US-based software company Pegasystems has announced the launch of Knowledge Buddy, a generative AI-based assistant to help organizations collate data spread across different sources.

Typically, information is scattered across several locations in an organization and this can make it tougher for employees and customers to access it. "The needed information is usually spread across documents, Wiki's or fileshares, which takes away precious minutes to sort through and find, so they [employees] can serve their customers or get their work done," explained Don Schuerman, CTO and Vice President of Product Strategy and Marketing, Pegasystems.

"Knowledge Buddy aims to simplify their day-to-day by distilling those docs into concise, contextual guidance and embedding that info directly into the customer service and operations portals in which they are already working," added Schuerman.

Knowledge Buddy-powered bots can also integrated with customer-facing websites or chatbots, allowing enterprises to enable their customers to acquire the required information without allocating resources for call centers. Knowledge Buddy can also allow organizations to configure the tool for different use cases, such as responding to marketing questions and integrating them into their internal or external channels.

"Knowledge Buddy has all the functions to turn these bots into serious enterprise-ready tools that many similar GPT-like services lack. This includes content auditability, security and other critical functions needed for large enterprises to deploy with confidence. It also plugs into an enterprise's own knowledge base to ensure that answers are accurate and always traceable back to source content and documents," Schuerman said.

The company is targeting its existing clients as potential customers of Knowledge Buddy. "We will be selling Knowledge Buddy to our existing customer base as it is a perfect complement for the mission-critical workflow applications our clients run on Pega," Schuerman said.

Amidst the growing interest in generative AI technology, several companies have recently launched assistants to help enterprises better organize the information available in their systems. Pega's Knowledge Buddy would be competing with Amazon Q and Microsoft Copilot, among several others.

Even as the number of generative AI-enabled assistants continues to grow, there are concerns regarding the accuracy and credibility of the technology. There have been reports of large language models (LLMs), which are used by GenAI tools, can be inaccurate, making it difficult for enterprises to rely on them. For instance, a Stanford University study says that the vast amount of data used by LLMs makes it difficult to track down the source of the information. Lack of transparency can limit the adoption of this kind of tools by organizations.