Looking ahead at KM trends for 2019

From the growth of AI, cloud computing, and intelligent search technologies, to the rise of new collaboration tools and the prevalence of mobile workers, the world of knowledge management and information management continues to evolve.

With a new year comes the sense of looming seismic shifts in KM that will bring with them new challenges and opportunities.

KM recently held a webinar featuring Kamran Khan, managing director of search and content analytics, Accenture Applied Intelligence; David Seuss, chief executive officer, Northern Light Group; and Sunny Manivannan, VP of Marketing, Guru, who discussed predictions for 2019.

Khan believes AI will evolve enough to help organizations sift through unstructured content because traditional search is no longer enough. What is needed moving forward is  combination of cognitive search fueled by AI technologies such as Machine Learning and NLP to extract knowledge and insights from the data to return more relevant and complete results.

Accenture is tapping into this area in three ways, Khan said, with:

• Auto Tagging (NLP): Using text analytics to improve content management and search.
• Personalized Content Recommendations: Surfacing the right knowledge to help you sell and deliver via smart engines.
• Connector: Making it easier to connect to knowledgeable help by automatically inferring what our people know.

Ten years ago knowledge management was all about search, Seuss said. Now it is about delivering curated insights to audiences browsing to content across many channels.

“We are approaching the era when users will no longer search for information,” Seuss said. “Search is evolving to have an in-depth understanding of the searched material.”
Using machine learning, search is now able to:

• Distinguish not just what is relevant to a search query but also what is important for the user to know
• Summarize the important insights in the documents relevant to a user’s interests
• Learn what each user cares about and find the relevant material without being asked

Manivannan sees three trends on the horizon: eliminating the need to search, AI’s transformation of customer support into a revenue generator, and AI enabling organizations to do their best work.

Guru supports all these predictions with its platform, suggesting businesses unifiy, verify, and empower workers with AI tools that empowers teams with the knowledge they need.

An archived on-demand replay of this webinar is available here.