Knowledge Graphs as a source of trust for LLM-powered enterprise question answering

Generative AI provides an innovative and exciting way to manage knowledge and data at any scale; for small projects, at the enterprise level, and even at a world wide web scale. It is tempting to think that Generative AI has made other knowledge-based technologies obsolete; that anything we wanted to do with knowledge-based systems, knowledge graphs or even expert systems can instead be done with Generative AI. Our position is counter to that conclusion. Our practical experience on implementing enterprise question answering systems using Generative AI has shown that Knowledge Graphs support this infrastructure in multiple ways: they provide a formal framework to evaluate the validity of a query generated by an LLM, serve as a foundation for explaining results, and offer access to governed and trusted data. In this position paper, we share our experience, present industry needs, and outline the opportunities for future research contributions.