What is an AI Knowledge Base?

What is a knowledge base? What is AI? You will get as many answers as the number of people that you ask—even today!

Pundits were creating their own definitions and vendors were creating their own—arguably self-serving—spin as well, adding to market confusion. The truth of the matter is Knowledge base management and AI have been on a convergence course for a long time. And they need each other for mutual success in creating business value.

AI helps knowledge management in many ways. Here are some examples:

• Intent inference: The ML aspect of AI can help better understand what the customer is saying and what their intent is.
• Search: Generative AI can help generate answers—finding the answer that might be buried in a long document or compile it from multiple documents.
• Process guidance: Case-based reasoning can help execute both static and dynamic processes—the former being standard procedures and the latter being dynamic, real-time, next-best-step guidance during a conversation with a customer, for example.
• Knowledge automation: Generative AI can help accelerate the entire knowledge management process—discover, create, curate, publish, and optimize.

AI can transform business, but it also poses significant risks. In the case of Generative AI, they are hallucination, loss of trust in answers and in the technology itself, knowledge fragmentation, and compliance risks. A modern knowledge base system implemented as a hub—like the eGain AI Knowledge Hub—helps safely operationalize Generative AI by offering:

• Trusted Knowledge Base Management: KM can ensure that correct data and content are used to feed and train gen AI. Without this foundation, the initiative is likely to fail with disastrous consequences for the brand.
• Controls and governance: A modern knowledge base hub comes with controls to determine which queries to process with gen AI and which ones not to. The knowledge manager can control its “creativity,” as the situation warrants and configure additional accuracy checks.
• Closed-loop analytics: Knowledge base management provides insights and actionable recommendations on the use, effectiveness, and improvement of gen AI actions.
• Process orchestration: Gen AI is an exciting building block of knowledge base management, but not the only one. A knowledge hub also includes other AI technologies like reasoning and machine learning, plus critical components such as content management and conversational guidance. The hub orchestrates these capabilities to deliver effective journeys to agents, business, and customers.

For AI and knowledge bases to be the most impactful for the business, one cannot exist without the other. Implemented together, they simply become “AI knowledge bases”, with AI being the accelerator, knowledge being the output, and business transformation—at the functional and/or the enterprise level—being the benefit, which can be measured by KPIs such as Net Promoter Score, reduction in employee churn, cost reduction, employee productivity, contact center performance, and much more!

A new approach orchestrates AI knowledge bases from one hub to maximize and accelerate business value. The eGain AI Knowledge Hub exemplifies it, unifying next-gen content management, workflows, profiled content access, intent inference, search methods, generated instant answers, guided help, analytics, pre-built connectors to existing systems, and much more, powered by generative AI, conversational AI, and ML, in one single hub. Trusted knowledge is then contextualized, personalized, and published across touchpoints and users. Trust turbocharges user adoption and user adoption, in turn, turbocharges business value from the knowledge base.

AI knowledge bases can be leveraged in any industry. Common examples include:

Manufacturing: Problem diagnosis and resolution, product recommendation, pause-and-resume in long-lived troubleshooting

Banking and financial services: Product recommendation and consumer onboarding, financial counseling, procedures such as account opening, cross-sell and upsell, financial wellness coaching

P&C and health insurance: Product recommendation, eligibility determination, procedures such as claims processing, cross-sell and up-sell

Communications service providers: Plan recommendation, product recommendation, billing, troubleshooting

And much more.

Leading utility accelerated knowledge deployment 5X and boosted search success 6X with generative AI, powered by the eGain AI Knowledge Base.

Multinational Financial Services Provider improved First Contact Resolution (FCR) by 36% and slashed training time by 40% with eGain AI knowledge base.

Hypergrowth SaaS company improved contact center agent confidence by 60% and self-service adoption by 30%, while improving their gross margin three years in a row, thanks in part to customer service automation, powered by eGain AI knowledge base.

Large federal government agency experienced “phenomenal success” with the eGain Knowledge Hub. The hub empowers 25 million users and 128,000 contact center agents and other customer service personnel with consistent and accurate information and AI-guided customer service processes, compliant with regulations. Thanks in part to eGain, their position in the Forrester CX Index improved by 33% in 2021 over 2020!

After implementing the eGain Knowledge Hub, a mammoth federal government agency deflected up to 70% of incoming calls to AI-powered virtual assistance, reduced case handling time by 25%, and improved form-filling with granular knowledge assistance within forms. No wonder these powerful capabilities elevated their agent engagement to 92% versus their industry benchmark of 67%.

Premier health insurance firm reduced agent training time for handling complex health insurance queries by 33% even as its agents—over 2,000 of them—had to go remote overnight due to COVID lockdowns. In fact, the eGain AI knowledge base helped them meet all 30 of their goals, including slashing Average Handle Time and increasing First Contact Resolution, while vaulting them to a top 5 rank in Forrester’s CX Index benchmark evaluation.

Have you ever bought a car without a test drive or by pushing a toy car? The answer for most people is a no. The same principle applies to acquiring AI knowledge base solutions. Why risk it with a toy sand box or without a production pilot? Yet, few vendors—if any—want to put their skin in the game by offering a no-charge, expert-assisted, production pilot. The notable exception is eGain and our Innovation in 30 days program is just that—a no-charge, no-commitment production pilot with guidance from an expert for success.

Many of our enterprise clients have taken advantage of this approach and adopted our AI knowledge base solution risk-free. Learn more about it here. Want to talk to us first? Contact us now!

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