Knowledge Flow & Flourish

I recently co-presented at a KM conference about AI-powered knowledge and spoke on a panel focused on decision-making and innovation using knowledge. One of the last questions asked was, “where do you see KM in the next 5 years?”

My answer was that I didn’t see it changing very much. I know, that’s not an exciting answer. If you think about it, though, KM has slowly evolved in the past 20-30 years, and so many people don’t still don’t know what it is, so why would it change so quickly in 5 years now?

I also don’t see KM dying off in the next 5 years, either. As the moderator said, there have been many stories about KM being dead or being an old discipline. There are many other fundamental disciplines, like medicine, which have also not died off because there’s a rudimentary need.

I think this question is coming up now because there seems to be a fascination and a fear about AI. AI isn’t new. It’s been around for many, many years in some form or another in quiet ways to simplify life and personalize experiences for you in your consumer life. If you research it a bit, you’ll see first mention of it back in the 1950’s with Alan Turing and John McCarthy, and the first neural networks created in the 1960’s. Of course, it’s in the news now because of ChatGPT, a newer form of AI of the deep learning machine learning model branch that uses Large Language Models (LLMs). The is the newer world of Generative AI. If you’re unfamiliar to the topic, here’s a great article to get acquainted.

Will Generative AI change KM and the digital workplace in 5 years?

I remember hearing a futurist speak many years ago about how people usually expect technological innovations to change the world in 5 years, when in reality it comes to fruition in 25 years. Technology needs to become economically scalable for the average consumer, and this typically takes a longer period of time than we anticipate. How many years did we hear about ebooks before Amazon finally made the Kindle a household item? Enterprises often lag behind consumer experiences by several years, so I would expect to see our consumer products take off first. How may self-driving cars do you see on the road today, and how long have people been talking about and working on this? How long did it take for Siri and Alexa to take off? Is Siri helping you at work today?

GPT-3 is still very new, in beta stage, and has more evolutionary steps ahead of it to reach a safe and scalable consumer market. Once that happens, we can then consider it for our enterprises. Problems to be solved include AI hallucinations, required computing power, and the extremely large datasets to accurately train the AI.

For the enterprise, we’ve already seen this problem with enterprise search not performing at the level employees expect, like Google Search, because the enterprise will never have the amount of information to index as the internet.

When speaking of data in the enterprise setting, there’s also the challenge of security and employee privacy, which varies region by region. We need to figure out a way to honor security and privacy in a scalable way to be able to use the larger data sets that exist the enterprise to even hope to create a generative model based on employee knowledge.

What will we see for KM in the next 5 years?

As I said earlier, more basic forms of AI and machine learning have been around longer than Generative AI, and we’ve seen AI become basic and expected features of many enterprise systems, like ServiceNow, Coveo, Medallia, Starmind, and Microsoft Viva, for example. With these capabilities and availability to solve many business problems across the enterprise, we’ll continue to see individual organizations across an enterprise seeking out these solutions and attempting to implement them to solve their use cases.

We, as Knowledge Managers, have a unique opportunity here to offer our expertise, as our skillsets will be more widely needed within these groups. We have the opportunity to build a foundation of knowledge, information, and data to be used by these systems by bringing the people of the organization together to collect their knowledge in an organized way, honoring privacy and security, and creating the culture of sharing and reusing. Our skillsets will be more and more critical, as well as more commonplace and embedded into a variety of roles, much like has happened with project management and change management. Organizations will continue to need KM and perhaps more than ever, but we may see KM disguised in a variety of roles and job titles. We’ll need to remain creative to stay relevant.

My questions to you

So my question to you is, what are you doing today to position yourself, to teach others, and to prepare your organization for what’s to come in the next 5, 15, and 20 years?

Where do you see KM going in 5 years?