“On the Roadmap”

What is great about a cloud-native and event-driven platform like FormKiQ is that it’s not difficult to add new features, like an AI-Powered Knowledge Base creator.

In fact, it’s so simple that it can be tempting to start adding cool stuff whenever someone on the team (or a customer) thinks of it.

But there are two issues that can come from this, aside from the opportunity cost of working on a shiny new feature rather than other features on the roadmap:

• If we don’t have a customer ready to use it, how do we measure success?
• If we’re building it before it’s needed by someone, do we then maintain and update with each new version of FormKiQ?

So rather than build all the cool stuff, we put it on our roadmap. We may do some investigation, just to know what’s possible, but we won’t build it into FormKiQ until it’s needed.

Once a customer has a need for that feature, we prioritize it and make it happen. We then have a customer who can tell us if the feature works as needed, and we have a justification for putting the time in to maintain and improve the feature.

That makes sense to me. I think it’s a good way to build a technology platform.

But the downside is that we don’t get to demo all of the cool stuff we can do.

So what I want to do more often is showcase some of these “On the Roadmap” items, provide some detail on why we think it’s a hugely valuable feature, and give a brief description of how it will work within FormKiQ’s flexible document and information management platform.

AI-Powered Knowledge Bases

One feature that is mentioned often is AI-powered knowledge bases, which makes sense. Having a knowledge base where your users can ask the AI a question and receive an accurate, timely, and easy-to-understand answer has many benefits:

• Improves decision-making with instant access to accurate, comprehensive data
• Reduces operational costs by automating routine information retrieval tasks
• Supports remote work by providing easy access to information from anywhere
• Increases employee productivity by minimizing time spent searching for information
• Maintains consistency in answers and information provided across the organization
• Facilitates onboarding and training by centralizing and structuring knowledge
• Adapts and scales easily to growing organizational needs and data volume
• Enhances customer support with faster and more accurate responses
• Encourages innovation by enabling easier access to knowledge and insights

FormKiQ already has multiple methods for retrieving information from documents, including document metadata searches, file folder browsing, and full-text searches. The next step in information discovery is AI-powered knowledge discovery, where users can ask questions and receive accurate answers based on the information that exists within FormKiQ’s collection of documents.

Documents that are added to FormKiQ can have a knowledge management workflow triggered to add the document to one or more knowledge bases. (This can be done via rulesets or through other mechanisms.)

The knowledge management workflow can include additional steps, such as OCR for images or imaged documents, or for sensitive documents, a manual review of documents to ensure compliance or automated removal of personally identifiable information.

Once the document has been added to the knowledge base, the FormKiQ API would enable the user to chat, whether within the FormKiQ Console or in another application. Due to recent improvements from OpenAI and other Large Language Model (LLM) providers, a single conversation can continue indefinitely. This means that a user could have an ongoing conversation over days, months, or even years with the knowledge base AI on a specific topic.

This example uses OpenAI's API, but other alternatives are available.

But adding documents to a knowledge base and enabling a chat is not the only important requirement. The answers received from that knowledge base chat need to be correct.

The key to accuracy comes from implementing a knowledge lifecycle.

What is a Knowledge Lifecycle?

A knowledge lifecycle is a mechanism to ensure that the information from the knowledge base remains accurate over time. As the pace of change and innovation increases, the chance of information becoming obsolete and therefore incorrect also increases.

A knowledge base needs to update and prune the information contained within, to ensure that the answers being provided are correct.

FormKiQ will handle this using three main processes:

1. Versioning: when a document version is updated, any knowledge bases that include that document will receive a new version of the document, with the old version being removed
2. Document Review: when a document is added to a knowledge base, a review policy can be included, to notify a specified group of users that a document is in need of its periodic content review; this can be paired with an expiry date, so documents that are not reviewed within a specified timeframe will be removed from the knowledge base
3. Document Expiry: as with document review, documents added to the knowledge base can be provided with an expiry date; time-specific documents may need to be removed by a certain date, while other documents may require a new version or approved extension of the document’s validity period

By ensuring a knowledge lifecycle has been configured, FormKiQ can provide safeguards against obsolete information, while providing simple mechanisms to review and update the information and the lifecycle policies themselves.

A Knowledge Base that is available ANYWHERE

In addition to being cost effective, scalable, and flexible, the main advantage of FormKiQ’s AI-powered Knowledge Base is that it can be made available anywhere.

It’s possible to have an internal knowledge base accessible through various applications, while also providing an external knowledge base to customers or prospects via a website or mobile app.

Because FormKiQ is API-first, the creation, maintenance, and use of these knowledge bases can be done within FormKiQ’s console or through an integration with another application.

As well, by combining this knowledge base feature with FormKiQ’s other functionalities, such as integration with other sources of information, it’s possible to create knowledge bases that can reach across the entire organization to find answers, and be available on any device, from a web server to a mobile phone to a display on a refrigerator.

The FormKiQ Platform was designed from the start to provide endless possibilities, but I’d be lying if I said that asking your fridge about its extended warranty was on our original list of potential use cases.

From Blog Post to Deployment into Your AWS Account…

So it’s a cool feature, obviously. 🙂

But what is the next step? How does this go from a roadmap item to being a part of FormKiQ?

It’s all about finding a customer that’s ready to use it.

We would do a deep dive on your use case, the options we’ve found so far as part of our investigation, and if it sounds like the right course of action, we both commit to bringing the feature to life, with a clear timeline for development, beta release, and production deployment.

That’s all it takes to bring a new innovation to both FormKiQ and your organization or product.

If you think this makes sense for your use case, please reach out and let us know, and we can kick off the discussion.