Looking at digital workspaces of the future fueled by mobility and AI at KMWorld 2019

At KMWorld 2019, Kamonte McCray, SVP/GM Content Management & Workflow Software Group, Xerox, and John Chmaj, senior director, product strategy, Knowledge Management, Verint, looked at digital workspaces of the future from different points of view in a session titled "Digital Workspaces of the Future: Industry Insights."

McCray illustrated how organizations benefit from new approaches that effectively bridge the gap between physical and digital, enabling them to coexist in an efficient, secure digital workspace. Block discusses how the digital workspace of the future is immersive and multidimensional, not buried in flat interfaces, hierarchical folder structures, or complicated taxonomies. She shows how the digital workspace of the future works the way our brains work, tapping into the power of visual and spatial memory.

Videos of KMWorld 2019 awards presentations,  keynotes, and sessions can be found here.

Chmaj explored what's new in emerging AI technologies and tools, and how we can apply KM best practices with new knowledge automation technology to drive the best outcomes from each interaction. He discusses how a combination of forward thinking and tried and true methods are needed to evolve knowledge into these exciting interactive workspaces of the future for employees in the contact center and beyond as well as your customers.

There are many shifts driving the digital workplace of the future, said McCray. There is a:

• Technology shift: IoT devices will grow to 25 billion by 2021, and there is rapid adoption of tablet and cloud computing as more and more we are moving to a mobile society.
• Demographic shift: Millennials will account for 75% of workers by 2025 and there will be five different generations working in different ways.
• Work style shift with companies downsizing real estate and minimizing IT spend meaning that that by 2025 half of workers will be mobile. People will not necessarily be in the office anymore
• Content chaos: Structured and unstructured data will span physical, digital, social, and video, with data expected to double every 2 years.

Transforming into an intelligent workspace will support a changing workforce with flexible and scalable services that adapt to future workforce requirements … always on, with instant access anytime from anywhere.

Some of the benefits of this transformation will be:

• 42% fewer paper documents in the office
• At least a 5% of revenue growth, according 87% of CIOs due to digitally empowering employees
• 5% increased productivity when works are mobile
• 41% overall productivity increase

AI is both facilitating and accelerating KM evolution, said Chmaj. Key elements of this change are that:

• NLP and cognitive search understanding
• The ability to dynamically identify and act on context to drive rich personalization
• Predictive content and task associations that are based on past and present actions
• Machine learning to drive dynamic improvements in search, content structuring, and analytics

Organizations should seek to "simplify, modernize, and automate," with AI-infused KM, said Chmaj. This will include the following processes:

• Simplify knowledge development and delivery using the power of AI to bring knowledge to users directly without them having to know
  how to find it and use it.
• Modernize the use of knowledge through intelligent, context-driven delivery touchpoints and predictive ability.
• Automate the process of knowledge delivery by embedding and triggering it directly through the tools and processes where it is needed. Support content development through automated tagging, linking and structuring.

Challenges to consider for the future as the new reality of the AI-propelled workplace of the future becomes a reality will include, said Chmaj. This includes the questions: How do we curate exponentially larger datasets? How can we preserve and maintain a "single source of truth" across a plethora of channels and output devices? How do we evolve the combination of curation, technology design, and subject-matter expertise to own and operate a world with sophisticated NLP, AI, ML, and omni-channel outputs?  What does "knowledge" become in such a dynamic, multi-faceted, fragmented world?

KMWorld 2019 is a part of a unique program of five co-located conferences, which also includes Enterprise Search & Discovery, Office 365 Symposium, Taxonomy Boot Camp, and Text Analytics Forum.

Many speakers at KMWorld 2019 are making their presentations available at www.kmworld.com/Conference/2019/Presentations.aspx.

SAVE THE DATE FOR KMWORLD 2020- NOVEMBER 16-19, 2020!