Clickup: Latest news from the world of technology

Since its launch in 2017, ClickUp has become a popular productivity tool, and like other productivity tools, the ClickUp team has heard the call for artificial intelligence. Today, ClickUp released ClickUp Knowledge Management, a new wiki-style editor that incorporates a new artificial intelligence system to pull data from Google Drive, Dropbox, Confluence, Pygma, and more. The goal is to create a tool that can compete with other popular services like Atlassian's Notion and Confluence.

Zeb Evans, co-founder and CEO of ClickUp, believes that artificial intelligence plays an important role in knowledge management, but to make the most of it, there needs to be a central repository for all information.

"In most organizations, actual knowledge is recorded in a specific place, such as a wiki or notepad. Initiatives like Glean are starting to connect the dotted information, but the real problem now is that you can use one tool to connect all those dots, but you can't organize, manage and use those dots on one platform," he says.

One for all

This was a problem the ClickUp team had been facing for years, and although they could already create documents on the platform, the team decided to create a new wiki-based product (closer to Notion than Confluence) and integrate it with a new artificial intelligence system that could pull data from all other sources. And that's when they made the decision. In ClickUp, you can not only create a wiki, but you can connect all the other tools you work with and integrate the information into a single "brain" of the company.

The result is a system that combines the best features of Notion, Confluence and Glean, allowing users to create documents quickly. The team created ready-made templates for documents such as project reports, team updates, resumes, and standups, as well as the ability to automatically assign tasks, enter task data, and search for recurring tasks. Of course, people can also use chatbots to request documents. But most importantly, they've created a system that not only cites all sources, but also proactively asks users if they need to create documents based on their requests.

Existing employee rights

Evans emphasized that the system takes into account existing employee access rights, so the AI can only find information that is available to the user. About two years ago, ClickUp acquired Slapdash, a universal search tool that aggregates data from previously disparate SaaS applications. ClickUp has since redesigned Slapdash's architecture to work with AI, allowing ClickUp Knowledge Management to perform advanced search (RAG), which has become the industry standard for adding relevant information to large-scale language models (LLMs).

"The biggest part of integration is not just surface integration, like using an API to search everything, but bringing in the entire database from connected applications and doing a lot of interesting things with it," says Evans.

The future

Looking to the future, ClickUp plans to use the new system to further reduce task load. "The main goal of the next release is to eliminate task-related work. I hate asking a lot of questions, I hate figuring out where things are, I hate figuring out what everyone is doing. I want you to count how many hours a day you spend writing work plans in any company right now. I wrote it today, I wrote it yesterday. It's crazy," Evans says.