Machine Learning Helps Put Intelligence to Work for Your Business
The traditional search engine model is simple — you type in a few search terms, hit the “enter” key and pages of results suddenly begin to fill your screen. But for most of today’s enterprise users, this approach is neither efficient or comprehensive enough to gather the market research and competitive intelligence required to inform high-impact decisions that directly affect the bottom line.
Think about those pages of results the traditional search engine provides. If you are searching the enterprise’s own content, for example looking for market intelligence, you are probably using Microsoft SharePoint Search. SharePoint search is legendary for producing poor search results. As a provider of search technology to enterprises, we have heard your complaints about SharePoint search; we feel your pain.
That’s why more and more companies are turning to customizable knowledge platforms utilizing machine learning (machine learning) to automatically deliver the needed information—many times without even having to ask.
Machine learning-powered enterprise portals provide users with several advantages over traditional enterprise search engines like SharePoint search. Two very important ones are:
- Automatic discovery and summarization of insights from the content on the search results. For the first time in the twenty-five year history of search engines, machine learning gives us the ability to figure out what content is important in addition to being merely relevant. Now instead of slogging through a long list of hits on a search result you can just read the insights report the machine writes on the fly for you.
- Learns what you are interested in and sends it to you without you having to ask. With machine learning we can build a smart search assistant for each user that learns the user’s preferences for content. Then the smart search agent can monitor the content flow for the user and proactively recommend new material the user should be interested in. You don’t look for the content, the content comes and finds you.
Machine learning-powered enterprise portals don’t just provide technological benefits, they also provide benefits to the enterprise judging from our clients’ experiences using our SinglePoint machine learning powered knowledge management platform. For example, one Northern Light client:
- Saved $1 million per month as a result of users finding relevant prior and subscription research addressing their business needs.
- Cut time to market by six to nine months on their key product launches due to increased efficiency of their market research. As a result, they beat the competition to market and produced $2 billion in annual revenue gains.
- Saw the productivity rate of the market research staff triple.
- Discerned negative information about an acquisition the company was considering, saving them from a $100 million investment that might have cratered.
The future belongs to those that can make the best use of the machines. And a machine learning portal platform gives you the fastest access to the key insights to inform better business decisions — insights which could be difficult and time-consuming to find through conventional search engines. It also allows you to share this content throughout your organization, so every division (sales, marketing, research, etc.) can leverage it to their own specific needs. And, as already noted, the more you use machine learning to find what you need,, the more it will learn about the kind of content you need.
Michael Jordan once said, “Talent wins games. But teamwork and intelligence wins championships.” All of us at Northern Light certainly agree with this statement, because we’ve seen just how much our clients have benefited from obtaining the right insights and sharing them at just the right time: when the decisions are being made.