Every day, businesses are accumulating more and more data, and at a rate faster than before. The vast majority of this data is unstructured in PowerPoints, PDFs, Word Documents, and videos. In fact, analysts at Gartner estimate that more than 80 percent of enterprise data is unstructured. These unstructured assets are often the most valuable as they contain data that has been massaged into knowledge. Imagine the expense and effort to create these decks, reports, plans, and insights. Much of this data is stored on internal systems like SharePoint with the assumption that it can be accessed and used. Unfortunately, unstructured data is extremely difficult to search. As much as 95% of that organizational data will never be accessed again after 90 days from creation.
In today’s world of expansive research and data, there is simply too much to learn and too much of a struggle navigating through numerous files, systems, and tools. Nobody can find the information. Or worse, nobody knows that it exists. Imagine the expense and effort to create these decks, reports, plans, and insights, just to become permanent shelfware. The challenge grows the more people, offices, and geographies involved.
Unshared knowledge costs time, wastes money, and affects performance.
How do you find what you need, when you need it? Insights professionals are faced with daily challenges to find information across internal files, subscriptions, and research tools. There is no efficient way to search and extract all the possible value from what is available. It’s a constant challenge to find the information when needed.
Usually, enterprise search leads to employees piecing together findings based on a deep exploration process. We have done studies with multiple Fortune 1000 clients and have found that the average knowledge worker spends five-to-10 hours per week searching through tools and systems for answers in data. This equates to 10 – 25 percent of a typical work week.
It is clear the status quo of searching for information is antiquated and costly on many levels. Technology that empowers team members to share knowledge and insights, collaborate more effectively and operate in a do-it-yourself environment will play a critical role in the new workplace. Imagine if your teams could continually leverage and build upon all of your organization’s accumulated knowledge. The benefits, productivity improvements, and competitive advantage would be substantial.
This is why so many large enterprises are now deploying AI knowledge portals, capable of linking together all knowledge including answers from internal documents & subscriptions, data visualizations from databases, finding experts within the organization, and their critical tools to create a one-stop-shop for knowledge. These systems are helping insights teams effectively meet many challenges based on the intelligence that already exists within their company’s files and system.
This transformation is affecting every industry. We are seeing new AI knowledge systems being adopted across nearly every vertical—CPG, Financial Services, Healthcare, Retail, Auto, Entertainment, and more. In most cases, the insights teams within the organizations are leading the charge. The reason being is that they have more demands on time and higher expectations than ever before, and they are managing a mountain of data. You just cannot do what they are expected to do without the right tools. The prior generation of tools was too slow, inefficient, and time-consuming. With AI, there’s a whole new generation of efficiency with ROIs as simple as allowing overworked professionals to keep up with demands and as extreme as the millions of dollars saved by avoiding redundant research.
These new systems are accelerating the speed that insights are gathered to meet the on-demand requests of internal clients and improve the competitiveness of the business.
Of course, just because everyone else is doing it shouldn’t be your reason. Though it probably means now is time to at least start exploring the tools that are out there.
As you evaluate solutions, consider the following questions:
• Does my data get moved into the knowledge system or does the system integrate with the data where it lives?
• How long will it take to deploy the system and what are the resource ramifications on my team?
• How much tagging and/or training of the content is required by us to get to the point of beneficial usage?
• What is the required budget and associated benefits?
• How is content and information searched within the system? Does the system provide answers to questions, or simply find documents?
• Does the vendor provide implementation strategies and support?
• Is the system capable of accessing all common file formats?
• Is the system trained in natural language processing?
• Does the platform continuously learn and improve through user feedback?
Be sure to seek out a partner vendor that is open and honest in what their product and services can and cannot provide.
Adopting a new system business-wide can be a daunting task. Taking a careful and well-thought out approach to evaluate the right vendor and platform to implement your AI-powered knowledge management system will deliver a competitive advantage.
Get the Guide!
How to Evaluate & Implement AI-Powered Knowledge Management
We developed this guide to provide a process for successful evaluation and implementation of AI-powered knowledge management options.
