Enterprise AI can do so much more than just answer questions

With the right access to your team’s data, enterprise AI becomes a powerful tool for connectivity.

Ryan Klaus

Account Executive at Coda

Enterprise AI can do so much more than just answer questions

By Ryan Klaus

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AI · 8 min read
When the answering machine became a standard home appliance, it changed the way information moved through the world (yes, of course, plenty of technological developments changed how people understood the world around them, but this is a metaphor. Stay with me). Suddenly, people could share necessary information immediately but asynchronously, and they could have full confidence that it got where it needed to go. It seems to me that most people are using generative AI like it’s an answering machine they’ve attached to an old landline (the phone in this metaphor being the internet). And that makes sense! For many people, ChatGPT feels like the obvious next step in our relationship with the internet, like the answering machine was to the home phone. As the internet gets more massive and difficult to navigate, it’s nice to find something that pulls the information you need out of many distractions without wasting too much time. But simple information transmission falls way short of AI’s potential, especially within an enterprise context. AI, given the right framing, can do so much more than just answer your questions. With the right access to your data, enterprise AI becomes a powerful tool for connectivity—like a smartphone that touches on every element of your day instead of a single-purpose answering machine. Of course, your phone today collects messages and voicemails, but its connective apps also enable you to take care of necessities like banking or checking in for flights, pursue creative passions like photography or music, and even have a little fun with social media and games. Enterprise AI can be just as multi-faceted a help to your workflow. If that sounds too good to be true, let me prove it to you.

To get the most out of AI, you need the right tools.

 Put another way: to get the most out of cutting-edge technology, we need a cutting-edge platform. At Coda, that means building out a doc. Coda is an all-in-one collaboration platform that has pretty much all of your favorite productivity features in one space. A Coda doc combines the capabilities of everyday tools like word processors and spreadsheets with the collaborative power of project tracking and team communication apps like Slack, Jira, and Figma. Coda docs collect all the data, roadmaps, and comms tools an enterprise team needs, including integrations with over 500 other apps. Thus, they’re the perfect place to keep and track everyone’s work. All docs are immediately updated for everyone with access, so a team’s doc, or hub, becomes the single source of truth that everyone can trust. Next, we’ll need an AI that can keep up. ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) generally credited with popularizing AI assistance, simply doesn’t have access to the right information to be helpful for enterprise teams. Consumer AI solutions like ChatGPT work with data that is publicly available on the internet and are always a few years behind, which leads to nonfactual answers or hallucinations. Enterprise AI systems like Glean or Coda Brain, our in-house AI, have a similar LLM construction, but they’re designed to be used with sensitive data within a specific company’s context. Coda Brain has access to all of our data, and it has retrieval augmented generation (RAG) capabilities. RAG-based AI models are infinitely more likely to generate useful answers because they understand information boundaries. Coda Brain can search through all of Coda’s accumulated knowledge across all apps and files and generate an answer to any employee’s query. Unlike consumer AI, Coda Brain can answer in text, charts, or tables, but it also understands employee permissions around sensitive data and won’t pull from sources like someone else’s performance reviews or high-level communications. With Coda Brain, anyone on any team can access all the institutional knowledge they need and export answers as complete charts, tables, or sentences straight into a Coda doc. This tool's connective power is hard to overstate. Crucially, Coda Brain cites its sources, so we can always see where it pulled the information it uses in its answers. This makes Coda Brain so much more trustworthy than consumer AI, which is how it earned its nickname: our favorite know-it-all. Coda Brain also knows and respects an employee’s permissions when generating answers for them—meaning the employee handbook is infinitely searchable, but sensitive HR data never escapes containment.
So, please don’t hear me saying AI shouldn’t be an excellent answering machine. It should! But if that’s all it does, you’re missing out. Coda Brain goes much, much further than just collecting information.

Turn data into insights.

 Democratizing and organizing institutional knowledge is only the first step to using your company’s hard-won expertise. When Coda Brain has access to all your apps and data sources, it knows everything you have permission to know, even the things you didn’t know you needed to know. Coda Brain collects and presents information but can also create new connections for employees looking for inspiration. Just like any good know-it-all, Coda Brain can help generate new ideas and identify answers to more speculative questions. Teams can inquire about potential risks to project milestones based on their progress compared to the initial plans. My comms colleagues can pull data on the most effective ad campaigns from years before they started working at the company. The blog team can dig through customer feedback gathered by the customer success team and ask Coda Brain which issues they could address in a blog. Sales can ask Coda Brain to generate a list of the most likely opportunities for $100k or higher sales. And on and on. Coda Brain actually engages with the information you need, like an informed colleague helping you brainstorm.
And Coda Brain’s answers don’t have to be static. If I ask Coda Brain what customers think about a specific feature, I can get those results turned into a live table that is consistently updated as new feedback comes in. That way, Coda Brain generates continuous, growing insight well after it answers an initial query.

Turn insights into action.

 To expand on that last point, it’s Coda Brain’s integration into Coda docs that makes it such a powerful part of my workflow. With other tools, finding and collecting customer feedback, organizing it into an attractive and readable table, and sharing it with the team might take hours. And creating such a report is just the first step. Someone would have to be in charge of keeping the thing updated indefinitely. No one should live that way in the 21st century. With Coda Brain, I could ask for feedback organized into a table, click one button to add it to a doc, and trust that it would be updated as long as needed. Anything we source in Coda Brain is immediately actionable and shareable, which makes it as much a productivity catalyst as an organizational tool. Coda Brain turns multi-step processes into one-command queries many times throughout my day. Here’s another example: When using Coda Brain for meeting notes, I can pay better attention to the conversation. Coda Brain can extract complete call transcriptions and condense them into useful summaries stored in a shared team document. That’s at least three steps of admin work taken off our team’s plate. But then, Coda Brain can generate multiple personalized to-do lists based on the call and automatically insert them into the relevant team member’s doc. That’s two more steps knocked out instantly. Assignments are transparent, trustworthy, and immediate, so we can all move forward on tasks with complete confidence that nothing falls through the cracks. Coda Brain’s integration with docs means it can help move things along by generating the next step in our process—creating to-do lists, writing analyses, and creating roadmaps. And none of these are static additions to our workflow. They may start as one-time queries, but they’re living, continuously refreshing productivity aids. The best part about these integrations is their deepening connectivity for the whole organization. Unlike some turnkey enterprise AI solutions, Coda Brain answers are effortlessly shareable. One button adds an answer to a team hub, which means it’s automatically on everyone’s doc. Charts that Coda Brain generates can anchor reports to leadership or drive discussions with colleagues as soon as you think to query them.

Coda Brain knocks down company divides.

 So, have I convinced you? Answering machines were a great leap forward from the original landlines, and consumer AI is understandably exciting. But if you’re only using consumer AI chat bots to search the web or write first drafts of your emails, you’re missing out. Coda Brain makes sure all of our data is protected but accessible, it moves projects forward for everyone, and it connects everyone and everything on the team. Because of the way it’s impacted my workflow, I’m confident AI is only going to keep becoming more vital to enterprise work. Learn more about what Coda Brain could do for you and your team.
Learn more about Coda Brain

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