks offers the Connected Experience Cloud that captures user signals from every action and applies them to digital experiences by combining the power of search and machine learning to personalize experiences that meet employees’ and customers’ unique intent. To Learn More, read Will Hayes, CEO, Lucidworks' AI Trailblazer Insight. M-Files—The M-Files metadata-driven document management platform enables knowledge workers to instantly find the right information in any context, automate business processes, and enforce information control—providing businesses with a competitive advantage and substantial ROI. To Learn More, read Antti Nivala, Founder & CEO, M-Files's AI Trailblazer Insight. Microsoft—Microsoft enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge and recently acquired Nuance Communications to amplify AI expertise and customer engagement solutions across interactive voice response, virtual assistants, and digital and biometric solutions. Mindbreeze—Mindbreeze is a provider of appliances and cloud services for enterprise search, applied AI, and knowledge management that utilizes an insight engine that offers a consolidated view of corporate knowledge, regardless of where and how the data is stored. To Learn More, read Daniel Fallmann, Founder and CEO, Mindbreeze's AI Trailblazer Insight. NICE—NICE is a provider of cloud and on-prem enterprise software solutions that empower organizations to make smarter decisions based on advanced analytics of structured and unstructured data and offers NICE Enlighten AI for Customer Satisfaction to help businesses improve customer interactions. To Learn More, read Sharon Einstein, Vice President Customer Engagement Analytics LOB, NICE's AI Trailblazer Insight. Northern Light—Northern Light has been providing knowledge management platforms for competitive intelligence and market research insights to global enterprises since 1996, including Fortune 1000 leaders across multiple industries such as information technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences. To Learn More, read C. David Seuss, CEO's Trailblazer Insight. Perfect Memory, an Implid Group Company—Perfect Memory is a software publisher that has crafted a new generation of digital asset management systems, the DAM-as-a-Brain, that can refine and execute cognitive processing on content, enabling users to collect, interpret, and transform any data and content into natively exploitable assets. Progress Software—As the trusted provider of the best products to develop, deploy, and manage high-impact applications, Progress enables customers to develop the applications and experiences they need, deploy where and how they want, and manage it all safely and securely. Pryon—Pryon is an AI company focused on enterprise knowledge, whose core natural language processing platform is designed to extract data from enterprise content and systems with high levels of accuracy and speed. To Learn More, Read Igor Jablokov, CEO, Pryon's AI Trailblazer Insight. Re:infer—Businesses use Re:infer to mine, monitor, and automate their service conversations through their no-code NLP platform, which allows customers to democratize the power of AI for every employee. SAS—SAS is a leader in analytics that provides innovative software and services, empowering and inspiring customers around the world to transform data into intelligence. SearchBlox—SearchBlox builds intuitive and intelligent enterprise insight engines based on open source technologies, simplifying search for complex enterprises, with clients that include leaders in financial services, healthcare, and government. Semantic Web Company—As a provider of graph-based metadata, search, and analysis solutions, Semantic Web Company supports its customers in the development and implementation of enterprise knowledge graphs, the extraction of useful knowledge from large datasets, and the integration and linking of structured and unstructured data. Semaphore by MarkLogic—Semaphore is a modular software product that provides the semantic layer in your digital ecosystem so you can manage knowledge models, generate semantic metadata, and enrichyour enterprise information with context and meaning to reveal valuable insights that drive innovation. Simpplr—With what Simpplr calls Live EX, the company supports better communication in a distributed world and measures an organization’s heartbeat by understanding employee alignment and sentiment in real time. Sinequa—Customers employ Sinequa's intelligent search platform to connect all content (both text and data), derive meaning, learn from user interactions, and present information in context, solving content chaos and informing employees through a single, secure interface. SparkCognition—SparkCognition provides AI solutions that allow organizations to predict future outcomes, optimize processes, and prevent cyberattacks, and partners with industry leaders to analyze, optimize, and learn from data, augment human intelligence, and drive profitable growth. Symanto—Symanto helps market researchers, agencies, and brands unleash the power of psychographic profiling, semantic analysis, and machine learning to provide a deep understanding of the human motivation, attitudes, and emotions behind behavior to help drive brand connection and ultimately increase sales. TigerGraph—Based on a distributed native graph database, TigerGraph’s technology supports advanced analytics and machine learning applications such as fraud detection, anti-money laundering (AML), entity resolution, Customer 360, recommendations, knowledge graph, cybersecurity, supply chain, IoT, and network analysis. Upland Software—Upland helps global businesses accelerate digital transformation with a powerful cloud software library that provides choice, flexibility, and value with a growing library of products that deliver the "last-mile" plug-in processes, reporting, and job-specific workflows. To Learn More, Read Karen Cummings, General EVP and General Manager, Document Workflow and PITM Product Suites, Upland Software's AI Trailblazer Insight. Verint—Verint helps the world’s most iconic brands build enduring customer relationships by connecting work, data, and experiences across the enterprise with a customer engagement portfolio that draws on the latest advancements in AI and analytics. Yext—Yext collects and organizes content into a knowledge graph, then leverages AI to improve the findability of relevant information across search engines, websites, mobile apps, and hundreds of other digital touchpoints.