ClickUp has become a popular and well-funded productivity tool since its launch in 2017. And like any productivity tool, the ClickUp team was tempted by artificial intelligence. The company is now launching a tool called “ClickUp Knowledge Management,” which combines a new wiki-like editor with a new AI system that can also pull in data from sources like Google Drive, Dropbox, Confluence, and Figma. With this, the company hopes to build a tool that rivals other popular services like Notion and Atlassian's Confluence.
Zeb Evans, co-founder and CEO of ClickUp, said he believes AI is crucial for knowledge management, but to get the most out of it, companies need a central repository for all their knowledge.
Image credit: ClickUp
“In most companies, the actual knowledge is written in a specific place, like Confluence. [wiki] “Or Notion,” he says, “and there's a lot of knowledge stored in different places. Some startups like Glean are starting to connect that knowledge, but the real problem that exists today is that you can go to one tool and connect the dots, but you can't edit and manage those dots or do work around them on the same platform.”
It's a problem the ClickUp team itself has faced for years: while it was already possible to create documentation on the platform, the team decided to build a new product from scratch with a wiki at its core (more like Notion than Confluence), while also integrating a new AI system that could ingest data from all their other sources.
“You can build a wiki in ClickUp, but now you can connect it to all your other work tools and aggregate the knowledge in one central company brain, so to speak, and create a wiki based on all the context that's now available,” Evans says.
ClickUp claims the result is a system that brings together the best features of Notion, Confluence, and Glean to help users create documents quickly. For texts like project reports, team updates, summaries, and standups, the team has already created pre-built templates. Users can also use the system to automatically assign tasks, populate task data, and find duplicate tasks.
Of course, there is also a chatbot that can be used to query documents, but the nifty thing here is that ClickUp has built the system in a way that it not only cites all sources but also proactively asks the user if they want to generate relevant documents based on the query results.
Image credit: ClickUp
Evans stressed that the system takes into account employees' existing access permissions, so the AI only shows information that a particular user is authorized to interact with.
About two years ago, ClickUp acquired Slapdash, a universal search tool that unifies data from traditionally siloed SaaS apps. Since then, ClickUp has been working to re-architect the Slapdash architecture to work with AI, enabling ClickUp Knowledge Management to perform search augmentation generation (RAG), which is quickly becoming the industry standard for augmenting large language models (LLMs) with additional up-to-date information.
“This isn't just a surface level integration. A lot of these integrations use APIs to look up everything. Instead, we're actually working with all the databases from the connected applications and doing all sorts of cool things with it,” Evans said.
Going forward, ClickUp hopes to use this new system to further reduce the amount of work involved.
“A big part of what we're focusing on in our next release is to stop work about work. I hate work about work. I hate having to ask a bunch of questions and figure out where things are and what people are working on. If you do the math at any company right now how much time is spent writing stand-ups every day. 'Today I did this. Yesterday I did this.' It's ridiculous,” Evans said.