KMWorld 2023’s second day keynotes strike the balance between human connection and AI

Evaluating GenAI and its impact on enterprise search and UX

Kamran Khan, president and CEO, Pureinsights Technology Corp., further took the mystery out of GenAI and its application to KM by illustrating its potential power in supercharging search experiences.

There’s so much you can do with AI, Khan remarked. This certainly inspires various fears due to its capacity to overwhelm, though Khan broke down its applications:

• Generating text
• Generating code
• Generating images

These categories, though broad, have seen such wild success—and seemingly overnight, Khan added.

For the sake of the presentation, Khan brought it back to search, where GenAI poses endless possibilities for search. This introduces a particular challenge: choice. With endless applications, GenAI can be more harmful than helpful.

Khan offered these tips for using GenAI, its search capacity, and your content:

• Use the generative LLM as “the brain”
• Train “the brain” incrementally on YOUR content
• Smartly curate answers only from YOUR content

Additionally, Khan explained that to achieve a successfully integrated content-search system, you must evolve search, not “clunk” it. By implementing a hybrid approach—where an enterprise improves upon its traditional search and then improves semantic search with vectors—the move to GenAI is gradual, and therefore, more seamless.

Maximizing knowledge value with conversational AI

John Lewis, chief knowledge officer, SearchBlox Software Inc. and Explanation Age LLC, focused his section of the keynote on the digitization of dialogue, examining how AI can bridge the gap between novice queries and expert content.

Lewis argued that search is the method in which enterprises unlock knowledge. There are two mindsets that further surround this concept: innovation and productivity. When GenAI hit the scene, it seemingly struck the metaphorical gold of these two attributes.

However, Lewis suggested that this may not be the reality.

“The hype curve for ChatGPT was off the chart,” said Lewis. “It was the hammer and anything it looked at was a nail.”

“Everything as a nail” fundamentally lacks nuance, generating a wild misunderstanding of how to leverage GenAI to its maximum capacity and efficacy.

Lewis then introduced SearchBlox’s unified AI strategy as a remediation of this GenAI issue, which features an intersection between search, FAQs, and chatbots. This included the following technologies:

• Document and URL search with PreText and SmartSuggest
• Generate answers from knowledge silos with private LLM-based chatbots
• Find an answer with SmartFAQs

SearchBlox’s unified AI strategy enables organizations to create personalized, configurable AI implementations that offer chatbot insights based on an enterprise’s unique content, accompanied by a user-friendly UI.

SearchBlox’s offering takes the disruption out of GenAI, empowering it to spark KM joy as opposed to AI-phobia.

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.