How Noonean is using AI to help companies generate and leverage knowledge
By: Tiana Laurence, General Partner at Laurence Innovation
While previous industrial revolutions were driven by steam power, railroads, and factory automation, the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is powered by knowledge. Rapidly emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) are all about the ability to process and analyze information, which ultimately leads to the production of knowledge. There’s nothing more fundamental to companies’ performance, as knowledge encompasses everything they care about — from the improvement of products and services to the identification of new markets.
Companies lose millions of dollars every year because they lack certain forms of knowledge. Consider all the institutional memory that’s lost when experts leave an organization, the productivity that’s sacrificed when employees can’t find the right information and have to duplicate work, or the lack of efficiency when there’s minimal communication between department and teams.
These are all reasons why Laurence Innovation is proud to partner with Noonean, a company that’s helping organizations use AI (through an innovative process known as cognitive cybernetics) to improve the discovery, spread, and creation of knowledge.
Current knowledge management practices are falling short
Gartner defines knowledge management as a “business process that formalizes the management and use of an enterprise’s intellectual assets. KM promotes a collaborative and integrative approach to the creation, capture, organization, access, and use of information assets, including the tacit, uncaptured knowledge of people.” In other words, knowledge management is a way to make teams as transparent and productive as possible, which will help companies fully leverage their human capital.
Although companies recognize the importance of knowledge management, they’re failing to make it a core part of their operations. A 2020 Deloitte report found that, while three-quarters of organizations say the creation and preservation of knowledge across workforces is important or very important, just 9 percent said they were prepared to facilitate this process. Deloitte notes that this disconnect “represents one of the largest gaps between importance and readiness across this year’s trends.” Meanwhile, 82 percent of respondents said they need to do a better job of putting knowledge into action and 79 percent said they have to be “more effective at creating knowledge to jump-start innovations and launch new products and services.”
By their own admission, companies aren’t generating and using knowledge as effectively as they should be. Noonean was created to upend this status quo.
Noonean is disrupting the world of knowledge management
In an ever-evolving and hyper-competitive global economy, companies need to do away with static databases and move toward dynamic knowledge systems capable of identifying and leveraging human capital, generating usable knowledge, and dramatically increasing efficiency. By using best-in-class enterprise natural language processing (NLP) technology and uniquely powerful search engines, Noonean gives companies a knowledge management solution that connects different parts of the organization, finds expertise, and helps them adapt to changing circumstances in real time.
Despite the fact that drastic improvements in AI technology have made old forms of manual data collection and storage obsolete, companies are neglecting the most revolutionary form of knowledge management that exists. Deloitte found that more than two-thirds of organizations haven’t yet incorporated AI into their knowledge management platform, while a survey of 1,300 business and IT leaders reports that just 15 percent of respondents are using AI to “drive strategy, innovation, efficiency or the customer experience.” However, 60 percent anticipate that they’ll deploy AI for all these purposes in the future.
When companies choose which AI-powered knowledge management platform they’ll use, several critical considerations should inform this decision. First, the most effective solutions will be conversational and adaptive — users should be able to engage with AI directly, which will provide intelligent answers to specific queries. Second, AI knowledge management tools should be user-friendly — there doesn’t need to be a steep learning curve or months of training. Third, the knowledge generated by an AI solution should be easily accessible across the organization, especially given the prominence of distributed workforces in the post-COVID-19 era. This knowledge also needs to be immediately usable, which is why AI solutions should offer a system of team feedback, knowledge templates, and knowledge flows.
Noonean checks all of these boxes, which is why we decided to support its efforts to permanently transform the way companies approach knowledge management.
How does Noonean work?
Noonean’s proprietary NLP technology, the Noonean Morphological Grammar Engine, calculates the structure and intent of each sentence in a document and quickly compares it to millions of others. By taking users directly to relevant lines of text in documents and databases, Noonean is able to provide actionable information more quickly and efficiently than its competitors. Noonean also deploys a form of AI called an Ontology Builder, which accurately captures the language of a business and dynamically configures its solution to each individual business without heavy training.
Noonean’s solution went through years of development and quality assurance testing with a Fortune 100 company before it was ready for action. This rigorous process produced a highly adaptable solution that facilitates knowledge sharing and cooperation, allows companies to analyze many different forms of information in real time, and provides a wide range of knowledge management tools in an accessible and easy-to-use platform. Other AI-driven knowledge management solutions have slower search engines, a lack of functionality, and centralized information processing mechanisms that constrain the knowledge companies can gather, interpret, and generate.
As the global economy becomes increasingly data-driven and competitive, knowledge is becoming more integral all the time. We’re thrilled to team up with Noonean, a company that’s providing the digital tools necessary to turn the massive amount of information out there into something that can actually be used: knowledge.