The Guru Advantage: AI in Every Step of the Knowledge Lifecycle

At Guru, we believe that the future of AI is a human-centric one. Here's why.
Table of Contents

At Guru, we believe that the future of AI is a human-centric one.

That’s why we’ve spent the last five years building towards a “human-in-the-loop,” AI-supported vision for knowledge management. Humans provide the critical ingredient of trust in the accuracy of information that AI cannot replicate. That’s why we’ve always believed it’s critical to have a human subject-matter expert involved in all of our AI workflows — both to handle the inconsistent quality that AI systems can produce, and to provide feedback to the AI system to improve accuracy on an ongoing basis.

So where can AI help humans with the heavy lifting of knowledge management? And what have we built in support of this vision?

For us, it all starts with creating a single source of truth for your company’s people and information. It is vital to the success of any organization, but it can be daunting. With so much information - much of which is out of date or duplicative in nature and living in so many different places - it can feel overwhelming.

But with AI, Guru makes it easy. In fact, Guru does the heavy lifting to get you set up quickly, ensuring information is readily accessible when and where it’s needed, all while improving in quality over time.

When this all comes together and people have trusted knowledge when and where they need it, you can meaningfully improve employee engagement and operational efficiency.

The information lifecycle
Information is dynamic. This is the lifecycle of information about your people, company, and product and how it gets captured, identified, organized, discovered, and improved over time.

Identification

With more applications, more info than ever, we’re all overwhelmed by information. Many will refer to this as “information overload.”

Amidst the mass haystacks of information that exist at a company, it can be difficult to find the needle of information you need “in the moment.”

Whether you’re setting up Guru for the first time, or ensuring company information is continuously available to your team, it’s important to identify the knowledge that matters and the knowledge that is noise. Our Slack integration enables you to capture and store information in the moment, as well as access it directly in Slack. We also have leveraged AI in this area as well, but more on that in a bit.

And with our new HRIS system integration, we can automatically add your employees into Guru and creates profiles for that, combining information about the employee with the knowledge they contribute to the company. Profiles allow your teammates to share more about themselves, their work, and how best to work with them. This starts to unlock your company’s expertise based on where an employee resides in the organization and what expertise they have.

How Guru’s AI helps

With our most recent investments into AI, we are creating new, automated ways to identify knowledge gaps and opportunities. With Trending Topics, you can connect Guru to your company’s Slack and automatically identify the topics that keep coming up.  These are likely things that need to be documented for your team, or repeat questions in Slack that cripple operational efficiency.

And if you simply have a question, we’re also leveraging AI to point you in the direction of who to ask. With Ask an Expert, you can ask a question and, based on the content of your question, Guru will determine who the best candidate is to answer that question by summarizing the expertise of your employees.

Less time spent trying to get a question answered. Less time trying to figure out which questions are going unanswered.

Creation

When it comes time to create knowledge in Guru, our editing experience is paramount. It’s why we’ve invested so much into our editor recently, and will continue to do so.

It’s also why we’ve built our Slack integration to not only enable you to search for content directly in Slack, but capture knowledge as it's shared in Slack.

Guru_Collage_Image-Library-32

How Guru’s AI helps

And with any piece of content, grammar, tone, and brevity can make or break engagement and comprehension. We are currently working on ways to incorporate generative AI solutions into Guru to improve the Admin/Author experience, but also the end-user experience. For customers that want more information, subscribe to the Guru Community Product Updates so you'll be the first to hear about updates on Guru's AI features. You can also join the group demo and learn more.

Discovery

What good is identifying a piece of information and documenting it if no one can actually find and use it? Every piece of knowledge is only as good as its usefulness and usage. So how do you make sure that once information is created it's actually discovered by employees that need it?

For us, that all starts with the discovery of the knowledge itself. It’s why we launched in 2014 as a browser plugin, and continued to build an “in you workflow” knowledge product, releasing our Slack integration the first day the Slack App Directory launched in 2015. At Guru, we believe the information you need to do your job should find you where you’re already working.

How Guru’s AI helps

When you log into the Guru application, you are met with your dashboard. Using AI, Guru personalizes the homepage with information that matters to each employee by understanding what their colleagues are reading and bubbling up knowledge that is most relevant to you and your role.

But not everything will be discoverable on the dashboard. As such, a great search experience is table stakes. Over the last few years, AI has drastically changed the accuracy of search. If you’ve tried using a keyword-based search experience, you’ve probably felt the pain of digging through pages of results and trying different words to get what you need. With natural language search, Guru can understand the intent behind what a user is searching, and gets smarter the more you use it.

