Our experienced speakers cut through the hype and share how new technologies like AI can be used for business benefit and competitive advantage. This facilitated panel discussion describes what technologies are available and how companies can use them. It explains how businesses can put artificial intelligence to work now, in the real world. AI will improve products and processes and make decisions better-informed/important but largely invisible tasks. AI technologies won't replace human workers but augment their capabilities, with smart machines working alongside smart people. AI can automate structured and repetitive work, provide extensive analysis of data through machine learning (“analytics on steroids”), and engage with customers and employees via chatbots and intelligent agents. Get insights and ideas on how to experiment with these technologies, consider the ethics of these technologies,  and use them to revitalize knowledge management in your organization.

For years Synaptica has advised our clients that there are just some things they can’t do with their taxonomies once they migrate them to the SharePoint Term Store. Restrictions within SharePoint prevent much of the richness of thesauri and non-hierarchical relationships from being expressed. Finally, a breakthrough solution has been developed through a joint venture effort between Synaptica and Search Explained. Clarke and Molnar briefly review the common pain points experienced in SharePoint taxonomy implementations, before demonstrating innovative new user experiences that transcend these pain points to deliver a taxonomy-rich search, browse and tagging experience within SharePoint.

Few organizations realize that 80% of their most critical data cannot be handled by business applications because it is unstructured (contracts, emails, customer correspondence …). But the missing piece in this puzzle actually exists: natural language processing (NLP), a form of AI that extracts meaning from documents thanks to organizational and linguistic knowledge. The outcome is a genuinely knowledgeable application: one that delivers effective search and analytics, accelerates business processes, and enables professionals to focus on the highest added-value parts of their mission. Discover why leading organizations have made NLP a priority and how they are using it to build knowledgeable applications for search, analytics, and process automation.

Like many large organizations, Deloitte grapples with providing a search experience meeting the very diverse needs of users and has long sought to provide a personalized experience. Romero and Jalagam share insight on the business drivers for the firm’s personalization efforts as well as cover details on the technical approach to personalize two aspects of our search experience—relevancy logic and search suggestions. They address how they embedded machine learning in the process. Join them for valuable lessons learned and how personalization has positively impacted their users’ experience.

Siri and Alexa are cool, but they aren’t powerful enough for sophisticated daily enterprise uses. In this interactive session, Nelson introduces you to Saga, a Natural Language Understanding Framework— a scalable, cost-efficient framework, the next-generation solution for many business applications, from smart question/answer systems to compliance monitoring, contract analysis, and document understanding. Machine learning and knowledge graph ready, Saga is an easy-to-use NLU system for extracting valuable insights from unstructured data.

Search is often considered to be a magical “black box.” Like air or water, we don’t recognize it when it works. But complaints start as soon as we don’t get the results we expect. Concentrating on search in SharePoint and Office 365, but with general applicability, Molnar explains how search works behind the scenes. She demonstrates how content becomes searchable, how data becomes a refining filter, how data can be displayed on the user interface, how to define various “search verticals” and specific search applications, and why is it important to add good metadata on the content and empower all users to do the same. Learn mythbusting from one of the best.

Desai and Singh share their experience of using data analytics and expert knowledge systems to build a skill-based enterprise search experience, including the role of Ingestor to fetch data from independent sources to transform into a common format (in a MySQL DB). They dive into business issues solved by combining data from various data sources into search. They explore engagement metrics and detailed data analytics for a new search UX, using machine learning to improve ranking and expert ranking systems to further improve relevancy.

Search is not static. You can’t “set it and forget it.” In this session, we look at successful implementations of search, starting off with Cedric Ulmer’s case study of a project in a large aerospace group. Gross and Vogt look at enterprise search in combination with chat bots and NLP, discussing risk-free approach to implementing bot applications.

Stop by the Enterprise Solutions Showcase after a full day of stimulating conference sessions to mix and mingle with other conference attendees, speakers, and our conference sponsors.