How to Apply AI to Learning and Knowledge Management in the Workplace
Artificial intelligence is touching every aspect of how we engage with information (and much more) these days. Sana Labs is a business based on one particular application of that — how to apply AI to knowledge management in the workplace — recently announced funding as it finds some decent traction for its approach.
Sana Labs — which provides an AI-based platform to help people manage information at work, and subsequently to use that data as a resource for e-learning within the organization — closed a round of $34 million after seeing ARR grow seven-fold in the last year.
Menlo Ventures, the U.S. VC firm, is leading the round for Stockholm-based Sana, with EQT Ventures and a whopping 25 angels and founder/operator individuals also participating. This is a Series B that values Sana at $180 million post-money.There are a lot of knowledge management, enterprise learning and enterprise search products on the market today, but what Sana believes it has struck on uniquely is a platform that combines all three to work together: a knowledge management-meets-enterprise-search-meets-e-learning platform.
The crux of Sana is a platform and AI engine that connects to all of the different apps that an organization uses in the workplace — Salesforce, e-mail, Notion, GitHub, Slack, Trello, Asana and whatever else you might have to capture, source or store information and communicate with others.
All of the data across these apps is ingested and organized automatically by the Sana platform (AI magic), and maintained as the information inside those apps changes or expands. Then, users who want to access information go to Sana and request it in regular “human” language as you might do in a search engine. But alongside that, the data is used as the basis of e-learning modules for onboarding, training or professional development — modules created/conceived of either by people in the organization, or by Sana itself.
This wasn’t the original concept for Sana, which started with building just the back-end machine learning engine to organize information. But Joel Hellermark, Sana’s CEO and founder, said that early on the startup was getting requests for the front end — the part for people to easily query the information and use it to build training and learning materials — so they build that part, too. The learning can come in the form of quizzes and polls, interactive sessions and more, and when interactive Q&A is generated around webinars, like some kind of very resourceful, waste-not-want-not stew, the outcomes from all those also get fed into the knowledge base for future reference.
The mix of knowledge management with search and e-learning means that the platform sees very different engagement metrics, said Hellermark. “Sana is used continuously, which is very different from a typical e-learning platform,” he said. “We’re seeing weekly and daily active usage” from among the tens of thousands of employees from across the 100 or so businesses that are already using Sana, he added.
Join us at our Long Table Weds 18th Jan at 9:30am where Emil Sjölander and Samuel Björklund, Directors of Business Development at Sana Labs talk to us about applying AI to learning and knowledge management in the workplace.
