Why you can’t have AI without KM

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This is the conclusion of Gartner research, quoted in this Computer Weekly post entitled “IT staff will need to retrain when automation deskills their jobs”.

According to the post – 

Before automation and intelligent agents can really take off in the enterprise, IT operations teams will need to build knowledge management systems. 

Gartner said knowledge management is essential for a chatbot or virtual support agent (VSA) to provide answers to business consumers, but the response can only repeat scripted answers when based on existing data from a static knowledge base. It warned that intelligent agents without access to this rich source of knowledge cannot provide intelligent responses. 

As such, Gartner suggested that infrastructure and operations managers will need to establish or improve knowledge management initiatives. Gartner predicted that, by 2020, 99% of AI initiatives in IT service management will fail because of the lack of an established knowledge management foundation.

That’s quite a prediction, but really it makes sense. AI in the form of intelligent agents like IBMs Watson is really a delivery vehicle for knowledge, allowing contextual answers to be provided quickly and effectively, and it requires a robust source of knowledge in order to work. Without KM, AI will fail.