Forget AI Magic, Embrace the Knowledge Graph

From Enforcer to Curator: Forget nagging colleagues about tagging documents. Your new role is to curate a living, breathing knowledge ecosystem You ensure data quality, prune irrelevant connections, and foster meaningful new ones. You move from policing metadata to cultivating a dynamic resource that grows more intelligent with use.

From Responder to Strategic Enabler: You are no longer just responding to information requests. You are the one building and managing the «brain» for sophisticated AI applications You enable the intelligent chatbots that can answer complex, contextual questions. You power the expertise-location systems that dynamically map skills to people. You are the reason AI delivers insight instead of nonsense.

The Stakes Have Never Been Higher

Let me be crystal clear: This is not a new topic. But for some reason, it is one that continues to be ignored by both technology vendors and organizational leaders and to their great peril.

The knowledge, skills, and experience of knowledge managers are not just “nice to have” for this endeavor—they are the absolute prerequisite for success. If knowledge managers are not in control of knowledge graphs, then nothing is going to work. The data foundations will be flawed, the semantic models will be incoherent, and the connections will be meaningless.

The promise of AI will simply result in an expensive, automated mess—a “garbage in, gospel out” scenario that will destroy trust and set KM back a decade. You don’t want that. You don’t want to be sidelined. And surely you want the job security and higher pay that comes from being indispensable.

So, stop fighting the wrong battle. The goal isn’t to resist AI; it’s to own its core. Embrace the knowledge graph. Argue your case not from a position of fear, but from one of unique capability. You are the only ones in the organization who understand both the content and the context. You are the architects of meaning. It’s time to build.

Note: This column was inspired by a project undertaken by my organization, Deep Analysis, for a major oil and gas company, and just to be clear, no living pigs are harmed in the launching process.