Generative AI is lighting the way to Revolutionize Knowledge Transfer

In the digital age, organizations have unparalleled access to vast amounts of low-quality data, which holds the potential to significantly enhance collaboration and productivity. According to a report by MIT Sloan, up to 80 percent of this data is unstructured, encompassing documents, images, videos, audio, and social media content. This unstructured data also includes the invaluable "tribal knowledge" that resides in the minds of seasoned employees—knowledge encompassing best practices and procedural workarounds. However, the challenge lies in the fact that much of this data is often dispersed across various silos, making it difficult for employees to access the information they need efficiently.

Enter Generative AI (GenAI)—a technological advancement poised to revolutionize the way businesses manage and utilize their unstructured data. By leveraging GenAI, companies can streamline information, enhance knowledge-sharing capabilities, and drive significant productivity improvements. Here's how GenAI can break down data silos and benefit your workforce.

Enhancing the Onboarding Experience

The onboarding process is crucial for new employees as they assimilate into an organization. However, without a structured onboarding process, companies can experience a 16% reduction in productivity and a 14% increase in inefficiencies, according to a Harris poll conducted by CareerBuilder. While the official onboarding process may last a few days or weeks, new employees spend much of their first year acquiring knowledge about the organization's workflows, operational processes, and ongoing projects.

GenAI can make this process seamless by ingesting vast amounts of unstructured data across the organization and transforming these data points into actionable knowledge and insights. New employees can quickly gain a comprehensive understanding of the company’s financials, corporate filings, customer profiles, products, suppliers, and business process characteristics. They can also speed up their knowledge acquisition regarding external drivers that affect the business, such as weather, pricing, and local events. This is particularly beneficial for roles like Purchasing, where employees can access detailed information about suppliers, contract terms, and potential risks through an interactive digital walkthrough powered by the enterprise's digital twin.

Bridging the Skills Gap

As experienced professionals retire and fewer new professionals enter the workforce, many industries face a significant skills gap. This gap can impact all aspects of a business, from productivity to profitability. For instance, the manufacturing sector may face a shortage of planning skills in the next five years. GenAI platforms can help bridge this gap by gathering, cleansing, and organizing unstructured data and tribal knowledge from seasoned professionals.

Expert playbooks created by experienced employees can be digitized and passed down to new hires, ensuring continuity of knowledge. GenAI can also act as a copilot, guiding employees as they upskill, providing feedback through data-driven analyses, and driving continuous improvement. This not only preserves essential knowledge but also enhances the learning and development process for new and existing employees.

Enabling Access to Necessary Information

Investing in the digitization of tribal knowledge allows companies to provide their workforce with up-to-date, accurate insights necessary for making critical decisions. For example, consider a pharmaceutical company that underestimated the need for antibiotics due to a severe allergy season. Tribal knowledge about the situation existed within the sales teams, media reports, and weather forecasts but was not accessible to all relevant teams. GenAI can connect these dots, presenting a narrative that was previously missed and offering corrective actions to improve forecasting models by incorporating new drivers like temperature, humidity, and pollen levels.

Accelerating Knowledge Transfer

By leveraging GenAI, businesses can unlock the tribal knowledge siloed within their organization, transforming it into business insights that benefit employees at all stages of their careers. This facilitates a culture of continuous learning and growth across all roles and functions. Employees can access the information they need quickly and efficiently, enhancing their expertise and enabling them to make more informed decisions.

Conclusion

Generative AI presents a transformative opportunity for organizations to harness the power of their unstructured data and tribal knowledge. By breaking down data silos, enhancing the onboarding process, bridging the skills gap, and enabling easy access to necessary information, GenAI can significantly accelerate knowledge transfer and drive productivity improvements. Businesses that invest in GenAI technologies stand to benefit from a more knowledgeable, efficient, and adaptable workforce, paving the way for continued growth and success in the digital era.