Three Keys to Generative AI in KM for Enterprise Business Research - Northern Light

Having specialized in enterprise-scale knowledge management optimized for market research and competitive intelligence for 20 years, Northern Light knows a lot about the curation, mining and delivery of business and technology research content. And one thing we can say for certain is that, with the advent of generative AI, we now have the first major user experience innovation in “search” since the advent of commercial search engines 30 years ago.

But organizations can’t just drop ChatGPT into an enterprise KM system. In fact, there are several keys to effectively implementing generative AI in an enterprise application for business research.

The first is to use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Using RAG ensures that a gen AI-authored answer to a user’s business research question is based only on well-vetted, authoritative content found in the organization’s research portal, not some AI training set drawn from who knows when or where, thus avoiding the “hallucination” problem. In Northern Light’s implementation, when a researcher asks Northern Light SinglePoint™ a question, the answer is automatically generated from the 20 documents containing information most responsive to the user’s query–documents may be found within only authorized content collections indexed in the SinglePoint platform, e.g., business news, primary or licensed secondary research, scientific journals, conference abstracts, corporate financial reports, thought leader commentaries, technology vendor white papers, selected government databases–and presented in narrative form.

The second and third keys are having citations and links embedded in the gen AI-created responses. Citations ensure that plagiarism is off the table. Live links to the source material from which an answer is derived let users instantly click through to the research and news documents of greatest interest to explore a given answer in more detail, so users can explore the content in more depth and validate the gen AI material.

Northern Light pioneered the practical use of AI and machine learning technology in enterprise-class market and competitive intelligence knowledge management systems in 2017. SinglePoint’s other AI-based capabilities include automated “Insights Reports”–machine-generated summaries of search results–as well as referrals to documents addressing topics of known interest to a user based on their search history (“Recommended Reading List”), and links to topically similar documents contained in a search result based on an AI-driven semantic analysis (“More Like This”).