In 2001, IDC published a white paper, “The High Cost of Not Finding Information,” noting that knowledge workers were spending two and a half hours a day searching for information.
Ten years ago in 2012, McKinsey reported that “employees spend 1.8 hours every day—9.3 hours per week, on average—searching and gathering information.”
And in 2018 an IDC study found that “data professionals are losing 50% of their time every week” — 30% searching for, governing and preparing data plus 20% duplicating work.
All the search and knowledge management technologies corporations have introduced over the last twenty years have barely moved the needle on the amount of time knowledge workers spend searching for and preparing knowledge that already exists in their organisations for reuse.
Clearly, there has to be a better way to raise the productivity and effectiveness of knowledge workers, but it’s unlikely to emerge from doing the same thing over and over again.
To move the needle, raise productivity and prevent corporate knowledge from going to waste, we need to think differently about how we arm knowledge workers to discover, access and reuse knowledge.
Here’s where Artificial Intelligence comes in. Previous methods of knowledge management were limited to helping to organise and catalogue knowledge to be easier to find and access when required. They didn’t help knowledge workers to comprehend or repurpose existing knowledge to generate new value for organisations. They relied on what human teams remembered and worked at human speeds for reading and comprehension – and finally on human speeds for producing new content from old.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) moves the needle by removing the human limits on speed while continuing to involve humans in the production and distribution of content and the creation of value.
Rather than relying on human discovery capability, AI can read, understand and repurpose all of an organisation’s relevant knowledge to meet new organisational challenges and needs in mere minutes, then hand over draft content to humans to add that spart of creativity and insight that AI can’t match.
AI does the heavy lifting humans aren’t good at – identifying and comprehending relevant bodies of text and allows human teams to focus on their strengths, editing and refining to perfection.
This approach transforms corporate workflows and dramatically moves the needle on productivity, providing a new way to approach knowledge work that values the skills of AIs and humans alike.
If you’re interested in learning more, or exploring what the impact could be for your organisation, reach out and schedule a conversation with reKnow today.