Pegasystems Inc., a leader in enterprise artificial intelligence software, announced a new AI-powered virtual assistant called Pega GenAI Knowledge Buddy on Thursday. The goal is to provide smoother experiences for both employees and customers by enabling faster access to information scattered across a company’s knowledge bases.
The launch comes as more companies explore how to leverage generative AI — technology that can create original text, images, video or audio — to improve operations. But widespread enterprise adoption has been slow due to concerns around content quality, security and transparency. Pega believes Knowledge Buddy solves these issues with built-in auditing features and controls.
Pega’s chief product officer, Kerim Akgonul, said Knowledge Buddy is designed specifically for the complex needs of large organizations. He contrasted it with chatbots aimed at consumers that lack robust governance capabilities.
“Organizations would like to use AI to improve experiences and increase efficiency, but many existing solutions aren’t meant for intricate inner workings and complex needs of large organizations,” Mr. Akgonul said.
With Pega’s new assistant, employees and customers can have natural language conversations to get answers synthesized from documents stored in knowledge management systems. Users can also leverage Knowledge Buddy’s generative capabilities to create new content like emails or reports based on existing materials.
The virtual assistant maintains transparency by providing citations for answers so users can validate accuracy. On the governance side, knowledge base administrators have visibility into usage analytics and control over user access rights. They can also easily update the knowledge sources that fuel Knowledge Buddy.
Pega GenAI Knowledge Buddy will be available as part of the Pega Infinity software suite and can integrate with Pega customer service tools or a company’s own websites and chatbots. Potential applications span industries and functions, from creating personalized marketing campaigns to answering customer service inquiries more quickly.
Knowledge Buddy leverages an underlying Pega architecture called Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to minimize AI hallucination risk by restricting language models to answers based on a client’s existing content. It runs on Pega Cloud for ease of deployment without additional infrastructure costs associated with maintaining AI models.
Pega said Knowledge Buddy will be available in the first half of 2024 as part of the Pega Infinity 24.1 release. Pricing details have not yet been announced.