A new study published in Business Horizons explores how emerging artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities can enhance knowledge management within enterprises. It articulates AI’s potential role across fundamental dimensions including creating, storing, sharing, and applying knowledge. The authors advocate for a partnership between humans and AI to achieve “collaborative intelligence.”
Knowledge management refers to company-wide systems facilitating the productive use of expertise. As AI increasingly mimics abilities like visual perception and language understanding, it can take on knowledge work deemed unwieldy for employees to handle manually. This includes analyzing volumes of data to discover non-obvious insights or summarizing content to retrieve key information.
The study cites opportunities to use AI for predictive analytics, identifying unseen correlations in CRM data for example. AI can also efficiently classify, organize and search documented information and past cases to promote reuse. For sharing knowledge, AI can help connect expertise across siloed functions, providing a comprehensive perspective.
However, the authors argue generalized intelligence abilities like judgment, reflection and contextual interpretation remain distinctly human strengths. They propose the concept of “humaneAI symbiosis” where both sides enhance each other’s complementary capabilities. Scenarios include personal AI assistants augmenting individual productivity and interdisciplinary teams collaborating on algorithm design.
Practical implications focus on changes to people, infrastructure and processes needed to enable adoption. Fostering “AI literacy” among workers is key so they can be elevated by rather than displaced through automation. Companies also need the data volume, governance and technical integrations to scale trusted AI. Processes should be redesigned to support mutual learning between artificial and human capabilities.
The paper concludes that AI’s value relies on an effective partnership amplifying each side’s strengths. Combined with ethical foundations, this symbiotic approach aspires to unlock AI’s benefits through human-centered enhancement. The technology’s ultimate role should be enabling people to leverage knowledge in new ways not possible by either in isolation.
Original paper bibliographic details:
Jarrahi, Mohammad Hossein, David Askay, Ali Eshraghi, and Preston Smith. “Artificial intelligence and knowledge management: A partnership between human and AI.” Business Horizons 66, no. 1 (2023): 87-99.
