What’s next in KM: All roads lead to AI
Lists of KM trends have proliferated this year, and while they cover a diverse range of topics, virtually all of them include AI. Estimates on the size of the AI market vary, but are generally in the billions of dollars, with some analysts projecting trillion-dollar markets in the 2030s. The growth is largely being fueled by advances in generative AI (GenAI). Although not all of this market growth is accounted for by the use of AI in KM, nearly every aspect of KM has been affected.
Supporting the workforce of the future
Improving workforce productivity is a core function of KM. The fundamental enabling capabilities include capturing and storing information, making it findable, analyzing it, and supporting business processes. All of these functions have become progressively more intelligent across time, particularly when it comes to search. Intelligence has been built into search for more than a decade, allowing it to achieve more relevant results by incorporating context, understanding the user's intent, and basing search on semantics rather than word-matching. Text analytics uses natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to classify documents and identify entities.
Within the last couple of years, GenAI has become another tool to support and enable KM. It is already being incorporated into KM platforms. Given a prompt that specifies a topic or asks a question, a GenAI application seeks out information from within an organization (or outside it), using large language models (LLMs) to interpret the contents and provide an original answer. “What the C-suite most wants to see is for its proprietary information to be captured, securely stored, and made available to employees in actionable form,” said Dan Stradtman, CMO at Bloomfire. “The emergence of GenAI in KM platforms can certainly help organizations access this large volume of information and present the most meaningful insights."
Bloomfire provides a SaaS-based KM platform with AI-enhanced semantic search and authoring tools in a customizable user interface to deliver enterprise knowledge at scale. It captures a company’s collective knowledge and makes it accessible across the organization. Customer support teams often use the knowledgebase to provide service representatives with the information they need to address customer issues quickly and successfully. The platform also integrates with users’ other workplace applications, such as Slack and Salesforce. It can search across enterprise storage repositories, such as SharePoint and Box, to provide a seamless worker experience.
About a year ago, Bloomfire launched Ask AI and Author Assist to extend the search and content creation functions of its platform. Ask AI allows users to ask questions in natural language and get answers based on verified enterprise content. The system is set up to provide answers only if relevant information is available, thus avoiding hallucinations and helping identify knowledge gaps. Author Assist lets users summarize their knowledge
content using a list of predefined options, including the level of detail, and set a tone ranging from friendly to formal. The new content is automatically indexed and published in real time.