Sugarwork was founded as a software platform to preserve institutional knowledge from subject matter experts, particularly as employees departed. This supports succession planning and helps onboard new employees. It has been used by customers spanning manufacturing, technology, and commercial real estate. “Although there are other software products that help organizations map processes, and there are other AI notetakers,” said Vanessa Liu, CEO and co-founder of Sugarwork, “Sugarwork is unique in its ability to provide insights about tacit knowledge.”
In one use case, a company preparing to outsource its engineering activities wanted a systematic way to capture the engineers’ knowledge. “We provided a template to 130 engineers so they could share their knowledge on the Sugarwork platform with each other through interviews,” Liu stated. “Expected onboarding time for the new workers was decreased by 70%, standard operating procedure manuals were prepared using our AI platform, and this was all done in under 4 weeks.”
The Sugarwork platform can also identify bottlenecks much faster and at much lower cost than other methods, such as using consultants or in-house teams. Detailed processes can be mapped in as little as 2 days, versus the 3 months it usually takes—a critical advantage in gathering the input needed for the process automation that many companies are now looking to do with AI. It facilitates restructuring of organizations and scales critical processes by making those processes explicit.
In another use case, many highly skilled blue-collar workers were retiring from a medical device manufacturing company. Sugarwork was used to develop a queryable database through the use of recorded interviews and AI-enabled analysis. “To do this well, you have to understand how to elicit knowledge,” Liu added. “And once ChatGPT came along, we realized that we could leverage it to analyze content at a very deep level and obtain hard-to-get tacit information.”
Many avenues are available to organizations for discovering sources of tacit knowledge and using this valuable (and often untapped) resource, whether by enhancing applications they are already using, seeking deeper meanings through the use of storytelling, or deploying a purpose-designed platform for extracting and analyzing tacit information. This information can then be scaled and shared to bring new dimensions of innovation and productivity to the enterprise at large.