Speaking of getting smarter over time, Guru keeps track of a user's reading journeys. As Cards are accessed in Guru, Guru will suggest the most related Card that the employee should need next, much like Amazon would “recommend” products based on purchase and view behavior.

And, while Guru is very much a company-wide product, few feel the pain of bad knowledge management, like customer-facing teams. For these teams, fast and accurate information to customers can make or break your customer satisfaction score. Connecting Guru to your customer service application, Guru learns what knowledge is relevant to what customer conversation. Guru will provide the answers in context and in real time and continuously improve the accuracy of recommendations as your team continues to use it.

Guru_Collage_Image-Library-45

Improvement

As knowledge gets stale, Guru will suggest the right expert to verify its accuracy by connecting your people with their topics of expertise. Employees can clearly see who is verifying what information, if it is trusted and up to date, as well as the last time it was verified.

And as you send out Announcements in Guru, leaders and admins have more visibility into how groups of people are engaging with content. See who is reading announcements, how people are feeling about announcements, and easily re-engage those that have missed a critical update.

How Guru’s AI helps

Keeping your knowledge base clean is critical to ensure employees find just the right information. It also builds trust in the knowledge itself. With Duplicate Detection, Guru analyzes all of your company knowledge to identify potential duplicate information, all while providing an easy way to clean up and archive duplicates.

Conclusion

To say there’s a lot of hype around AI right now would be an understatement.

For us, it comes as no surprise, as this is an investment we’ve been making for a long time.

Your company is constantly evolving and changing. So, too, is your information and your people. At Guru, we want to minimize the pain of managing that change. And we do it with an AI-driven source of truth that puts humans first.  

Guru is continuously investing in leveraging AI to help you create and scale your company's source of truth, all while driving internal efficiency and employee engagement.

We believe that AI/ML should never, and will never, take over completely. It might change how we think about creating or organizing knowledge, but the technology itself will never be the full solution. Instead, we are thinking about the AI as an assistant, another potential collaborator to work alongside the subject matter experts at an organization, improving both efficiency and effectiveness as they create the most engaging, digestible, and discoverable content possible.

And, while we’ve been at this for over five years, there is a lot more to come. We’ll continue to leverage the latest advancements in AI to deliver new and innovative value to our customers. Stay tuned for some exciting new product investments that leverage AI.


At Guru, we believe that the future of AI is a human-centric one.

That’s why we’ve spent the last five years building towards a “human-in-the-loop,” AI-supported vision for knowledge management. Humans provide the critical ingredient of trust in the accuracy of information that AI cannot replicate. That’s why we’ve always believed it’s critical to have a human subject-matter expert involved in all of our AI workflows — both to handle the inconsistent quality that AI systems can produce, and to provide feedback to the AI system to improve accuracy on an ongoing basis.

So where can AI help humans with the heavy lifting of knowledge management? And what have we built in support of this vision?

For us, it all starts with creating a single source of truth for your company’s people and information. It is vital to the success of any organization, but it can be daunting. With so much information - much of which is out of date or duplicative in nature and living in so many different places - it can feel overwhelming.

But with AI, Guru makes it easy. In fact, Guru does the heavy lifting to get you set up quickly, ensuring information is readily accessible when and where it’s needed, all while improving in quality over time.

When this all comes together and people have trusted knowledge when and where they need it, you can meaningfully improve employee engagement and operational efficiency.

The information lifecycle
Information is dynamic. This is the lifecycle of information about your people, company, and product and how it gets captured, identified, organized, discovered, and improved over time.

Identification

With more applications, more info than ever, we’re all overwhelmed by information. Many will refer to this as “information overload.”

Amidst the mass haystacks of information that exist at a company, it can be difficult to find the needle of information you need “in the moment.”

Whether you’re setting up Guru for the first time, or ensuring company information is continuously available to your team, it’s important to identify the knowledge that matters and the knowledge that is noise. Our Slack integration enables you to capture and store information in the moment, as well as access it directly in Slack. We also have leveraged AI in this area as well, but more on that in a bit.

And with our new HRIS system integration, we can automatically add your employees into Guru and creates profiles for that, combining information about the employee with the knowledge they contribute to the company. Profiles allow your teammates to share more about themselves, their work, and how best to work with them. This starts to unlock your company’s expertise based on where an employee resides in the organization and what expertise they have.

How Guru’s AI helps

With our most recent investments into AI, we are creating new, automated ways to identify knowledge gaps and opportunities. With Trending Topics, you can connect Guru to your company’s Slack and automatically identify the topics that keep coming up.  These are likely things that need to be documented for your team, or repeat questions in Slack that cripple operational efficiency.

