Beyond knowledge management: leveraging AI for quick, quality insights at Colgate-Palmolive

Market Logic Team

Market Logic recently joined our partners Colgate-Palmolive at MRMW EU 2022 to share about how our innovative partnership is moving us beyond knowledge management and into the world of AI-enhanced search and knowledge synthesis.

Christian Niederaurer, Global Head of Insights at Colgate-Palmolive, and Olaf Lenzmann, Chief Innovation and Product Officer at Market Logic Software, shared an in-depth keynote address about how Market Logic and Colgate-Palmolive are experimenting with AI to fast-track answers and free-up time, so insights teams can make a greater impact across their organizations.

Knowledge management is only the first step towards knowledge democratization

Christian kicked off the presentation by explaining how knowledge management is only the first step towards knowledge democratization. He talked about what he calls “the more-more-less dilemma,” a dilemma many organizations face as they navigate exponential growth in knowledge and data combined with an increasing urgency for fewer insights professionals to produce quick insights.

The more-more-less dilemma is made up of three parts:

More information than ever before.
More questions than ever before, as data-driven decision making becomes increasingly important.
Less insights people to help make sense of the growing data and questions.

Even if you may have all your information in one, searchable place—a critical foundation for an insights-driven organization—there’s still the problem of making sense of it all. Christian said sometimes we may lose sight of the ultimate goal to produce better, faster innovative insights because we’re so busy trying to organize the tsunami of information coming at us.

“We’re even more busy now trying to capture all the insights, making sure they’re stored in the right way and so on, we forget along the way that we’re doing all this work only to generate more and better insights. Knowledge management is definitely a necessary first starting point, but it’s not really the final solution… We want to democratize information, but we have to do it in a way that’s digestible and people find what they’re looking for”
Christian Niederauer, Global Head of Insights, Colgate-Palmolive

How can we take steps to move beyond knowledge management and towards full knowledge democratization?

“There’s a lot of knowledge management systems out there that can capture the knowledge and insights, but it’s not quite trivial to get that information in the way you need it, at the level of abstraction you need it, and to get it fast… We believe that AI has reached a stage of maturity that can really make significant contributions to solve that problem.”
Olaf Lenzmann, Chief Innovation & Product Officer, Market Logic Software

Leveraging AI for quick answers to real-world questions about the oral care customer journey

About a year ago, Olaf explained, Market Logic and Colgate set out to explore how AI could help pull faster insights from the massive knowledge asset Colgate manages in their insights platform “DIG.”

“Our square objective was to take all the lovely information that’s already in DIG, all the reports from the consumer journeys, and throw them at the AI without any further manual intervention. Then, [we] try to answer questions, real-world questions that people would ask Christian’s team.”
Olaf Lenzmann, Chief Innovation & Product Officer, Market Logic Software

The team kept two overarching goals in mind:

Use AI to enable business users who have questions to ask them in a simple, natural way and get quick answers that make sense to them, answers they can consume, interact with, and that lead them to more highly relevant information.
Relieve insights teams so they can focus on high-value, high-level, strategic insights work. The goal is to remove much of the time-consuming, manual search-and-compile work insights professionals and business users must do with a system that’s limited to only a knowledge repository.

Drawing on unstructured (text) report content, Market Logic took 1000+ pages of high-quality research PPTs on the oral care consumer journey already available in Colgate’s insights platform “DIG.” The team applied Large-Language-Models, which now have a good grasp and understanding of how human language works, to extract, classify, surface, and summarize content, and evaluate the result against a reference set of questions.

For example, ask the question, “How often do people use whitening products? And is that different by country or demographics?” and after just a few seconds, you’ll receive a synthesized response from the AI.

Here’s an example of a result:

The AI quickly inspects all the content in the insights system, trawls through all the findings in documents, finds the most relevant-to-your-question bits, and summarizes it into an easy-to-consume answer.

The AI then recommends additional reading, but it’s not a recommendation for reading entire documents that may or may not have a relevant answer. The AI recommends sections of documents that are particularly relevant to your question and summarizes those sections, so you quickly know why you may want to read more.

“It’s not like pulling text blocks from documents. The AI is summarizing the most relevant information to your question into an easy-to-consume answer… we strongly believe this kind of interaction will save experts a lot of time because it’s such a natural interaction business users can use and accept.”
Olaf Lenzmann, Chief Innovation & Product Officer, Market Logic Software

Helping insights professionals transcend the limits of knowledge management

Instead of a knowledge management system that spits out a list of non-contextualized documents your workforce has to spend hours combing through for relevant information, Market Logic Insights platforms leverage AI to cut to the chase and produce quickly contextualized answers—answers you can use to influence your daily decisions or understand exactly where you need to learn more.

Watch Christian and Olaf’s full keynote address here.