KMWorld 2025 day 2 keynotes showcase enterprise intelligence

The second day of KMWorld 2025 focused on understanding the impact of AI on human experiences, especially as its implementation permeates all aspects of life, from retail shopping to psychotherapy.

The first keynote was delivered by Seema Swamy, senior director, research insights, data analytics, and data science, Walmart.

Swamy believes AI is a good role for optimization because there are so many tasks that humans cannot do as effectively.

However, AI agents should more easily pass the Turing test and be more vivid so human responses have greater valence, that is, their experiences will be significantly more positive or negative, depending on the context.

The impact can be favorable or unfavorable from an experiential psychological perspective. Organizations need to ensure that the human experience with AI is favorable.

“This is just unpredictable but it’s just so fascinating,” Swamy said.

There is an opportunity for AI to enrich work. By developing a scientific framework for generating and evaluating new ideas about how people and AI can work together—we get “science for the future of work.”

“All the leaders in the industry today have been tempering people’s expectations,” Swamy said.

Guidelines for collaborative intelligence include humans assisting machines, which entail training, explaining, and sustaining.

“An AI does not become smart by itself, it needs to be taught,” Swamy said.

However, relying too much on AI can cause emotional and cognitive atrophy, she noted. There can be a loss of empathy due to AI being trained on responding positively in general.

“What are we becoming and how will we change?” Swamy said. “Everybody wants the new shiny object.”

Data security concerns vary around the world. She recommended bridging the gap between personalization and data security to provide customers with peace of mind.

“The opportunities for AI to address customer trust issues is immense,” Swamy said.

AI as the Future of Work

Ville Somppi, SVP, industry solutions, M-Files, in his keynote centered on the future of work.

Technology applications are developing at a rapid-fire pace in today’s accelerated world. As organizations look toward the future of work, AI has emerged as a powerful tool to make jobs easier and enable better data-driven decisions.

For knowledge workers especially, the goal has always been to reduce time spent on the essential but unstimulating tasks that distract from using key skills to generate value. For these workers, the future of work is knowledge work automation, to enhance collaboration with colleagues and automate workflows.

Somppi discussed new innovations such as knowledge work automation to build a resilient workforce capable of responding to the most daunting of industry challenges.

AI operates on data, he explained, explicit and tacit. The maturity of data organizations have is structured and unstructured. The reality is that 60% of processes are document centered and this can be difficult for AI because these processes rely on people.

“Can we automate those document-centered processes so we can unlock that knowledge inside documents?” Somppi said.

AI can help make decisions faster and adaptable process possible. The foundations for AI success include leveraging context, automating document processes, and turning “ROT” into ART.

“AI needs high quality data to produce valuable outcomes,” Somppi said. “The next phase of AI is when both the AI and humans work together to process data.”

Knowledge Delivery With Faster, Smarter Agents

In a world where speed is the key to great customer experience (CX), every interaction—whether human or automated—requires fast, flawless access to the right knowledge.

As AI becomes prevalent across organizations, it is becoming critical to have the capability to deliver AI-driven knowledge across more solutions and their workflows to enable faster, more effective and efficient interactions.

John Chmaj, senior director, KM strategy, Verint, looked at how AI can be deployed to push the boundaries of how and where knowledge can be surfaced and optimized for agents, copilots, and intelligent virtual assistants.

“Support has a mandate to be efficient and meet me where I am,” Chmaj said.

Verint developed a strategy that is useful for people to scale. The CX Automation Platform is an open, flexible, and modular platform that delivers outcomes immediately. It’s centered around a data hub that can provide insights and train AI.

 “The value is that you can mix and match what you need,” Chmaj said. “You can bring your own LLM or application for what is needed.”

Enterprise Agentic AI at Scale: A Case Study

As enterprises race to implement agentic AI, many are unsure where to start. Others see early success but then stall when they realize that the path from prototype to real-world value is difficult.

Jeff Evernham, chief product officer, Sinequa by ChapsVision, presented a case study that demonstrated how a company can successfully scale agentic AI.

“When we’re talking about knowledge management, everybody is talking about context,” Evernham said.

There are 5 eras of the agentic revolution, this includes pre-agentic, agent adjacent, agentic colleagues, agent-centric, and agent-led.

“We’re going to see this kind of progression in much of the work we do,” Evernham said.

According to a McKinsey study, “The state of AI in 2025,” only 23% of companies surveyed have started to deploy agentic AI, Evernham noted.

To start implementing any type of AI in the business, he recommended a focused high-value, AI-aligned use case. Companies can success through verticalization and rigor and then scale with AI that is grounded, secure, and governed.  

BFFs for Great Experiences & Quick Business Value

Speakers from Wordplay, a global leader in payment solutions, discussed how they had to deal with multi-pronged knowledge silos as the company went through mergers and acquisitions.

Knowledge was fragmented across business units, languages, tools, content, and business knowhow. Meanwhile, contact center agents were expected to handle customer queries on any of the topics related to the merged entities.

Megan Taylor, Knowledge365 Program Owner, Worldpay and Marcus Tucson, Service Cloud Program Owner, Worldpay, explained that with eGain’s AI knowledge platform, Worldpay was able to centralize trusted knowledge in one single place of truth and leverage AI with this foundation to push vetted answers and step-by-step guidance in the flow of conversations and workflows while automating KM tasks with human experts in the loop.

“By remaining flexible and having strong partnerships, you can overcome challenges and remain successful,” Tucson 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.