Since its launch in 2017, ClickUp has change into a preferred and well-funded productiveness instrument. And like all productiveness instruments, the ClickUp staff has additionally heard the siren track of synthetic intelligence. The corporate has now launched what it calls “ClickUp Knowledge Management,” which mixes a brand new wiki-like editor with a brand new AI system that may additionally herald knowledge from Google Drive, Dropbox, Confluence, Figma and different sources. With that, the corporate goals to construct a instrument that may rival different in style providers like Notion and Atlassian’s Confluence.
ClickUp co-founder and CEO Zeb Evans instructed me that he believes AI is important for data administration, however to get probably the most out of that, companies want a central repository for all of that data.
“In the majority of companies, you have your actual knowledge, that’s written in a certain place like a Confluence [wiki] or Notion,” he stated. “And then you have a lot of knowledge in different places. There are some startups like Glean that are starting to connect the dots between that, but the real problem that exists now is that you can go to one tool and kind of connect the dots, but you can’t actually edit and manage those dots and do the work about the work on that same platform.”
That’s an issue the ClickUp staff itself confronted through the years. And whilst you might already creator paperwork on the platform, the staff determined to construct a brand new product from the bottom up that begins with a wiki at its core (and one which feels extra like Notion than Confluence) however then additionally integrates with a brand new AI system that may pull in knowledge from all of those different sources.
“You can build wikis in ClickUp, but we also now connect to all of your other work tools and aggregate the knowledge in one central company brain, so to speak, where you can write wikis based on all of the context that’s available to you today,” Evans stated.
The outcome, ClickUp argues, is a system that brings collectively one of the best of Notion, Confluence and Glean to permit customers to rapidly create paperwork. For texts like challenge stories, staff updates, summaries and standups, the staff created prebuilt templates. Customers may make the most of the system to routinely assign duties, populate activity knowledge and discover duplicate duties.
There’s, after all, additionally a chatbot that folks can use to question their paperwork. What’s nifty right here, although, is that ClickUp has constructed the system in a method that not solely cites all of its sources but in addition proactively asks the person if it ought to create related paperwork for them primarily based on the question outcomes.
Evans confused that the system takes an worker’s present entry permissions into consideration, so the AI will solely floor data {that a} given person is allowed to work with.
About two years in the past, ClickUp acquired Slapdash, a common search instrument that introduced collectively knowledge from what are historically siloed SaaS apps. Since then, ClickUp labored on rebuilding the Slapdash structure in order that it might work with AI. This now allows the ClickUp Information Administration to carry out retrieval augmented technology (RAG) — which has rapidly change into the trade customary for augmenting massive language fashions (LLMs) with extra and up-to-date data.
“It’s not a surface-level integration, where with a lot of these things, they use an API to go search all the things. Instead, we are actually digesting all of your databases from your connected applications so we can do a lot of cool stuff with that,” Evans stated.
Wanting forward, ClickUp goals to make use of this new system to scale back the quantity of labor about work much more.
“Our big thing for this next release is killing work about work. I hate work about work. I hate having to go ask a bunch of questions and figure out where things are and figure out what people are working on. Every company right now, if you calculate how much time is spent on just writing a standup every single day. ‘This is what I did today. This is what I did yesterday.’ It’s insane,” stated Evans.
