There are a few key principles that shape the world of modern knowledge management. Among those tenets is rapid, democratized access to information—which, as evidenced by Unisphere Research’s 2024 Survey on Information Discovery, 92% of enterprise leaders agree that access to fast, accurate information from unstructured content is vital to their business.
At the forefront of revolutionizing this rapid access to information and knowledge-based work is AI, a formidable conduit of KM advancement that—with the necessary guardrails in place—can catapult organizations' knowledge strategies into a modernity defined by efficiency and ease.
Joe McKendrick, author and analyst for Unisphere Research, and Jason Zhou, VP of solutions, services, and customer success at Pryon, joined KMWorld’s webinar, Knowledge AI in 2024: Trends, Impacts & Predictions, to examine how AI can be effectively used to extract knowledge from enterprise content, acknowledging both its barriers and crucial strategies.
McKendrick pointed to the fact that “knowledge friction,” or the significant distance between what individuals need to know within their organization and their ability to access that information, is the main theme for many enterprises’ states of KM.
According to Unisphere Research’s survey, 70% of respondents reported spending an hour or more looking for a single piece of information, whereas nearly a quarter (23%) reported spending more than five hours per information piece. As Zhou explained, this knowledge friction is because content authors and content consumers are fundamentally disconnected. Content is scattered across silos and formats, forcing workers to waste significant amounts of time looking for the answers to their queries.
What is the true cost of knowledge friction? Fairly extensive, according to the speakers, where the impacts of stalled information access include the following:
To tackle this detrimental reality of KM, many enterprises are looking to AI for help. As the survey found, 84% of respondents reported that they anticipate that AI will boost productivity within the next year, with half expecting this boost to be significant, exceeding a 20% increase in productivity.
However, despite AI’s promise, it comes with concerns. Seventy percent of organizations reported that data privacy and security challenges are the main obstacles to AI adoption, with close to two-thirds reporting that they worry about the accuracy of the results produced by AI.
McKendrick and Zhou offered an insightful conclusion: AI, paired with a well-governed and well-executed discovery strategy, will bring greater insights to decision makers at all levels. To achieve this, enterprises need a system that will:
Pryon’s platform delivers these capabilities to empower organizations to smooth knowledge friction, eliminating the distance between critical information and those who need it most. Split into two key components—an ingestion and exchange engine—Pryon accesses, reads, and understands in-scope content like a human would while simultaneously understanding users’ queries and rapidly searches through ingested content to surface an answer.
Pryon delivers the following capabilities:
To view the full webinar discussion about knowledge management and AI, you can view an archived version here.