Since its inception in 2017, ClickUp has rapidly evolved into a sought-after productivity tool with substantial backing. In line with the trend among productivity platforms, ClickUp has embraced artificial intelligence. The company recently unveiled “ClickUp Knowledge Management,” a comprehensive solution that integrates a sophisticated wiki-like editor with an AI system capable of sourcing data from Google Drive, Dropbox, Confluence, Figma, and other platforms. This strategic move is designed to position ClickUp as a formidable contender against well-known services such as Notion and Atlassian’s Confluence.
According to ClickUp’s co-founder and CEO, Zeb Evans, leveraging AI is crucial for effective knowledge management. However, to maximize its potential, businesses require a centralized knowledge repository.
“In most organizations, your knowledge is scattered—some in platforms like Confluence or Notion, and other bits in various locations,” Evans remarked. “While startups like Glean are attempting to bridge these gaps, the core issue is the inability to edit, manage, and perform ‘work about work’ within a single platform.”
This fragmentation was a challenge ClickUp experienced firsthand. Although the platform already allowed document creation, the team opted to develop a new product from scratch. This new tool prioritizes a wiki-centric approach (resembling Notion more than Confluence) and integrates with an AI system that aggregates data from multiple sources.
“You can craft wikis within ClickUp, yet now we also connect to all your other work tools, consolidating knowledge into a single, centralized company brain,” Evans explained. “This allows you to draft wikis leveraging all contemporary contextual data.”
ClickUp asserts that its system combines the strengths of Notion, Confluence, and Glean, facilitating users to swiftly generate documents. Pre-designed templates are available for project reports, team updates, summaries, and standups. The AI system can also automatically assign tasks, populate task data, and identify duplicate tasks.
A notable feature is the integrated chatbot, which users can employ to search their documents. Uniquely, ClickUp’s system not only cites all sources but also offers to create pertinent documents based on query outcomes.
Evans highlighted that the system respects existing access permissions, ensuring that the AI only retrieves information accessible to the specific user.
About two years ago, ClickUp acquired Slapdash, a universal search tool that integrated data from typically siloed SaaS applications. ClickUp has since re-engineered the Slapdash framework to be compatible with AI. This development empowers ClickUp Knowledge Management to leverage retrieval augmented generation (RAG)—a method rapidly becoming the industry norm for enriching large language models (LLMs) with additional and current data.
“It’s more than a superficial integration; rather than merely searching through APIs, we ingest entire databases from connected applications, enabling us to perform sophisticated operations,” Evans elaborated.
Looking forward, ClickUp aims to utilize this new system to significantly minimize “work about work.”
“Our primary goal for the upcoming release is to eliminate redundant work. I deeply dislike the inefficiency of having to repeatedly ask questions, locate information, and track ongoing tasks. If you calculate the time spent on daily standups alone – summarizing what was done today and yesterday – it’s extraordinarily wasteful,” Evans stated.
