A Call to Arms for Information Professionals

2. Weaponize Risk and Compliance. The AI sector may ignore governance, but the legal, risk, and compliance departments cannot. Become their greatest ally. Translate AI’s data gluttony into tangible risk frameworks: “If we ingest all legacy HR records without a PII scrub, we violate GDPR Article 17 and face fines of 4% of global revenue.” Speak the language of the CFO and CRO. Position yourself as the key control point that is preventing existential corporate liability. In the age of AI, the most valuable currency is not just data, but clean, compliant, auditable data.

3. Rebrand Relentlessly. If the term “knowledge management” is toxic in certain circles, stop using it. This isn’t surrender; it’s tactical linguistics. You are now a “data anthropologist,” deciphering the cultural meaning of information within silos. You are an “intelligence architect,” designing the foundational structures for trustworthy AI. You are (I am clearly making this up, but you hopefully get the drift) a “cognitive supply chain manager,” ensuring the quality and integrity of data flowing into models. Frame your expertise in the language the market values, but never abandon the core principles of your discipline.

4. Create Visible, AI-Agnostic Value. Don’t tie your success solely to one AI project’s success—those are high-risk and often opaque. Instead, use the tools and urgency of AI to solve long-standing, visible business problems. Use a text analytics engine you helped govern to finally organize the catastrophic shared drive. Use a clustering algorithm to map the real, undocumented expertise in the company. Deliver a clean, governed, and searchable repository of research—the foundation for any future AI. Show value first, then reveal that this pristine asset is now the only safe fuel for AI ambitions.

5. Champion the Human in the Loop. As AI fails—and it will, publicly—be the voice that explains why. Hallucinations are often a failure of information retrieval and context. Bias is a failure of source diversity and tagging. Use these to present the remedy: “This is why we need human expertise to curate, validate, and contextualize.” Position the professional as the essential hybrid, the translator between human knowledge and machine logic.

No Illusory Foundations for KM

The AI world is advancing at a breathtaking pace with staggering sums of money, but it’s built on unstable and illusory foundations. Our role is not to stand on the sidelines shouting warnings. It is to quietly, strategically, and indispensably become the people they cannot do without—the ones who ensure the entire system can actually function. The cleareyed KM professionals who see through the illusions.

This guerilla campaign is about making the governance, structure, and ethics of information impossible to ignore. It’s about forcing the realization that without us, this entire, glittering edifice is built on a ghost—a ghost of messy, uncontrolled, and dangerous data. It’s time to make that ghost visible, and, in doing so, make our profession not just relevant, but unequivocally vital.