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.

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.

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.

Pushing the boundaries of knowledge curation

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

The flip side of generative AI: Extractive AI

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

Was the web good for knowledge management?

So, yes, the web enables everyone with an internet connection and the freedom to use it to contribute to our new, global, contentious, and contradictory knowledge space. But I did not foresee the dark side because of an optimism born of privilege.

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 five ages of data

Perhaps this latest phase in the history of data will bring us to accept inexplicable complexity as a property of the world. We could view this as pure chaos, but thanks to having lived through the past four ages in rapid succession, we might instead recognize that chaos as being rich with endless mysteries we will never uncover completely.

Get your game on: KM skills needed for reliable use of LLMs

There is no questioning that generative AI is here to stay, but its use in mission-critical work has some way to go before it can be trusted and let loose.

The undiscovered country

Capturing and sharing what you already know is good; and with today's data and text analytics tools, it has become much easier than when we'd first begun this journey.

AI’s ways of being immoral

The most powerful ML can require the resources of wealthy organizations. Such organizations usually have at best mixed motivations, to be charitable about it.

Thinking beyond the status quo

The technologies exist today to achieve almost any corporate or departmental goal. What is lacking is the nerve to think big and think beyond the status quo—to break barriers, to collaborate, and to share.

Flipping data science

No matter how much "intelligence" is programmed into a computer, it will very likely never understand the results it produces. Doing so takes human cognition, intuition, judgment, and other ways we humans make sense out of data.

Usability testing for effective interactivity

Connecting the seeker to the information she seeks is not a new problem. Interaction design has been a stumbling block since the age of the card catalog.

Rebooting the information refinery

In the field of knowledge management, of course, the idea of turning data into information into knowledge has been a foundation concept for knowledge managers. But frankly, the ability to achieve this alchemy of data to knowledge has not been broadly demonstrated in practice. A next generation information refinery is required to make something meaningful and valuable out of the raw data flying around the firm and throughout the internet economy.

Crossing the epistemic divide

As the world races ahead, purely data-driven approaches will become less attractive. Instead, we need to start gaining a deeper understanding of how to bridge the great divide which separates the artificial and the natural.

Is enterprise search still surging?

A sea change for search

Search still surging