“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” This was true before Benjamin Franklin said it in the 18th century and is true today.
Data shows that organizations of every size and in every industry are investing in the creation and management of information. Consumer tech companies generate masses of product and technical documentation; pharmaceutical companies create patent applications, reams of Federal regulatory documentation, research, and information on side-effects and labeling. Online retailers, hardware manufacturers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies…all have critical content stored in many different repositories.
The challenge then becomes, How do you get content from those repositories into the hands (or the systems) where knowledge is needed most?
Consider a helpdesk that is serving employees with IT support or a contact center that is answering questions from customers. The trends point to an increasingly complex IT environment:
- The average medium sized company uses up to 364 SaaS tools
- 90% of the data being generated today is unstructured
- Employees spend up to 5 hours per week in search of documents.
The result? An exhausted helpdesk agent and a potentially less-than-ideal end-user experience.
To solve this problem, many organizations have turned to chatbots — a great solution for interactions that rely on structured data (highly organized data such as dates, names, addresses, credit card numbers, etc.).
But chatbots have a secret: They can’t answer questions against unstructured data such as the text that comprises the reams of documentation and content mentioned above. This content hold answers to hundreds of important customer and employee questions but lives in multiple formats and is almost always housed in siloed repositories that have proliferated over many years. For most organizations, it’s an incredibly valuable asset that is startlingly inaccessible.
Enter the Knowledge Bot, an AI-powered engine that ingests content from multiple repositories to create a singular body of knowledge that is then enriched with AI techniques and optimized for question and answering.
Most importantly, this approach delivers more accurate results than the mainstream/legacy search technologies that are in use today. That’s because the Knowledge Bot can “read” content like a human, discerning the most relevant elements of information and ignoring elements that don’t house substantive content that can deliver actual answers (don’t you hate it when a Google result points you to a table of contents or a footnote and sends you on a wild goose chase for a real answer?).
A Knowledge Bot does not compete for attention from a chatbot; rather, these two work hand in hand to improve the efficiency in supporting employees and customers, while improving the helpdesk experience for everyone.
We have a lot more to say about Knowledge Bots — about the underlying technologies, the AI capabilities, the tiers of function and, ultimately, how they can deliver real value.
