How is AI transforming Personal Knowledge Management?

As AI startups are striving to transform the way businesses organize and access their knowledge base, individuals use plethoric tools that are lagging behind in comparison with B2B tools.

“What’s your Personal Knowledge Management Tool ?” is not a question the general public often hears.

Instead, we answer questions like these:

• “What app do you use to keep your notes?”
• “What’s your main recommendation for a first camera?”
• “How do you keep track of your personal projects?”

These questions are use-case driven, and their answers don’t vary that much. We tend to find the same usual suspects (for notes: Google Keep, Apple Notes, Evernote; for photos: Google Photos, Instagram; for recommendations: your inbox or Whatsapp).

But there’s not one single app/software to rule them all.

And with the advent of AI, there’s probably some room for improvement in the world of Personal Knowledge Management.

What’s Personal Knowledge Management?

Personal Knowledge Management (PKM) is an approach where individuals capture, organize, process, and share their own knowledge. We define knowledge as the fact of knowing something thanks to experiences, information, and association. PKM involves all the strategies and tools used to effectively manage and use this vast amount of information in personal and professional contexts. PKM’s goals are to enhance an individual’s learning, problem-solving, and decision-making by creating a structured and interconnected repository of insights, notes, reflections, and resources. When we talk about PKM, we usually refer to journaling, note-taking, information tagging, and continuous self-directed learning.

How can AI help you build your own Personal Knowledge Management? 

Beyond Search…

In the process of collecting your notes, posts, articles, and messages, machine learning algorithms can definitely help you navigate your knowledge. Several startups are already investigating this segment. Some of them are offering to record everything stored in your physical and digital systems (your laptop and smartphone) to facilitate the search for a piece of information. Built for professional use, these apps are doing an incredible job at collating meeting recaps, emails, or OneNote drafts you’ve saved locally to help you accomplish a task. You get to share Slack messages, notes, or documents that are enriched with your own input.

There’s one flaw though: the absence of interaction with your audiences. And this is where AI comes into play. It has promised us more effective ways to simply go beyond the intricacies of the search experience. It opened the door for more:

• Availability: AI can make targeted content available around the clock. What if it could do the same with Personal Knowledge Bases? Instead of waiting for people to share their knowledge when they feel like it, experiences, skills, and stories would be searchable at all times.
• Connection: Querying a database has become a common action in the world of web products. What if AI could allow us to query Personal Knowledge Base and get instant answers in a user-friendly way?
• Personalization: Artificial General Intelligence is booming, As Personal Knowledge Bases now have the tech to become smart and useful, it’s the time to bring personalization into the hands of individuals themselves.

AI has brought some capabilities that we couldn’t even dream of a few years ago. Why not enter this new realm?

Personal AI to Revolutionize Personal Knowledge Management

Personal AI is a category of AI that provides you with the tools to create, train, and grow your own AI. But, instead of relying on trillion data points, your Personal AI learns from your data: your skills, experiences, and memories. A personal AI is a true extension of your mind online, drawing from your memory bank to give life to your new writing project, exploring new business ideas from your professional background, and connecting you seamlessly with the people that will unlock your creativity.

Personal AIs intend to provide users with the perfect tools to store, retrieve, and create from personal knowledge bases. AI startups are either focusing on storing and retrieving or creating:

• Storing and retrieving: Many AI startups in B2C and B2B are facilitating the storage of all the knowledge you have compiled in your notes, emails, and messages. Once stored, you can retrieve them to help you save time when writing your emails, recap notes, or drafting a presentation for your pitch. Why would you need AI here? Simply because streamlining the workflow that categorizes your knowledge in a logical structure and determines the best way to be retrieved is a hard task that would require a lot of manual work. 
• Creating: Many Artificial General Intelligence companies — OpenAI, Inflection AI, or Midjourney — are currently dominating the industry. Whether you need help to write a book, craft a new diet, or kickstart a new business, ChatGPT and Pi will offer you the most relevant generic answers to your personalized questions, drawing from trillion data points… This is totally fine for most of your expectations unless you need answers that dive into specific data points that cater to you…

We know many startups are working on solutions to bring the best of both worlds together, which is exciting for the future of Personal AI. This market is as huge as the problem is complicated.

The future of Personal Knowledge Management is already here

The revolution of Personal Knowledge Management with AI is going on. By using the capabilities of a personal AI to transform the Knowledge Management industry, you get to indefinitely store your unique knowledge and turn it into a Second Brain explorable by your audience around the clock. That itself is the best use case for AI: unlocking your own creativity.