KMWorld AI50 : The Companies Empowering Intelligent Knowledge Management 2021

The traditional knowledge management goals of sharing information, improving customer and employee experiences, and keeping operational costs down have never been more essential. However, the events of the past year have upset the plans of even the most successful companies, causing them to reconsider their road maps to accelerate the pace in some areas and navigate detours in others.

One area that continues to rise in importance is AI—along with the related technologies of augmented intelligence, machine learning, process automation, natural language processing, and low- and no-code development.

In the KM space, a spectrum of AI-related technologies is increasingly being deployed by sophisticated organizations to help improve decision making, support remote workers, enhance omnichannel customer interactions, automate financial processes, improve warehouse/supply chain operations, sharpen fraud detection, expedite pharmaceutical research, and elevate patient care.

The importance of AI is underscored by forecasts for revenue growth. Worldwide revenues for the AI market, including software, hardware, and services, are forecast to grow 16.4% year over year in 2021 to $327.5 billion, according to the latest release of the IDC Worldwide Semiannual Artificial Intelligence Tracker. In addition, IDC says that by 2024, the market is expected to break the $500 billion mark with a 5-year compound annual growth rate of 17.5%. Explaining the AI upswing for 2021 and beyond, IDC noted that the pandemic has pushed AI to the top of business agendas, and that advancements in machine learning, conversational AI, and computer vision AI “are at the forefront of AI software innovations, architecting converged business and IT process optimizations, predictions and recommendations, and enabling transformative customer and employee experiences.”

To better understand the current trends in knowledge management, including the impact of COVID-19 on remote work, plans for technology adoption, and changing priorities, Unisphere Research, a division of Information Today, Inc., also conducted a survey among the readership of KMWorld. Not surprisingly, the software solutions that respondents said would help their organizations increase productivity and innovation over the next 12 months were tools to improve collaboration/knowledge sharing (30%), employee experience (21%), and customer service (20%).

Although much of the software and systems being relied upon today are traditional KM favorites such as intranets and document management systems, the “KMWorld 2021 Knowledge Management Priority Survey” found that KMers are also intent on putting new tools to work. While multiple answers were permitted, the most frequently cited technology area that respondents are prioritizing over the next 12 months is AI/machine learning tools and frameworks.

To help spotlight innovation in knowledge management, KMWorld presents the annual KMWorld AI 50, a list of vendors that are helping their customers excel in an increasingly competitive marketplace by imbuing products and services with intelligence and automation.

In addition to the list of companies, be sure to check out the AI Trailblazer articles in which top executives explain in their own words how they are delivering smarter offerings that help customers put their information to work.

Plan to join us as we continue to explore a broad range of knowledge management topics—including AI and machine learning—in person at the annual KMWorld conference, which will be held at the JW Marriott in Washington, D.C., Nov. 15–18.

AI TRAILBLAZERS

We encourage you to visit the websites of the companies on this year’s list. In the AI TRAILBLAZER Spotlights, executives share their opinions and how their solutions help customers realize their business goals.