And if you simply have a question, we’re also leveraging AI to point you in the direction of who to ask. With Ask an Expert, you can ask a question and, based on the content of your question, Guru will determine who the best candidate is to answer that question by summarizing the expertise of your employees.

Less time spent trying to get a question answered. Less time trying to figure out which questions are going unanswered.

Creation

When it comes time to create knowledge in Guru, our editing experience is paramount. It’s why we’ve invested so much into our editor recently, and will continue to do so.

It’s also why we’ve built our Slack integration to not only enable you to search for content directly in Slack, but capture knowledge as it's shared in Slack.

Guru_Collage_Image-Library-32

How Guru’s AI helps

And with any piece of content, grammar, tone, and brevity can make or break engagement and comprehension. We are currently working on ways to incorporate generative AI solutions into Guru to improve the Admin/Author experience, but also the end-user experience. For customers that want more information, subscribe to the Guru Community Product Updates so you'll be the first to hear about updates on Guru's AI features. You can also join the group demo and learn more.

Discovery

What good is identifying a piece of information and documenting it if no one can actually find and use it? Every piece of knowledge is only as good as its usefulness and usage. So how do you make sure that once information is created it's actually discovered by employees that need it?

For us, that all starts with the discovery of the knowledge itself. It’s why we launched in 2014 as a browser plugin, and continued to build an “in you workflow” knowledge product, releasing our Slack integration the first day the Slack App Directory launched in 2015. At Guru, we believe the information you need to do your job should find you where you’re already working.

How Guru’s AI helps

When you log into the Guru application, you are met with your dashboard. Using AI, Guru personalizes the homepage with information that matters to each employee by understanding what their colleagues are reading and bubbling up knowledge that is most relevant to you and your role.

But not everything will be discoverable on the dashboard. As such, a great search experience is table stakes. Over the last few years, AI has drastically changed the accuracy of search. If you’ve tried using a keyword-based search experience, you’ve probably felt the pain of digging through pages of results and trying different words to get what you need. With natural language search, Guru can understand the intent behind what a user is searching, and gets smarter the more you use it.

Speaking of getting smarter over time, Guru keeps track of a user's reading journeys. As Cards are accessed in Guru, Guru will suggest the most related Card that the employee should need next, much like Amazon would “recommend” products based on purchase and view behavior.

And, while Guru is very much a company-wide product, few feel the pain of bad knowledge management, like customer-facing teams. For these teams, fast and accurate information to customers can make or break your customer satisfaction score. Connecting Guru to your customer service application, Guru learns what knowledge is relevant to what customer conversation. Guru will provide the answers in context and in real time and continuously improve the accuracy of recommendations as your team continues to use it.

Guru_Collage_Image-Library-45

Improvement

As knowledge gets stale, Guru will suggest the right expert to verify its accuracy by connecting your people with their topics of expertise. Employees can clearly see who is verifying what information, if it is trusted and up to date, as well as the last time it was verified.

And as you send out Announcements in Guru, leaders and admins have more visibility into how groups of people are engaging with content. See who is reading announcements, how people are feeling about announcements, and easily re-engage those that have missed a critical update.

How Guru’s AI helps

Keeping your knowledge base clean is critical to ensure employees find just the right information. It also builds trust in the knowledge itself. With Duplicate Detection, Guru analyzes all of your company knowledge to identify potential duplicate information, all while providing an easy way to clean up and archive duplicates.

Conclusion

To say there’s a lot of hype around AI right now would be an understatement.

For us, it comes as no surprise, as this is an investment we’ve been making for a long time.

Your company is constantly evolving and changing. So, too, is your information and your people. At Guru, we want to minimize the pain of managing that change. And we do it with an AI-driven source of truth that puts humans first.  

Guru is continuously investing in leveraging AI to help you create and scale your company's source of truth, all while driving internal efficiency and employee engagement.

We believe that AI/ML should never, and will never, take over completely. It might change how we think about creating or organizing knowledge, but the technology itself will never be the full solution. Instead, we are thinking about the AI as an assistant, another potential collaborator to work alongside the subject matter experts at an organization, improving both efficiency and effectiveness as they create the most engaging, digestible, and discoverable content possible.

And, while we’ve been at this for over five years, there is a lot more to come. We’ll continue to leverage the latest advancements in AI to deliver new and innovative value to our customers. Stay tuned for some exciting new product investments that leverage AI.


Experience the power of the Guru platform firsthand – take our interactive product tour
Take a tour