How to help your business with AI?

In today’s fast paced work environment, the most important resource is human attention and time. But, when teams spend 20% of their time answering the same question over and over, their attention is wasted.

Company knowledge is dispersed across company chats, websites, documents, and files, turning the search for information into a major challenge for employees. As you can imagine these distractions are highly prevalent across different domains in modern workplaces, and researchers at UC Irvine found that it takes 25 minutes after an interruption to fully return to a previous task, highlighting the cost of context switching. Both the askers and the answerers suffer. 

In this article, the team from QueryPal explores how to use AI chatbots to help organizations increase productivity, innovation, and collaboration among teams. AI assistants trained on company knowledge can help teams increase productivity, reduce context switching, and focus on what matters for business growth. 

Current Shortcomings

As remote work has become more prevalent, knowledge management gets more tricky. It involves the process of organizing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge. Knowledge management is not just data management but includes how you search and retrieve data for easier collaboration. As organizations grow, keeping up with the amount of information becomes challenging.

Here are a few reasons why:

1. Information Overload: As organizations grow and time goes by, the amount of data and information grows. Your organization may have some best practices, but it is still difficult for everyone to organize in the same consistent manner.
2. Fragmented Knowledge: In many organizations to improve remote work life and also productivity, people use more tools now than ever. So knowledge is stored across multiple tools and platforms—email, chats, documents, ticketing systems and more. This fragmentation makes it difficult for employees to search through and find information
3. Lack of User Updation: Keeping knowledge up to date is hard, Without regular updates, the knowledge base can become stale and irrelevant.
4. Closed Knowledge Sharing: Knowledge is usually trapped in silos. Data is usually shared in private channels or one-on-one conversations, making it difficult for others to know and can lead to duplicated information. 
5. Identifying knowledge gaps: An expert usually creates documents on information only they are aware of, but if they have too much on their plate this can lead to gaps in knowledge, this is also called tribal knowledge. 

How AI can help!

AI encompasses a wide array of technologies, so let’s look into specific types and use cases of machine learning (ML) models that can benefit businesses. For instance, information retrieval and keyword searches are significantly enhanced by employing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models. These models combine the strengths of information retrieval, search, classification, and analysis, utilizing large language models (LLMs) to provide accurate and contextually relevant results.

With the rise of LLMs (large language models) in the AI field, we can leverage it to help our businesses grow and increase productivity. 

Here are some benefits of using AI:

1. Handle Repetitive Tasks: AI can help create automated workflows such as data entry and information retrieval. This will help them focus more on the tasks that require innovation than the repetitive tasks. Not only does this save time, but reduces human error. 
2. Improved Search Capabilities: Keyword-based search has worked great over the years, but we can do better now with AI. By leveraging semantic search and NLP methods, we can understand the context and intent behind queries, delivering more faster and accurate results.
3. Handle Fragmented data: AI can help you understand the relationship between different sources of data, and then aggregate information from these sources. This reduces the time and effort of context-switching between multiple tools, leading to faster and more comprehensive answers
4. Identifying Relationships Between Entities: Here entities could be data, users, machines, etc. AI can analyze and identify connections between the various pieces uncovering hidden relationships and insights. This helps organizations to gain a deeper understanding of their knowledge base and make more informed decisions.
5. Customizations and Personalizations: Imagine an AI that understands your preferences and can provide personalized content by analyzing the behavior of users. Also it can learn from your feedback and proactively improve the experience. 
6. Improved Collaboration: AI chatbots can help your team collaborate in a more efficient way, by allowing you to talk to teammates not only for the surface level questions but the deeper questions that require teamwork and brainstorming.  
7. Identifying Knowledge Gaps: AI assistants can help identify the gaps in an organization’s data by looking at what users are asking and what’s missing in the existing knowledge bases. 
8. Better Knowledge Insights: Make data-driven decisions by analyzing the patterns and behaviors of your team. For example: which document is cited more frequently, where do you think knowledge gaps exist, are there answers in your chats you need to write back to your docs.

Real-World Applications of AI in Businesses

Let’s explore some real-world applications where organizations have successfully integrated AI technologies to enhance their knowledge management processes.

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1. Customer Support: This is a great example where there are an abundant number of common queries. You would have seen that many customer support chats now use AI trained on FAQs for the first step and only bring a human into the loop if necessary. This reduces the workload on support teams, allowing them to focus on more complex issues.
   
2. HR and Onboarding: A growing business always leads to more hiring! However hiring and onboarding can take a lot of effort for the existing senior employees on the team. AI can help reduce the effort spent on answering the repeat questions in onboarding. AI chatbots can use the existing onboarding documents and workflows to streamline and automate the process. New hires can get their answers in real time saving time for both parties.
   
3. Sales and Marketing: AI chatbots can help make more data driven decisions by analyzing the data and automating the lead generation process. It can help reduce the time wasted answering repetitive questions, need for quick access to data for campaign decisions.
4. Engineering: Engineering tasks require design documentation to start building, using AI to find and retrieve these documents and reduce the time searching for related work. There are also a lot of routine tasks, project management and debugging sessions where AI can help you look in the right places.

Conclusion

By just looking at a few real world applications, it becomes clear that AI is not a theoretical concept but can help enhance and automate aspects of knowledge management. Organizations that leverage AI technologies can streamline their processes, improve productivity, and reduce context switching and stay competitive in an ever-evolving market.

As the AI landscape continues to evolve, many businesses will need to start leveraging AI not just to stay relevant but to help growth, innovation and efficiency. An easy way to embrace this change is to adopt  AI assistants that do not require a huge shift in habits or culture but let you stay more focused and productive.