KMWorld 2023 opening keynotes focus on the future of work
Onboarding knowledge transfers with AI
Judith Williams, co-founder and Vanessa Liu, CEO, Sugarwork, talked “Capturing & Scaling Expert Knowledge with AI,” during their portion of the keynote.
New talent is important, but the value of experience is priceless. How do you capture institutional and skills-based knowledge to ensure the next employee gets off to the standing start? Minimize the costs of time and training when onboarding? Realize the benefits of new talent faster?
“Every one of us has a type of special knowledge,” Williams said. “It’s the things that take you many years to learn. That’s tacit knowledge.”
The founders of Sugarwork shared their vision and solutions for an area scantly addressed in the past, along with a success story, highlighting the transformation of a software company as it shifted the geography of its engineering team and used its structured tool to transfer knowledge from the more experienced team to the newly onboarded team.
“The methodologies that are used today are bespoke and non-identifiable,” Liu said.
Unlike tools such as intranets and collaboration platforms such as Slack, Microsoft Teams, and other stopgaps, the Sugarwork platform facilitates the transfer of tacit knowledge—knowledge that lives primarily in the minds of individual employees—and is deeply ingrained in people's experiences.
This becomes crucial in moments of transition or for companies facing a silver tsunami of retirements, divesting a business unit, or talent disruptions and that risk experiencing profound knowledge and productivity loss when experienced talent walks out the door.
“The cost of losing an experienced employee is high,” Williams said.
Taking GPT from transformer to transformation
Ashu Roy, CEO, eGain, went on to explain how generative AI has the potential to transform customer and employee experiences—CX and EX, during his keynote presentation, “The Knowledge Foundation: Take GPT From Transformer to Transformation.”
“AI is at the top of this pyramid of inflated expectations,” Roy said.
He mentioned the Turing test and how GPT-4 aced it, meaning that the technology is feeling more “human” every day.
The question is how you can harness that technology for CX and EX transformation. The rate of improvement is exponential with AI.
“This rate will create solutions 1-3 years that we can’t even fathom today,” Roy said.
KMWorld returned to the J.W. Marriott in Washington D.C. on November 6-9, with pre-conference workshops held on November 6.
KMWorld 2023 is a part of a unique program of five co-located conferences, which also includes Enterprise Search & Discovery, Enterprise AI World, Taxonomy Boot Camp, and Text Analytics Forum.