Customer learning software company Thought Industries Inc. today launched Lens, an artificial intelligence product that checks a business’ product knowledge for conflicts before it reaches customers.
Thought Industries Academy, its existing course software, joins Lens in a new Customer Knowledge AI Platform.
The launch is seeking to take on the problem of knowledge silos. At many companies, customer and product knowledge lives wherever the team that produced it happens to work. Because AI tools now answer queries from customers from many of those separate sources, the same question can draw two different answers. Customers who get stuck between those answers adopt less of the product, the company said.
Lens connects to the places where business already keeps that material, the help center and product documentation among them. None of it has to move. On top sits what the company calls a governed knowledge layer, where agents inside Lens look for sources that disagree. The business sets the trust rules in plain language. When a product changes, the agents work to bring the affected guidance up to date.
Customers can get answers from Lens inside the product itself or through whatever AI assistant they prefer. The agents can also complete workflows. Logged questions show businesses which parts of a product keep tripping customers up.
Checking for conflicts between sources is what Thought Industries says existing tools lack. It sees Model Context Protocol connectors and the AI built into individual systems as mostly finding information. Chief Executive Irana Wasti said search and retrieval alone do not settle which source is right.
“When every agent is working from a different version of product knowledge, they can simply spread wrong answers faster,” she said. Customers who do get what they need “use more, buy more and stay longer,” according to Wasti.
The Linux Foundation, which runs training and certification programs for open-source software, plans to use Lens. Clyde Seepersad, senior vice president and general manager of education there, said the information its users search for often sits in systems beyond the courseware. The foundation keeps control over what gets surfaced, he said, and the questions coming in should give it “a much clearer picture of what customers need.”
Thought Industries is also changing how it describes its own business. Customer and product leaders are now the stated audience, and the pitch centers on turning scattered knowledge into a competitive advantage. Academy remains the piece that runs courses, learning paths and certifications, with AI recommending what a learner should take next.
Lens is available now in beta. Thought Industries is a private equity-backed company that has sold customer training software since 2013, and Luminate Capital Partners made a strategic growth investment in it in 2019.