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.

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.

252 Million Walas

There are 195 countries in the world. How many more entrepreneurial innovation hotspots are out there, waiting to be tapped and awakened? In our high-tech, virtual world, all of the steps Pakistan has taken can be replicated virtually anywhere, regardless of your country's size, GDP, or location. Imagine the possibilities ...

The Long- and Short-Term Impacts of AI Technologies

A much less-known but arguably more critical tech law is Amara's Law, which states that we tend to overestimate the short-term impact of new technology while underestimating its long-term effects.

Agentic AI—So hot right now!

We are in the earliest stages of Agentic AI, and, much like the early days of RPA and GenAI, there's a lot of excitement but also a lot of uncertainty. While the potential benefits are enormous— streamlined operations, lower costs, fewer human errors—there are equally important concerns about job displacement, bias in AI decision making, and a lack of transparency in how these systems operate.

Trees, chains, and brains

Today's AI has many different flavors and architectures, along with massive amounts of memory and processing capacity. We could probably make better use of this computational power by looking at how we can improve the quality of our queries and, as a result, make better quality decisions.

Links conquer the universe

We can talk about these relationships as links. They're not expressed in blue underlined text, and you can't click on them. But they are the relationships among words that matter in any particular circumstance. They are the relationships that give words meaning. And as in life, those meanings are multiple and contextual. Without those relationships, there is no language.

On Chat AI and BS

So, I'm sticking with hallucinations for all of chat AI's statements, true or false. But that leaves us with a question: Why isn't there a word that perfectly expresses this situation? The answer is easy: LLMs are doing something genuinely new in our history. Our lack of a perfectly apt verb proves it.

Inefficient at the speed of light

While process mining started years ago as a mainly data-driven exercise, its stated goal is to be knowledge-driven. Given KM's multidisciplinary scope, we can play a major role in achieving that goal. Any process, no matter how simple, has the potential to reach across an entire business ecosystem, including all stakeholders. This seems like a perfect match for collaborative workflow, AI/ML, knowledge graphs, human sensemaking, and many of the other arrows in our KM quiver.

The rise and potential fall of the citizen developer

The citizen developer movement was heralded as a revolution. Like most revolutions, things have sometimes gone differently than planned. The logic is sound, empowering those who know the business best to build the tools and systems needed to do their job. Ah, if only things were that simple …

The end of tech glory days

The tech industry's glory days may be fading a little, but this is not a time for despair. It's an opportunity for renewal. By shifting to a needs-driven approach, the industry can ensure its relevance in a rapidly changing landscape.

What is Bharat and why should you care?

Knowledge should always be considered as accretive, not something that's "here today, gone tomorrow."

When AI’s eyes are smiling

As of now, GenAI doesn't learn from the knowledge it creates any more than a paint-mixing machine learns more about colors every time it's used.

Will AGI be intelligent?

AGI's holistic approach not only could enhance the accuracy and reliability of its decisions, but it would also mirror the interconnectedness of the real world.

Pushing the boundaries of knowledge curation

Knowledge democratization occurs in two directions, seemingly engaged in an endless tug of war: acquisition and dissemination.

The third place of knowledge management

The third place I alluded to goes far beyond mechanistic KM or curated knowledge and takes us into the actual world of tacit knowledge. Here, knowledge comes from and often remains as personal experience, impressions, and intuition; it's undocumented and often hidden and elusive.

Should we go back to paper-based KM?

The sheer volume of largely useless data we have accumulated across the years severely limits the ability of AI to work well, and it comes at a heavy environmental and financial cost.

The flip side of generative AI: Extractive AI

Extractive AI takes a more comprehensive and transparent approach to machine intelligence.