Employees spend as much as 8,8 hours every week searching for information they need to do their jobs, according to workforce efficiency research by Synergis. For many organisations, that equates to more than an entire working day lost every week to finding information that already exists somewhere within the business.
The challenge is becoming increasingly common as organisations generate growing volumes of training content, customer onboarding sessions, webinars, product demonstrations and internal knowledge-sharing recordings. Yet despite the explosion of content, many businesses continue to struggle to make that knowledge accessible when employees and customers need it most.
It is a challenge that inspired the creation of GenerEd, an AI-powered platform designed to help organisations unlock the value of knowledge already contained within their existing video libraries.
According to Thabang Chukura, founder and CEO of GenerEd and CEO of CMPNY, businesses are focusing on the wrong problem. “Most organisations don’t have a content problem. They have a discovery problem,” says Chukura.
“Businesses have spent years creating valuable knowledge assets. Every onboarding session, product demonstration, webinar and customer training workshop contains expertise that someone in the organisation will need again. The challenge is that much of this knowledge is buried inside recordings and systems that were never designed for easy search and retrieval.”
The issue has become more pronounced as video has emerged as the preferred format for knowledge transfer across many organisations. Teams record customer meetings, implementation workshops, training sessions and product walkthroughs every day, creating extensive knowledge libraries that often remain underutilised.
The consequences extend beyond simple inefficiency
When employees cannot find information quickly, support teams are forced to answer the same questions repeatedly, onboarding processes take longer, and customers become dependent on manual support channels for answers that may already exist elsewhere in the organisation. Valuable expertise remains trapped inside recordings instead of being available to the people who need it.
“What makes this challenge particularly interesting is that businesses often assume they need to create more content to solve it,” says Chukura.
“In reality, many organisations already possess the information their teams and customers are looking for. One of the biggest misconceptions is that existing content isn’t polished or professional enough to be useful. Businesses assume they need to invest in new training programmes, new documentation or new content creation projects when they often already have hours of valuable expertise sitting in recorded demonstrations, onboarding sessions and customer workshops. Some of the most effective training content comes from power users and product specialists doing their jobs, these are the people who understand the software best, answer customer questions every day and know where users typically get stuck. The value isn’t in producing another webinar or another training session, the value is in making the knowledge you already have accessible, searchable and usable.”
Businesses invest heavily in knowledge. Few invest enough in making it findable
As organisations face increasing pressure to improve productivity and scale operations without increasing headcount, knowledge accessibility is emerging as a strategic business issue rather than simply a training challenge.
Companies that can quickly surface institutional knowledge are often able to accelerate employee onboarding, improve product adoption, reduce repetitive support queries and free skilled employees to focus on more valuable work.
Chukura believes this also represents one of the most practical opportunities for artificial intelligence in the workplace.
“Much of the conversation around AI focuses on creating new content or replacing people,” he says. “I think one of the most valuable applications of AI is helping organisations unlock the knowledge they already have. Technology should help people find expertise faster, make better decisions and spend less time searching for information that already exists.”
This philosophy sits at the heart of GenerEd’s approach. The platform transforms existing training videos, webinars and screen recordings into structured, searchable learning experiences, allowing employees and customers to find specific answers without having to sit through hours of content or wait for support teams to respond.
Rather than requiring businesses to create entirely new content libraries, GenerEd focuses on helping organisations derive greater value from the knowledge assets they already own.
For Chukura, the businesses that will gain a competitive advantage over the next decade will not necessarily be those creating the most content. “They will be the organisations that can connect people with the right knowledge at the right time,” he says. “Knowledge only creates value when people can find it.”