KMWorld 2025 keynotes stress the importance of enterprise-wide AI adoption

Martin Kon, president emeritus, Cohere and former CFO, YouTube, opened the first official day of KMWorld 2025 with his keynote, “Unlocking Enterprise Value for a Positive Future of Knowledge Work,” exploring how organizations can effectively harness the power of AI to transform KM, accelerate decision making, and unlock new levels of performance across sectors.

“It’s amazing to think about what’s changed and has gone on in the world in the last 3 years,” Kon said. “AI has the really exciting potential to bridge the skills gap.”

Kon explained that AI will not replace jobs, those that embrace this new technology and the applications created will replace those who don’t.

“The true transformation for the economy will come from enterprise adoption,” Kon said. “This is about how AI can be integrated at the core workflows of organizations.”

From transforming financial institutions with productivity and efficiency gains to streamlining clinical workflows in healthcare and supporting secure, high-stakes applications in the public sector and national security, these are the real-world use cases and lessons learned from the frontier of AI deployment.

“There is an unprecedented opportunity to unlock the lost knowledge within an enterprise,” Kon said.

From Pilot to Production: Enterprise Autonomization

GenAI and intelligent agents are fundamentally transforming the landscape of enterprise operations by enabling unprecedented levels of automation, personalization, and efficiency. These technologies are breaking traditional data silos, allowing for seamless integration and real-time access to information across various departments.

Dave Clarke, chief innovation officer, Squirro, discussed how GenAI and intelligent agents affect ontology and taxonomies in KM during his keynote.

“In 2024 we saw a lot of companies doing pilots but in 2025 that ‘honeymoon’ phase was over,” Clarke said. “Next year is the time to scale.”

He recommended starting AI pilots on something built to scale instead of starting from scratch. To pivot from pilot to production, enterprises need a platform to orchestrate AI and knowledge management. Enterprises also need to deliver precision, security, and privacy at scale.

Machine-readable knowledge is the key to AI precision, Clarke stressed. It informs AI agents and helps them with their processes.

AI agents are at the convergence of generative AI and knowledge graphs. Squirro provides agentic workflow knowledge graphs, he explained.

“We have built AI agents using an ontology to build taxonomies for us,” Clarke said. “We also built AI agents for iterative classification and information extraction.”

Trusted Knowledge Infrastructure for AI Business

There is no question that AI has reignited interest in KM. Gartner predicts that 100% of AI virtual customer assistant and virtual agent assistant projects that lack integration to modern KM systems will fail to meet their CX and operational cost-reduction goals by 2025.

As businesses experiment with AI, they are realizing that robust KM is foundational to its success. During his keynote, Arvind Gopal, VP of product management and strategy, eGain, discussed how KM and AI can accelerate and ensure mutual success, creating transformational business value at warp speed.

“Traditionally knowledge management has been a heavy lift,” Gopal said. “The core areas are still manual.”

That is where eGain comes in, he noted. The eGain AI Knowledge method has sped up KM tasks, and improved consistency, accuracy, compliance, and relevance.

The method is rooted in the principle of the knowledge you need, not the knowledge you have. It homes in on the information needed and makes that easily available, Gopal explained.

KM & GenAI Workflow

During his portion of the keynotes, Tim Hill, director, product management, NiCE, examined how leading organizations are revolutionizing their knowledge management with GenAI Workflow and achieving measurable ROI.

NiCE has implemented CXone Mpower expert GenAI workflow. It captures, cultivates, calibrates, and calculates.

“It’s going to come as no surprise that search is changing,” Hill said. “Content is being used differently and its through these generative responses.”

The primary purpose of webpages is to power generative searches, and the secondary purpose is pages for humans, he said.

KMWorld returned to the J.W. Marriott in Washington D.C. on November 17-20, with pre-conference workshops held on November 17.

KMWorld 2025 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.