ClickUp, which debuted in 2017, has grown to be a well-liked and well-funded productivity tool. The ClickUp crew has also heard the seductive call of artificial intelligence, just as with other productivity products. Combining a new wiki-like editor with a new AI system able to also pull in data from Google Drive, Dropbox, Confluence, Figma, and other sources, the business has now introduced what it calls “ClickUp Knowledge Management.” With that, the business wants to create a platform that can compete with other well-known services, such as Confluence by Atlassian and Notion.
CEO Zeb Evans, a co-founder of ClickUp, told me he thinks knowledge management depends on artificial intelligence, but companies must have a single repository for all that information if they want to maximise it.
“Most businesses store their actual knowledge in a specific location, such as a Confluence [wiki] or Notion,” he explained. “And then you possess a lot of information across many spheres,” he said. Some firms such as Glean are starting to link this information, but the main issue currently exists is that while you can use a single tool to connect the dots, you cannot effectively update and manage these connections, nor can you perform tasks related to the job on the same platform.” 
Over the years, the ClickUp crew itself has encountered the same issue. Though you could already author documents on the platform, the team decided to create a new product from the ground up, starting with a wiki at its core (and one that feels more like Notion than Confluence), but then also integrating with a new AI system that can pull in data from all of these other 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 the context that’s available to you today,” Evans said.
ClickUp contends that this solution combines the best of Notion, Confluence, and Glean to let users rapidly generate documents. The team created prebuilt templates for tasks such as project reports, team updates, summaries, and stand-ups. The technology also lets users automatically allocate chores, fill task data, and identify duplicate work.
People may also naturally use a chatbot to search their documentation. ClickUp has designed the system so that it not only identifies all its sources but also actively inquires with the user about whether it should produce pertinent documents based on the query outcomes.
Evans emphasized that the technology considers an employee’s current access rights, so the AI will only highlight data that is accessible to a specific user for use.
ClickUp bought Slapdash, a universal search platform combining information from often fragmented SaaS applications, around two years ago. Since then, ClickUp has worked on reconstructing the Slapdash architecture to enable artificial intelligence. This now allows ClickUp Knowledge Management to carry retrieval augmented generation (RAG), which has rapidly become the industry standard for supplementing large language models (LLMs) with extra and current information.
“It’s not just a surface-level connection, as many of these products utilize an API to search everything.” Rather, Evans continued, we are really consuming all of your databases from your linked apps, so we can do a lot of interesting work with them.
Looking forward, ClickUp wants to utilise this new approach to even more drastically cut the volume of labour required.
“Our major focus for this upcoming edition is eliminating work-related stress.” I detest working for a living. Having to constantly ask questions, find out where things are located, and determine what people are working on bothers me. If you calculate the amount of time every organization wastes simply getting up each day, Today, this is what I did. Yesterday, this is what I did. Evans laughed. “It’s crazy.”
