Conversational Agents and AI Transformation: Q&A with Rob Ryan, Head of Business Value and Thought Leadership, Workgrid

Video produced by Steve Nathans-Kelly

Marydee Ojala, Editor-in-Chief of KMWorld, recently interviewed Rob Ryan, Head of Business Value and Thought Leadership at Workgrid.

[Edited for length and clarity]

Ojala: Today I'm talking with Rob Ryan, Head of Business Value and Thought Leadership at Workgrid. He's responsible not only for thought leadership, but also managing analyst relations and providing strategic support to the sales team in enterprise deals. Rob has great expertise in digital transformation and employee experience. He has played a pivotal role in shaping intranets, extranets, digital workplaces, and digital employee experiences for some of the world's most renowned organizations and brands. Rob, why don't we start with an explanation of Workgrid?

Ryan: Workgrid has one goal in mind, and that's to simplify work and make employees' lives easier. So you can think of it as a copilot or an intelligent, reliable sidekick that helps throughout the day, whether that's asking questions to the assistant, finding information, managing tasks, or even delivering key news and insights.

Workgrid also integrates seamlessly across all the enterprise systems your team uses today. That might be ServiceNow, Salesforce, SharePoint, or even documents, libraries, knowledge repositories, making it possible to find the things you need in one conversational interface. Better yet, it works within the channels that you work—this could be your intranet, a portal browser, MS teams. And given the fact that we were born out of the enterprise world backed by years of experience in AI technology, it's designed with scale, security, and governance in mind, allowing you to transform your digital workplace and the way you work.

Ojala: How does what you're doing now differ from the more traditional search?

Ryan: Enterprise search has historically had a reputation for being inadequate, particularly for the enterprise search vendor space. AI assistants come in to help by using search functionality, by connecting intent to action. And while AI assistants are not intended to replace traditional search, it is certainly transforming how employees find information and certainly discover information. Better yet, it's changing the way how they feel about that discovery process. Most employees will "app hop" across 30 plus applications per day. They'll waste over half their day searching, foraging, trying to find information, and they'll actually context switch anywhere between 1,200 to 3,000 times per day.

The AI assistant is really transforming that paradigm of search in a number of ways, but hre's the top three. The first way is the use of natural language processing within the assistant. So by leveraging NLP, employees no longer have to search using those rigid keywords or terms, and it defined what they're looking for, benefits pay, etc. They can ask questions in a natural manner via conversational interface and language to get the right, accurate answers across multiple systems, no matter where that data happens to live.

Number two, and related, is through the use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation. Perhaps you've heard of this RAG, which enhances traditional search functionality by combining AI generative capabilities with real time information retrieval. To give a real human example of this, we all know about LLMs and GenAI, but that's a snapshot in time based upon when that model has been trained.

The last way that we're innovating on search and discovery is with agentic AI and this is AI that goes beyond being just a tool. It's now an active, a proactive agent, that understands, predicts, and even acts on behalf of the employee. This allows the assistant to anticipate needs and be proactive in delivering insight, removing the friction for information discovery, and allowing the employee to get back to their high value tasks.