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ABBYY—ABBYY’s Digital Intelligence platform enables customers to identify intelligent automation opportunities, and understand the processes, content, and manual tasks that drive them, while extending RPA and other automation platforms with AI-based automated document processing. Accenture—A professional services company with capabilities in digital, cloud, and security, Accenture provides myWizard, an intelligent automation platform that connects to an organization’s ecosystem and uses AI to enable human and machine collaboration for IT that is innovative and resilient. Adlib Software—With content intelligence and automation solutions that make it easy to discover, standardize, classify, extract, and leverage clean, structured data from complex, unstructured documents, Adlib helps customers reduce risk, simplify compliance, and accelerate customer experiences. Adobe—With Adobe Sensei’s AI and machine learning powering features in Adobe Experience Cloud, Adobe enables organizations to gain a more comprehensive view of customers so they can deliver more personalized, timely experiences and target marketing for better results. Alation—A pioneer in the data catalog market that is now leading its evolution into a range of data intelligence solutions, Alation combines machine learning with human insight to tackle even the most demanding challenges in data and metadata management. To Learn more, read Satyen Sangani, CEO and co-founder's AI Trailblazer Insight. Amazon Web Services (AWS)—With a broad set of tools to create impactful machine learning solutions faster, AWS Machine Learning is used by tens of thousands of customers to improve healthcare, provide better customer service, optimize their business, enable new customer experiences, and more. Appen—A provider of high-quality training data for organizations that build effective AI systems at scale, Appen collects and labels images, text, speech, audio, and video used to assemble and continuously improve the world’s most innovative AI systems. Automation Anywhere—A provider of robotic process automation software, Automation Anywhere empowers organizations to automate end-to-end business processes with AI-powered digital workers that perform repetitive, manual tasks, resulting in productivity gains, optimized customer experience, and more engaged employees. BA Insight—An innovator in AI-driven search, BA Insight provides a software portfolio that enhances the outcome of digital interactions through advanced search experiences that are relevant, personalized, and actionable, providing a web-like search experience regardless of where content or users reside. To Learn more, read Massood Zarrabian, CEO's AI Trailblazer Insight. CallMiner—Providing the Eureka engagement analytics platform, CallMiner leverages AI and machine learning to transform the voice of customers and agents into operational intelligence at scale with automated performance and sentiment scoring, topic discovery, and trend presentation. Capacity —Capacity offers an AI-powered support automation platform that connects an organization’s entire tech stack to answer questions, automate repetitive support tasks, and build solutions to business challenges so support teams can focus on strategic goals and tasks that require higher-level thinking. Coveo—With a cloud-based AI-powered relevance platform, Coveo provides the intelligence layer that injects relevance into digital experiences, with applied AI-driven solutions spanning intelligent search through recommendation and personalization solutions for ecommerce, service, and workplace. Deloitte—Deloitte delivers AI and analytics services that combine AI solutions with domain and industry insight to harness human-machine collaboration by focusing on four pillars: designing for accountability, optimizing for predictable performance, translating unknowns into knowns, and reimagining with confidence. To Learn more, read Stephen Lancaster-Hall, Managing Director, Deloitte Consulting Head of KM Practice, US's AI Trailblazer Insight. eGain—With software powered by AI, machine learning, knowledge, and analytics, eGain offers a customer engagement platform that automates digital-first, omnichannel experiences across all touchpoints while reducing cost and improving compliance. Enterprise Knowledge—A services firm that delivers comprehensive solutions, Enterprise Knowledge has a staff of in-house developers who implement knowledge graphs, ML, NLP, and semantic technologies for public and commercial institutions. To Learn more, read Lulit Tesfaye, Practice Lead for Data and Information Management, Enterprise Knowledge's AI Trailblazer Insight. expert.ai—expert.ai provides a platform for language understanding that features a hybrid approach to natural language, combining symbolic human-like comprehension and machine learning to transform language-intensive processes into practical knowledge, enabling the insight required to improve decision making throughout organizations. Franz—An early innovator in AI and leading supplier of semantic graph database technology with expert knowledge in developing and deploying knowledge graph solutions, Franz provides AllegroGraph, a horizontally scalable, high-performance, transactional semantic graph database. To Learn more, read Jans Aasman CEO's AI Trailblazer Insight. Genesys—A provider of omnichannel customer experience and contact center solutions, Genesys offers technology, powered by the cloud and AI, to connect customer moments while also improving employee experiences. Google—Organizations put Google’s AI and machine learning to work to help them run faster and smoother while using unstructured data to increase operational efficiency, improve customer experience, and inform decision making. Hyland—A provider of a content services platform featuring AI-enabled analytics, machine learning, and automation, Hyland earlier this year acquired Nuxeo, a content services platform and digital asset management provider.  Indico—Allowing enterprises to deploy AI to unstructured content challenges while eliminating many of the common barriers to adoption, Indico, a provider of intelligent process automation solutions, helps turn process into profit by automating manual, labor-intensive, document-based workflows. Infosys BPM—Delivering intelligent process automation solutions for unstructured content workflows, Indico offers an application of transfer learning that provides freedom from templates and rules, enabling process owners to build custom machine learning models with as few as 200 examples. Interactions—With flexible products and solutions designed to meet the growing demand for unified, omnichannel customer care, Interactions provides intelligent virtual assistants that seamlessly assimilate conversational AI and human understanding to enable businesses to engage with their customers in productive conversations. KMS Lighthouse—KMS Lighthouse provides a SaaS-based knowledge system that supports updates, collaboration, and sharing in real time and offers native integrations to social media, product catalogs, operational systems, chatbots, virtual assistants, and open API integrations with existing applications. To Learn more, read Sagi Eliyahu, CEO's AI Trailblazer Insight. KnowledgeLake—Providing an end-to-end, fully cloud-native solution for document processing that enables organizations to capture, process, and manage their content in a single platform, KnowledgeLake combines intelligent document capture and robotic process automation to increase productivity.

