Unlocking Knowledge: AI is here and AI is ready for your industry

This blog explores how, despite its limitations, AI can add significant business value by streamlining operations and improving employee efficiency. We will highlight the mindset needed to leverage AI effectively, helping your organization enhance work quality, cut operational costs, and boost profitability — ultimately gaining a competitive edge in the market.

For decades, we’ve trusted computers to be deterministic and completely accurate. AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), don’t fit into this paradigm. AI is probabilistic, sometimes unpredictable, and at times inaccurate. That makes people nervous, and understandably so. But here’s the truth: AI doesn’t need to be perfect to be useful. In fact, it’s already useful in your industry. The challenge isn’t in the technology — it’s in how we use it.

We built Adam, our internal knowledge base assistant, as a proof of concept to address the challenges in AI adoption. You can learn more about Adam in its introduction blog.

While building Adam, we realized that extracting the true value in AI requires two important things:

1. Building trust
2. Setting the right expectations

Trust takes time — and the correct user interface design. Here are two examples of our recommended design considerations to build trust with AI applications:

1. Share the source

AI tools should consistently cite the sources they use to generate responses. This allows users to verify the information when necessary, instead of being forced to accept it at face value or start their own research from the ground up. When accuracy is important, expecting users to do the fact-checking themselves defeats the purpose of using an AI tool, limiting it’s usefulness.

For example, every answer Adam provides includes links to the original sources. This helps users verify the information quickly, without needing to dig through multiple tabs or switch contexts unnecessarily. Adam summarizes complex information to save time, but never hides the origin. The goal is speed and accuracy, not one at the cost of the other.

2. Augmentation vs. Automation

AI tools should aim to be smart assistants. An AI can guess what filters to apply, what content to highlight, or what related query might help. However, the user should always be in control and have the ability to override the solution, adjust the parameters, and resume the process.

For example, Adam has a recommendations engine which highlights how the knowledge base can be improved. However, it never automatically makes the changes to the data itself and instead relies on the subject matter expert (SME) to make sure the recommendation is correct. In this way, Adam becomes useful to highlight issues to the SME, augmenting their ability without undermining their decision making.

A good rule of thumb that a product team can keep in mind is that when AI fails to work as intended, the user should not feel their time was wasted or that they are stuck or blocked with the task until the problem with AI is fixed. Instead, the experience should allow them to naturally continue their task without AI.

In essence, AI tools must provide accurate citations and preserve user control in order to be both effective and respectful of existing user workflows. This approach helps build trust in AI applications allowing users to naturally integrate AI into their everyday workflow.

One of the most important jobs of any product team working with AI is managing how users think about the tool. AI isn’t magic. It’s not always right. And it’s not a substitute for expertise or judgment.

That’s why in Adam, we emphasize that AI can and will hallucinate. We mention this information clearly on all screens where AI interaction occurs. This is not a matter of legal policy but setting the correct expectation of the capabilities of AI. Rather than pretending the tool is smarter than it is, we’re clear about its limitations front and center. Adam is only supposed to help reduce the context switching time and give a useful starting point.

This change in the design philosophy allows us to set the user expectation that AI is quick, but not final. With this philosophy, we enable the user to modify their behavior to find the balanced workflow where AI supports rather than replaces their human expertise.

In essence, the responsibility of setting the correct expectation of the usage of AI lies with the team designing and building the AI tools. By properly and clearly being upfront about its limitations we help users build an appropriate mental model of the tool. This empowers users to engage with the AI more effectively over time: knowing when to lean on it, when to double-check, and when to take over entirely.

AI is not a silver bullet, but it is a powerful tool — if we adapt our behavior and built applications thoughtfully.

Therefore, AI is ready for your industry today, but only with the correct mindset. Rather than expecting full automation, organizations should view AI as a tool to accelerate tasks and enhance human capabilities. While it is not perfect, its usefulness is already clear, and the efficiency gains it offers have become too significant to overlook. In a competitive landscape, adopting AI is not just advantageous, it has become essential now.

This is just one example of interesting problems we solve for our clients everyday. Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more behind-the-scenes insights into the problems we’ve faced — and the solutions we’ve delivered. Stay tuned.

At SMS, we see the rise of artificial intelligence as an opportunity to re-imagine long-standing organizational challenges and develop innovative, streamlined solutions. To that end, we’ve made significant investments in building deep AI expertise — both to enhance our internal capabilities and to better support our clients.

With nearly 50 years of experience, SMS is a trusted provider of professional services, delivering high-impact solutions across both public and private sectors. We operate in highly secure, compliance-driven environments that demand government-grade standards, while also surpassing the agility, efficiency, and speed expected from leading private sector service providers.

If you’re looking to use AI to boost efficiency, cut costs, and maintain top standards in quality, security, and compliance, let’s connect. Our team of experts is ready to help identify opportunities tailored to your unique needs.