What is Knowledge Automation?
Businesses have an information problem. Employees ask lots of complex questions that can only be answered by humans.
Questions like these require intimate knowledge of a business’s products and processes:
Answers to these queries cannot be googled or asked of ChatGPT. They are not easily automated and almost always require a human to answer.
In the old days, this content was stored in an intranet. Knowledge management tools were built to help alleviate this issue. But many of them can feel like a glorified Content Management System (CMS). They all rely on a similar workflow:
- Create content.
- Upload it to a knowledge base.
- Push it out to your organization.
- Hope that teammates can find and use your content when they need it.
A known issue with this process is that it can take tons of work to get off the ground. Steps 1-4 can take weeks or months of uplift before value is realized.
But step 4 is the hardest part.
When most people require information quickly, they default to asking a human. It’s easier to bother a colleague than it is to go looking for an answer. Sure, this leads to distractions that impact team efficiency, but who cares? Asking a teammate just “feels faster” than researching and digging through an internal knowledge base.
And for the people who do use the knowledge base, the experience of finding what they need is often inadequate. KB search capabilities usually aren’t great. They heavily depend on an admin’s ability to make content that is readable/searchable by software.
The need to curate and maintain a legacy knowledge base can create more work than it actually solves.
Knowledge Automation is a new way of using Large Language Models to deliver intelligence across an organization
This approach relies on LLMs to intake information, understand it, and generate answers to queries of varying complexity.
We believe that the speed at which a team can retrieve information is a key driver of what makes them successful.
Knowledge automation is based on the idea that Information + Speed = Success.
Get the right information, to the people who need it, as soon as they ask for it, and they will succeed in their task. One example is AI Question Answering, a popular use case among enterprises. It looks something like this:
It could take an experienced Sales Engineer several minutes of digging through documentation to find this answer. In this example, 1up is providing an answer in a fraction of the time it would have taken.
Here’s another one from the perspective of a Business Development Representative (BDR):
Even the best sales reps don’t want to have to look for this content. They want to be ready for their call, meeting, or email. An automated approach to knowledge helps them retrieve what they need, when they need it.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have opened up a world of possibilities. Automating the retrieval of knowledge is one exciting use of this technology.
Want to experience it for yourself? Try 1up for free.