Published: 05-Oct-2024 |
| Knowledge in a business is probably its biggest asset. Even if you have a small business, eg a coffee shop, knowledge of how to run it is more important than the actual coffee machine! Knowledge of where to buy supplies, how to make your customers' favourite drinks, how to employ people, knowledge of costs, finance, how to market. They say most of this knowledge is obvious, just "general knowledge", but it's not! In a bigger business, the knowledge accumulates. It includes knowledge of products and services, customers, staff, suppliers, and "general knowledge". Where is that knowledge stored? All over the company: in finance, marketing, HR, on ERP systems, in emails, on websites and intranets. Big IT companies like SAP try to centralise it all, but some still sits on your Excel spreadsheets, on your PC, inside your head. The company does not have full knowledge where all this knowledge sits. Each new employee adds more knowledge or duplicates existing knowledge, sometimes wrongly! How does a company grow? By using its knowledge which includes actions based on that knowledge. It needs to grow by accumulating more knowledge and removing the information that no longer works. The real question I'm asking is how does that knowledge get managed and improved? Centralising it all like via a gigantic ERP is good, but not perfect. Bits of knowledge still "float" around. How does this relate to AI? I suggest that AI has a better way to track and understand company knowledge, wherever it may be. For example our AI Chat system will go a long way to help identify knowledge and use it. If every time there is an internal question, management were to go to their own (secure) chatbot to get the information, it would be a great start. If the information is not available to the chatbot, then someone would be tasked with getting that information and updating the chatbot. The idea is to let the chatbot sort through data, turn it into information and then knowledge. At the same time AI should be able to identify conflicting information to assist in keeping the information current. Software technology is improving at an enormous rate, so we feel the starting point is to create the chatbot and start giving it company knowledge and information. |