Automation versus Human Curation - to choose is to lose, or not?
It’s sometimes hard to follow the ever changing world of knowledge management. Definitely with the arrival of automation and AI in the past year, it seems a human touch is less and less needed. However, it doesn’t have to come to a head-to-head.
On the contrary, the combination of automated systems and human curation makes for the most optimal results. Let’s hear from Charles how you can use both human-curation and automation to empower your organization's knowledge workers.
With automation, comes the benefit of speed and accuracy
By using automation or AI, you can scale your internal knowledge processes quickly and efficiently. Your team will be able to find the right information and create the right content much faster. Think about the creation of sales proposals, consultancy reports or even company presentations. Automation allows for accurate and fast results and doesn’t put any more strain on the person in charge or his fellow team members. Don’t mind the abundance in documents and if they are widespread over a million drives, your AI assistant will get the right one to you when needed.
With human curation, you get to keep control over your assets
Let’s be honest, human curation of all your documents is not the most cost effective or speedy way to go. However, it does give you to control to decide for yourself what can or should be used within your vast knowledge stores. It can also bring a sense of security, knowing that the decision to publish a set of documents was checked by a real human. Is something under NDA or not? Is the information outdated? Was the content created effective the last it was used?
It's hard to scale human curation effectively
If you have a lot of users looking for, using, and creating content, it will take a long time to get everything curated. In addition, as the size of your company grows, so does the amount of time that goes into curating the new information. It’s a never ending job that can become tedious very fast for the one in charge.
Also, it is difficult for one person to know something about every given topic within a company. They will never have all relevant information at hand that gives enough information to make a decision on the usefulness of a document. So bring in the AI, automation it is?
Automation isn't perfect, but it's getting better all the time
Automated curation certainly isn’t perfect, but it's getting better all the time. As AI technology improves, it will learn to apply this power to content curation. It will become more sophisticated and able to handle more nuanced tasks like identifying individual user preferences or recommending documents based on quality for a specific purpose.
But that’s not the whole story of course. Us humans are still needed to keep a hand on the controls and make sure that we're not just relying on machines. Not because we don’t trust them, but because we still have a better insight in human nature. When creating (and curating) content, subconsciously we take things into account like culture, gender, religion and even the current weather. It’s not about human oversight, it’s about the perfect combination between humans and machines.
Wherever you are now with knowledge management, you can go further by taking advantage of both human & automated curation
Automation is great for speed and scale, while human curation is better for quality and customer experience. If you’re stressing about either one, you might need a tool that lets you combine both.
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