Northern Light applies OpenAI’s large language models to answer users’ questions based on content within their enterprise market and competitive intelligence knowledge management system
Northern Light announced a generative AI “question answering” capability within Northern Light’s SinglePoint knowledge management platform for market research and competitive intelligence.
Northern Light’s question-answering capability is built on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo large language model. Last month, OpenAI, an AI research and deployment company and the developer of ChatGPT exposed a developer API for GPT-3.5 Turbo, making it practical for commercial developers of enterprise-class applications.
Northern Light’s implementation of generative AI in SinglePoint addresses a critical requirement for AI-based research systems that synthesise published content: source citations. When a user asks SinglePoint a direct question, the answer is automatically generated and presented in narrative form, with live links to the source material from which the answer is derived so users can click through to the source documents of greatest interest to explore a given answer in more detail. Sources may be from any content collection within the client organisation’s SinglePoint portal, including business news, original primary or licensed secondary market research, thought leaders’ commentary, technology white papers, conference abstracts, or industry and government databases.
“In generative AI, last month seems like a decade ago, given how quickly user interest and the technology are evolving,” Northern Light CEO C. David Seuss said. “We are working with OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 Turbo model, which has the merits of being both fast and impressively accurate when using text from the high-quality market and competitive intelligence content of the type that Northern Light provides to its clients. OpenAI has made switching to another model supported by the API easy and quick, so if GPT-4 or some future model becomes a better option, we will switch to it.”
Seuss continued, “Our observation is the search experience is significantly enhanced by a generative AI answer to the user’s question. We expect that users will change their search behaviour by asking a question when embarking on a new market research or competitive intelligence project. For example, a user might ask what new products a competitor has launched, what strategies are being used by the competitor, or how customers make purchase decisions in a particular product market rather than just entering search terms and reviewing lists of documents.”
Northern Light pioneered the practical use of AI and machine learning technology in the enterprise-class markets and competitive intelligence knowledge management systems in 2017. SinglePoint’s AI-based capabilities include automated “Insights Reports” – machine-generated summaries of search results – as well as referrals to documents addressing topics of known interest to a user based on their search history (“Recommended Reading List”), and links to topically similar documents contained in a search result based on an AI-driven semantic analysis (“More Like This”).
Northern Light plans to begin delivering its generative AI question-answering capability to SinglePoint clients within 90 days.
