Unlocking Knowledge Potential

The key to a worker in a business that relies on knowledge and expertise to create value and drive its operations, is access to knowledge.  The current methods for sharing and managing knowledge are linear which can lead to inefficiency because the knowledge holder serves as a gatekeeper. This person decides where and how to share and store the knowledge for others to use and can often act as a blocker to value creation.

In an AI-enabled organisation, knowledge workers should expect a highly democratised flow of knowledge to maximise the value they can create. 

Tapping into your most valuable knowledge sources

Normally when an organisation talks about the data that they have, it is often referring to the information stored in structured systems such as financial management, CRM, Human Capital Management, and so on.  This structured data only represents a small fraction (typically less than 1%) of the total information that is stored in an organisation and most data is stored in an unstructured way in personal drives, email systems and collaboration platforms such as MS Sharepoint and Teams.  Whilst organisations spend a considerable amount of money investing in their structured systems, they currently have limited tools to gain insights from the 99% of unstructured data.

The use of ‘Datagraphs’ is a concept that Venkat Venkatramen discussed in his HBR paper from June 2022, ‘The Next Great Digital Advantage’.  A datagraph is a unique set of data that an organisation owns, offering deep insights and value that competitors cannot replicate.  Examples of datagraphs include Amazon’s shopping graph where they know more than other retailers on what products consumers search for and buy; the Netflix entertainment graphs where they are masters of knowing what content people want to watch and therefore provide highly tailored viewing to keep customers happy and subscribe to their service.  It is important for organisations to consider what would constitute their unique set of datagraphs that are differentiating and will help them to continue to deliver value and grow their business.  Combining the entire breadth of stored data (both structured and unstructured) will help businesses develop their datagraphs that will ne a source of competitive advantage.  Of course, maintaining good quality datasets are a critical part of everyone’s AI journey, however it is equally important to look at how AI tools can transform your data and make connections to provide insights that humans may miss.

How can AI help?

Before the introduction of Generative AI, retrieving information from a variety of datasets required an extensive data structuring and cleansing exercise, making it very expensive and largely inaccessible to most organisations.  That is not to say that implementing an AI solution to unlock your knowledge potential is easy, however Generative AI technology does make this more accessible to most. 

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is a two part system that will allow you to maximise the value of your datagraphs.  The first part, retrieval, searches your datasets to find the most relevant pieces of information (kind of like a super-smart librarian) and the second part, generation, takes the information retrieved and generates a coherent and relevant response (think of it as a highly creative writer).  This RAG system is an example of AI augmentation that we described in part one of this article, where machines augment human output through providing highly relevant information.  Along with the automation of routine tasks, this is where companies will receive their AI dividend.

Part Three of this series will discuss how assessing the nature of work in your businesses can be used to determine where to deploy this AI tool.  We will also highlight some of the risks of adopting AI and how these can impact your business.

Bothy Consulting is an innovation and transformation consultancy that provides advice on strategy development, process mapping, organisational design and Innovation-as-a-Service.  Its founding partners have over 50 years of combined corporate experience and have led many transformation and change initiatives and developed digital and AI strategies for leading businesses.  If you would like to hear more about their services, email enquiries@bothyconsulting.com