Kyndi—Providing AI software that helps organizations answer their hardest questions, Kyndi can analyze long-form text and find actionable insights in a smarter, faster, and explainable way. Lexalytics—Offering the Salience, Semantria, and Lexalytics Intelligence Platform products, Lexalytics processes billions of words every day, globally, for data analytics companies and enterprise data analyst teams that need to tell powerful stories from text data. Lucidworks—Lucidworks offers the Connected Experience Cloud that captures user signals from every action and applies them to digital experiences by combining the power of search and machine learning to personalize experiences that meet employees’ and customers’ unique intent. Luminoso—Requiring little setup, maintenance, or training, Luminoso combines natural language understanding technology and a vast knowledgebase to learn words from context—just as humans do—and instantly analyzes text without libraries. Microsoft—Microsoft enables digital transformation for the era of an intelligent cloud and an intelligent edge and recently acquired Nuance Communications to amplify AI expertise and customer engagement solutions across interactive voice response, virtual assistants, and digital and biometric solutions. Mindbreeze—Mindbreeze is a provider of appliances and cloud services for enterprise search, applied AI, and knowledge management that utilizes an insight engine that offers a consolidated view of corporate knowledge, regardless of where and how the data is stored. To Learn more, read Daniel Fallmann, CEO's AI Trailblazer Insight. Neo4j—A provider of graph database technology, Neo4j drives innovation and competitive advantage with a relationships-first approach that enables applications to tackle connected data challenges posed by AI, fraud detection, real-time recommendations, and master data. NICE—NICE is a provider of cloud and on-prem enterprise software solutions that empower organizations to make smarter decisions based on advanced analytics of structured and unstructured data and offers NICE Enlighten AI for Customer Satisfaction to help businesses improve customer interactions. To Learn more, read Sharon Einstein, Vice President and General Manager, NICE Customer Experience Analytics's AI Trailblazer Insight. Northern Light—Northern Light has been providing knowledge management platforms for competitive intelligence and market research insights to global enterprises since 1996, including Fortune 1000 leaders across multiple industries such as information technology, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, and life sciences. To Learn more, read David Seuss, CEO's AI Trailblazer Insight. Nuance Communications—Nuance Communications is a technology pioneer with market leadership in conversational AI and ambient intelligence, offering intuitive solutions that amplify people’s ability to help others. Observe.AI—Observe.AI, a leader in contact center AI, transforms customer experiences and improves agent performance by helping top brands analyze 100% of interactions, extract actionable sentiment and interaction insights, and streamline workflows. O'Neil Digital Solutions—O’Neil Digital Solutions’ latest version of ONEsuite includes a robust data analytics engine, content management, template creation, output functionality, CRM, built-in omnichannel delivery, and other features that provide self-service—allowing clients to interact with their data, content and templates and create communications, proof, and deliver to their audiences. Pryon—Pryon is an AI company focused on enterprise knowledge, whose core natural language processing platform is designed to extract data from enterprise content and systems with high levels of accuracy and speed. RWS—RWS is a provider of technology-enabled language, content management, and intellectual property services, helping customers to connect with and bring new ideas to people globally by communicating business-critical content at scale and enabling the protection and realization of their innovations. SAS—SAS is a leader in analytics that provides innovative software and services, empowering and inspiring customers around the world to transform data into intelligence. SearchBlox—SearchBlox builds intuitive and intelligent enterprise insight engines based on open source technologies, simplifying search for complex enterprises, with clients that include leaders in financial services, healthcare, and government. To Learn more, read Robert Selvaraj, CEO's AI Trailblazer Insight. Semantic Web Company—As a leading provider of graph-based metadata, search, and analysis solutions, Semantic Web Company supports its customers in the development and implementation of enterprise knowledge graphs, the extraction of useful knowledge from large datasets, and the integration and linking of structured and unstructured data. ServiceNow—ServiceNow is making the world of work work better for people with its cloud-based platform and predictive intelligence solutions that deliver digital workflows that aim to create great experiences and unlock productivity for employees and the enterprise. Sinequa—Customers employ Sinequa’s intelligent search platform to connect all content (both text and data), derive meaning, learn from user interactions, and present information in context, solving content chaos and informing employees through a single, secure interface. Smartlogic—Smartlogic’s Semaphore is a semantic AI platform that enables organizations to reveal and extract knowledge from their digital data ecosystem to yield business insight, enriching enterprise information with context and meaning, extracting critical facts and relationships, and harmonizing disparate information. Softworks AI—Softworks AI strives to leverage its deep expertise in computer perception, advanced document understanding, and AI technologies to transform raw data into intelligent, actionable information with its proprietary technology, Trapeze, which can automate knowledge workers’ tedious, time-consuming tasks. Starmind—Starmind offers a unique self-learning AI algorithm to uncover knowledge and improve organizational efficiency by breaking through complicated and broken corporate processes, enabling employees to access the organization’s full knowledge potential. TTEC—A technology and services company, TTEC provides automation, AI, and RPA solutions that help drive service costs down by empowering customer self-service and augmenting the associate experience for many of the world’s most iconic brands. UiPath—UiPath offers an end-to-end platform for automation, combining a robotic process automation solution with a full suite of capabilities that enable every organization to rapidly scale digital business operations. Verint—Verint helps the world’s most iconic brands build enduring customer relationships by connecting work, data, and experiences across the enterprise with a customer engagement portfolio that draws on the latest advancements in AI and analytics.