Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Intelligence, Blog Post, Digital Transformation, Enterprise Data, Enterprise Search, Knowledge Management, Natural Language Processing, Semantic Search, Squirro Insights

Improving Decision Intelligence with Knowledge Portals

Steven Grinberg

January 25, 2023

Thinking in Terms of Zettabytes

While the promise of big data was that it would be used to create business solutions, it continues to be a source of big and costly problems. Current forecasting has humanity creating and consuming over 180 zettabytes of data by 2025¹. To be clear, one zettabyte is equal to a billion terabytes, and 2025 is just two years away! While this entire universe of data doesn't apply solely to businesses, a huge portion does. The enterprise data sphere is expected to grow more than twice as fast as the consumer data sphere over the next five years.² A Forbes survey back in 2019 found that 95% of businesses struggle with managing their unstructured data³. Considering that the vast majority of data in existence, 80%-90%, is unstructured⁴ and not easy to compute as it's text or other non-numeric data, that means that almost all businesses are struggling with almost all of their data.

So, we have companies sitting on huge swaths of internal and external data; across various systems and silos; almost guaranteed to have insights relative to customers, partners, competition, investments, and supply chains. This causes employees a tremendous effort to gather, analyze and generate insights and understanding from the data. On average, organizations are using 976 individual applications (compared to 843 a year ago). Yet only 28% of these applications are integrated.⁵ As a result, teams often resort to timely research across each system and resource in an attempt to stitch together a picture that would help them make better business decisions. Besides being an incredibly inefficient process, this leads to critical points being missed, which results in opportunities being lost or risks being overlooked.

This can be avoided with a Knowledge Portal!

Understanding Knowledge Portals

In 2023, Knowledge Portals represent a new integrated suite of technologies to produce a central source for insights and understanding. Zach Wahl, President and CEO of Enterprise Knowledge, one of Squirro’s business partners, states that Knowledge Portals are not a single technology solution, but rather an integrated suite, typically comprised of a web front-end, content management solution, enterprise search, and knowledge graph (typically with a taxonomy/ontology management tool as well)⁶.

A Knowledge Portal provides unified access to all relevant data in the context of the business need and user intent. This becomes critical when, for example, a Sales Manager is planning their next sales call, and understanding the prospect's situation is key to closing the deal. Another example is mitigating risk exposure by ongoing monitoring for policy changes. Knowledge Portals can also be used with customers and partners, allowing them to meet their needs largely in a self-service manner.

Finding Insights With Knowledge Portals

Squirro provides a holistic approach to Knowledge Portals. With its simple 3-step approach, the Squirro Insight Engine platform does this by:

Connecting to and ingesting all internal, external, and premium data sources that are relevant to the business user.
Using the latest AI, machine learning (ML), knowledge graph (KG), and natural language processing techniques (NLP), it processes all of the data to find insights and recommendations in the context of the use case.
Presenting the findings via intuitive dashboards that can be accessed directly or embedded into the tools that the business user prefers.

Built into the Squirro Insight Engine, is a powerful Semantic Search solution that gives the user the ability to set up automatic searches and alerts. One way to receive these alerts is through the Communities feature, which allows end users to personalize their Squirro experience by following topics of interest (e.g., countries, sectors, companies, etc.) Users have easy control over how communities are visualized in their dashboards. This allows users to quickly digest news and information on topics of their choice.

Another way to receive alerts is by using the Signals feature, which focuses on specific triggers (e.g., management change, ESG, price increase, etc.). Squirro recognizes when relevant information is encountered that relates to these Signals and delivers the insights automatically to the user through alerts. Signals are predictions from machine learning or pattern matching models. Such models are not only provided by Squirro, they can also be easily created by Squirro's users and deployed via Squirro's no-code AI interface called AI studio.

Gather

Using any of the pre-built connectors or with custom connectors, data from any internal, external, and premium source is categorized and enriched.

Understand

Applying the latest AI techniques to the data to find relevant patterns, trends, and anomalies, which are used to prepare insights.

Act

With the insights ready, they are provided as intuitive visualizations, actionable recommendations, and even as a basis for automation.

Knowledge Portal Experiences from Squirro's Users

Here are some reviews from, amongst others, Gartner^™ Peer Insights^™ by users that experience the Squirro solution on a daily basis:

“Squirro excels in providing accurate insights at the proper time which really helped in increasing effectiveness while building process within the organization.”
Function: Research and Development, Company Size: 10B - 30B USD, IT Services Industry

“Amazing Results, Amazing Product, Amazing Organisation. Overall the delivery and design of Squirro into our organisation has been a real success. The challenge of getting Squirro into the existing infrastructure was smooth and with amazing support from colleagues at Squirro. The proactive approach of colleagues from Squirro and internally meant we delivered in record time with a super usage level."
Function: Project and Portfolio Management, Company Size: <50M USD, Industry: Banking

“Understanding the communications between your business and customer is very insightful in building your business. This is exactly what Squirro lets us do. Squirro provides insights on content which may otherwise be unstructured and confusing.”
Function: Data and Analytics, Company Size: 10B - 30B USD, Industry: IT Services Industry

“Before Squirro, it was all very manual. If we saw an insight in a certain area, we had to do a lot of clicks to get to the details. Now with Squirro, it's all there, and I can see it all in one dashboard. No more sifting through content that is not relevant. I can do things that would normally take multiple hours in several minutes.”
Function: Demand Generation, Company Size 500M - 1B USD, Industry: Chemicals

The Game-Changer: Composite AI

In collaboration with our partner, Semantic Web Company, a leading knowledge graph technology provider known as Poolparty, Squirro created a groundbreaking new Composite AI proposition for Knowledge Portals.. Squirro uses NLP and ML to classify the content on the word and sentence level according to the user's intent. PoolParty's Knowledge Graph technology, in parallel, contextualizes concepts from content and links them to other meaningful concepts and contents to extend the search result.

"Combining Squirro’s Insight Engine with the Semantic Web Company's knowledge graph technology is a game changer," said Dr. Dorian Selz, CEO, Squirro. "Staid, static, unused information is turned into a decisive input factor for better and more intelligent business decision making."

Just think about the possibilities for business users that have insights and recommendations automatically provided to them in the context of their current use case, based on their intent, in one place. No more need to hunt for information across an array of systems or trying to figure out the magic set of keywords that will produce the results being sought out. Alternatively, think about the paradigm shift this offers in supporting customers and partners by providing them with great self-service capabilities, greatly improving the quality and timeliness of their experience.

Next Steps for You

Would you like to know more about Knowledge Portals and the positive impact they can have on your business? Together with our partners at Enterprise Knowledge and PoolParty we will be organizing a panel discussion webinar on March 14th, 2023. Dr. Dorian Selz CEO and Co-Founder of Squirro, Andreas Blumauer, CEO and Co-Founder, the Semantic Web Company and Zach Wahl, President and CEO of Enterprise Knowledge will enter a discussion on the benefits and future of Knowledge Portals. They are happy to answer any questions you might have on the topic. If you would like to attend the webinar you can visit this page to register.