Humans in Loops, Flows, and Dialogues

I think we are entering—possibly are already in—the era of humans in the dialogue with AI, discovering our values, getting more specific about them, and altering their applications based on the specifics of our world and situation.If the old KM was about building, organizing, sharing, and leveraging knowledge, the new KM might also be about mastering the dialogue: using AI not just to retrieve our answers, but to help us finally articulate the right questions.

A Call to Arms for Information Professionals

The AI world is advancing at a breathtaking pace with staggering sums of money, but it's built on unstable and illusoryfoundations. Our role is not to stand on the sidelines shouting warnings. It is to quietly, strategically, and indispensablybecome the people they cannot do without—the ones who ensure the entire system can actually function.

If We’re Truly in the Knowledge Age, Why Is Higher Education in Crisis?

Clearly, both traditional college degrees and specialized trade certifications are too narrow and fragmented to fully prepare students for what lies ahead. For now, a hybrid system is emerging that balances the arts and the sciences, augmented by one or more areas of specialization. KM's multidisciplinary nature gives us a distinct advantage in helping to make this transformation happen. The trick is knowing when to work inside and when to work outside the formal system.

Is Your Agentic AI Built on Sand or Bedrock?

Data and knowledge do not, anymore, exist as separate components. They are rapidly merging into a single architecture. As KM'ers, we can no longer leave data management solely up to the admins. Rather, we need to work closely with them on creating data architectures that are contextually and semantically rich enough to be reliably actionable for use by autonomous and semi-autonomous agents.

Why Embodied Knowledge Matters and Why AI Doesn't Understand

A machine-learning large language model doesn't have tacit knowledge. It consists of potential knowledge.

Forget AI Magic, Embrace the Knowledge Graph

The advances in AI and information management are not our enemies; they are our most powerful allies. When wielded by skilled KM professionals, these technologies work. When deployed without our input, they fail miserably, delivering incorrect, misleading, or plain nonsensical results.

Me and Mr. Tibbs

Enter Mr. Tibbs, the personal AI agent I imagine having in a year or so. If Mr. Tibbs went through that filing cabinet, it would learn plenty. Of course, I'm imagining Mr. Tibbs version 4.0, which is not only smarter, but also magically has the physical mechanisms required to go through a stack of folders.

Human Evolution in a Digital World

Human senses play a critical role in group interaction and collaboration, a key aspect of KM.

The Productivity Paradox: Why Your AI Investment Won’t Pay Off Without KM

There should be one clear group of winners emerging from the coming disillusionment: knowledge and information managers. The AI reckoning will force a long-overdue epiphany upon executive leadership: The value of technology is not inherent; it is contingent on the quality of the information fuel you feed it.

Conversation With an AI About Knowledge

This type of dialogue with a non-conscious machine will become commonplace. This could profoundly change education, expertise, and knowledge itself. It doesn't relieve us of thinking, but helps us to think more clearly and originally to confront challenges to our ideas.

A System of Systems … With a Twist

Many long-standing technologies such as swarm intelligence, biomimicry, neural networks, and the like are now being stitched together. Think of what could happen if each of those technologies interacted not only with each other but also with the environment at large, its living and artificial elements, as an integrated whole.

Will AI Ever Play in Peoria? The Enterprise Reality Check

The tech industry has a long history of overpromising and underdelivering, but AI has taken this to new heights. We're bombarded daily with headlines about AI writing novels, diagnosing diseases, and even replacing entire job functions. Yet, when you peel back the layers, you find a landscape littered with half-baked implementations, inflated claims, and solutions that work only in the most controlled environments.

Life in the Virtual Trenches

Immersive Learning - The applications in education are obvious. But you can build use cases for almost any domain.

The 12 Temptations of Knowledge

The intuitive appeal of regarding knowledge as a concept lies in a tempting belief that what's true is true. But knowledge is contextual in every possible way.

What Problem Is AI Actually Trying to Solve?

Too often, AI is deployed reactively—thrown at symptoms rather than root causes—leading to wasted resources, disillusionment, and even deeper inefficiencies.

Beyond the Unknown Unknowns

The concept of unknown unknowns provides us with some cover for not anticipating changes that are impossible to predict.

Scarcity Versus Abundance

The Knowledge Age we've been talking about for so long has finally arrived. The potential for scarcity is real, but so is the potential for overflowing abundance. Let's bring every tool in our KM arsenal to bear, along with our decades of experience, and help make it happen.

Let’s Get Real About the Impact of AI on Jobs

History tells us that industrial revolutions ultimately do create more jobs, but that the transition period is long and highly turbulent. Thus, when we see resistance in the workplace to AI and automation in general, we should acknowledge that the resistance and fear are well-grounded.

Knowledge Through Motion

Although large bodies of research have identified mind-body-environment connections, much of this research remains untapped and underutilized.

The Dethroning of Deduction

AI's favoring of induction over deduction is the root of its power, for it lets it deal with the specifics that bedevil the application of broad major premises.