September/October 2026, Trend-Setting Products 2026 [Volume 35, Issue 5]

Features

You Think Your Content is AI-Ready. Are You Sure? Access Innovations Data Harmony

By bringing knowledge domain-based systems into the era of artificial intelligence, the company continues its mission to make knowledge accessible, interoperable, and powerful for the next generation of AI solutions.

Where Knowledge Base & Documentation is Designed for Humans & AI - Document360 Knowledge Base Portal

Enterprise knowledge is only as useful as it is trustworthy. When SOPs, user manuals, software and product documentation, API docs, and other critical knowledge are scattered across drives, wikis, and PDFs, they go stale, staff struggle to find them, and AI assistants have nothing reliable to draw on.

eGain Composer Recognized as a Trend-Setting Product of the Year

One of the newest additions to the eGain portfolio is Composer, a modular developer platform built on eGain's knowledge foundation. When IT teams need their AI applications to use the most accurate content, they can pull in whatever Composer component they need through open APIs, SDKs, and MCP servers, build agents that orchestrate and take action, and inherit enterprise security and governance automatically. Native MCP and A2A support connects teams to any LLM or agent.

Guru: the AI source of truth for enterprise knowledge

Your company's knowledge is scattered across wikis, drives, tickets, and chat threads, much of it stale or contradictory. Point AI at that knowledge and it does not clean up the mess. It repeats the retired policy and last quarter's pricing, confidently, at scale. Getting an answer is instant now. Knowing the answer is right is not. Guru

KMS Lighthouse: The Knowledge Layer Behind Trusted AI Agents

KMS Lighthouse gives organizations a single governed source of knowledge that serves AI agents, virtual assistants and human advisors from the same content. GetAnswer delivers precise, context-aware answers to employees and customers across every channel, while Answers AI and AI Assistant make that same structured knowledge available to automated systems. Whoever—or whatever—asks the question, the answer is consistent, current and traceable to its source.

RightAnswers KCS v6 - Turn Support Complexity Into Competitive Advantage With AI-Powered Knowledge Management

Built on 25 years of KM expertise and flexible AI options, RightAnswers transforms how teams create, curate, and deliver knowledge. Generative AI assistance drafts and improves articles in minutes, while built-in quality checks keep content accurate across thousands of articles. Federated search and connected knowledge surface trusted answers wherever agents and customers work, integrating seamlessly across your entire tech stack.

Stravito AI Assistant: AI that connects all your consumer intelligence with all your decisions. Finally!

Stravito is the platform enterprise teams use to find what you already know, at decision speed, synthesize your knowledge into contextual, analyst-depth answers and pressure-test ideas against consumer perspectives built from your own data before investment is committed.

Talkdesk: Talkdesk CXA - part of a unified platform built for the hybrid workforce

Talkdesk helps organizations improve productivity, reduce cost to serve, and deliver better customer experiences as their workforce evolves.

KMWorld Trend-Setting Products of 2026

KMWorld's Trend-Setting Products list of 2026 identifies the contributions of forward-thinking companies that are leading the way in innovating for knowledge access and sharing, improving knowledge flows, and paving the way for knowledge managers.

Adaptive Learning and Personalization Within the Enterprise

Personalization and adaptive learning, from the KM perspective, revolve around human knowledge needs, which can change as projects, perspectives, and products change. Plus, given rapid technological advances that accelerate the ability of enterprises to understand those changes that affect personalization, people's expectations have heightened. Being able to tailor knowledge to individual preferences is suddenly the norm, although individuals may have to inform chatbots, language models, and knowledgebases of what has changed.

Reimagining Workflows in the Agentic Age

Not all workflow is agentic, and not all agentic AI is workflow, but where the two converge, a very dynamic market has emerged for companies both large and small. As recently as September 2025, Market.us predicted that the global agentic AI workflow market will grow from $5.2 billion as of 2024 to $227 billion by 2034, meaning a growth approaching 50% per year. Few software sectors can match this upside potential, so look for a lot of action here within the next few years.

ViewPoints

Stop Calling It Automation: AI Is a Knowledge Augmentation Layer, not a Replacement

Organizations that treat AI as an augmentation layer—one more component in a socio-technical system built on semantic grounding and human accountability—will get the compounding advantage everyone else is trying to buy with a bigger model. That's the bet worth making. Not AI instead of KM, but AI inside KM, on KM's terms. 

Your Enterprise Knowledgebase Was Built for Search, Not Action

A knowledgebase built for search helps people find information. A knowledge system built for action helps a company use that information safely.

David Weinberger

What Happens When Everything Speaks

The beauty of bits, and why they became the fundamental unit of information, is that they can work with whatever type of information a computer is processing.

The Future of the Future

A Critical but Often Neglected Dimension of KM

Much of our legacy KM practices have focused on treating knowledge as content to be captured, shared, and applied as needed. But what has become foundational in today's complex, fast-changing world is the need for a more complete representation of knowledge in the time periods before, during, and after its emergence and application. Introducing epistemological temporality.

Ethical Innovation

The Fallacy of Productivity Gains (and Why Agentic AI Won’t Save Us)

If we have learned anything from the productivity fallacies of the past 30 years, it is that technology alone has never delivered, and likely never will, the promised quantum leap. It is always the marriage of process, governance, and human skill.