Knowledge management is in for a big overhaul with the advent of AI technologies. In the last blog, how AI could meet the knowledge requirements was studied. As part of the series, in the current blog, an attempt is made to understand how Intelligent Content Management Systems will behave.

Content management is one of the critical pieces of a KM ecosystem. AI has a lot to offer in the way content is managed in Organisations. With the proper application of AI-based technologies, we are looking at an intelligent, self-aware content management system, which can essentially perform all the activities required to manage the content of an Organisation. It can be more efficient and effective and do activities that are humanly impossible.

Let us analyze key aspects of an AI-driven content management system

• Content Collation, Knowledge Audit: A key activity in content management is to collate relevant content, tag it and make it available for employees to use. This can also include knowledge auditing and closing the gaps. Normally this is a manual activity and in many Organisations, KM team focuses on ensuring that the knowledge base is well structured, with not much focus on closing knowledge gaps. By leveraging AI we can develop content management systems that are aware of what it has and does not have in terms of information, knowledge and data. It will have the ability to assess the knowledge gaps that are there, by doing self-auditing. It would also have the ability to tag documents automatically with taxonomy and metadata.
• Awareness About Usage Behaviour: Modern applications allow us to know who downloaded, which asset, how much time the user spent on different pages, where all he or she clicked. This data can be used to create insight on user’s behaviour and better serve the user. While this can be done manually, an automated system can do this much faster and also has the ability to provide customized services at the individual level by being sensitive to individual differences in information and knowledge need. Over time, based on learning, the system will be aware of what the different users would want from the repository, what employees with similar roles are searching for, what a new employee generally searches. It will keep learning on whether it was able to provide the content employees are looking for and if not try to collate the content and share it later.
• Predicting and Pushing Content: Most of the work done by employees in Organisations gets managed through applications. Applications are extensively used to assign work, track the status, give suggestions, coordinate with other team members etc. A huge amount of data gets created which can help us know, what each every employee is working on, are they on target or may get delayed, the complexity of the work done by them, whether anyone has done this work before. These kinds of data and information can be used to predict the kind of support an employee may need in terms of knowledge or information and push the same through email or other channels. This feature is something that is impossible manually.
• Generating Abstracts and Building Documents: We are in an era where machines can create their own content. Not long ago there was an article in Forbes about how AI can write amazing content. There are algorithms that can be used to create an abstract from a document or group of documents. One need not have to glance through large documents, but based on requirements allow the tool to share consolidated content. There are also software applications that can build documents in the form of market reports, proposal documents by pulling content from different documents. If a salesperson wants a proposal document, these tools can create it in a matter of minutes and share it. Recently Microsoft announced AI in power points, which can suggest the right icons to use, content that can go with the topic of interest, help a presenter practice the presentation.

From the comparison shown below we can see that as a result of applying AI, Organisations can derive huge benefits from the content management system, which is manually impossible.

A functional view of how an AI-driven content management system will work with employees and support them.

A typical content management system may be used only by less than 15% of the employees. It is because we expect employees to come to the system to find relevant content. This results in most of the critical knowledge not getting reused. With AI, this will soon become a bad dream.