Editorial
White Paper
Why AI Rarely Improves How Work Actually Gets Done
I’ve spent the last year on the road, in the air and (my favorite) on the railways. Jumping between Microsoft Teams calls and coffee docks, talking to leaders across multiple sectors — from global logistics disruptors and UN agencies to universities and local councils.
Whether I’m speaking with a Director of Operations in a manufacturing plant or a Chief People Officer in a tech firm, the conversation almost always starts with a tactical question, but quickly drifts toward a much deeper, shared anxiety.
We are all drowning in information, yet starving for knowledge.
After over 100 discovery calls, meetings and workshops, I analyzed my notes and identified the top five challenges that are keeping knowledge managers awake at night.
Here is what's really happening behind the corporate curtain.
1. The 'Silver Tsunami' and the Brain Drain
This one causes the most palpable anxiety. We are facing a massive generational shift. In some jurisdictions (like Italy) it’s pretty much an existential crisis.
A team at a large County Council described their situation as a "Silver Tsunami." Essentially, a third of their workforce is set to retire in the next 12 to 18 months. These aren't just employees; they are the keepers of the "tacit arts" — the deep, nuanced, context-specific institutional knowledge that doesn't exist in any manual.
This is happening everywhere. A leading UK University spoke about the fear of becoming a "single point of failure" when long-serving staff leave without a mechanism to capture their expertise. In the marine sector, world-leading expertise in seabed mapping may walk out the door as 20-year programs conclude. Business critical knowledge literally about to evaporate into the atmosphere, never to be retrieved.
The Challenge: How do you capture the wisdom in people's heads before they hand in their badge? The old way was an exit interview (which few people read). The new way has to be capturing that knowledge digitally, authentically and storing it where the next generation can easily find it (and leverage it).
2. The 'Lost Souls' of the Distributed Workforce
This memorable phrase came from a senior manager with a global logistics company managing a complex integration of different companies. He referred to night shift workers as "lost souls."
These are the people keeping the world moving at 3:00 AM, yet they rarely see or connect with management. They feel disconnected from the culture. In hybrid setups, or organizations with deskless and frontline workers, there is a massive divide between the "laptop class" and the operational staff.
Membership organizations also experience this disconnect. One such organization, which operates a streamlined, hybrid model, doubled in size in a year, leading to a situation where colleagues simply didn't know who was who anymore. When you lose that proximity, you lose the culture (and the efficiency).
The Challenge: How do you make a night driver in a warehouse or a remote intern feel seen, heard and understood? You can't do it with a newsletter. You need to close the gap between leadership and the frontline.
3. The Onboarding 'Fire Hose'
We've all been there. Your first day at a new job, and you are hit with the fire hose of information. New hires get sent to a share-drive and told: everything you need is there (unsaid: go figure it out — alone!).
One global media agency highlighted a classic tension: HR handles the compliance and payroll stuff, but then hands the new hire over to the manager for the "real" work. The manager is busy, so the new hire is left drifting, trying to figure out "how we do things here."
It is inefficient and expensive. But it’s also about confidence. New hires tell us they are terrified to ask their manager, "What was that thing you said last Tuesday?" because they don't want to look incompetent.
The Challenge: Moving from an information dump to a "just-in-time" learning model. We need to give people searchable, usable, friendly support (digitally) that they can refer back to without fear of judgment.
4. The SharePoint and Wiki Graveyards (Findability)
"Our Wiki is where knowledge goes to die."
I didn’t say it — an e-commerce company did. And almost everyone nods when they hear it.
Organizations have terabytes of data. They have PDFs, SOPs and handbooks buried in sub-folders of sub-folders. One euro-wide, fully remote tech company noted that information is siloed across Notion, Slack and Google Drive, and no-one really knows what’s where.
And even when — or if — they find it, people don't have time to read a 25-page SOP to find one specific instruction. A global hospitality agency told me they wanted to consolidate. They didn’t want five platforms, they wanted simplicity i.e. ease of use, ease of findability, ease of knowing who does what.
The Challenge: Findability. If your employees can't find the answer in 30 seconds, they will either guess (risky) or interrupt a colleague (inefficient). We need to signpost deep knowledge with accessible, short-form content.
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5. Mentoring Is Breaking Bad (or Non-Existent)
Mentoring is often the first casualty of remote and hybrid work.
A global health organization had a specific problem: their mentoring program was essentially a static directory on an intranet. It relied on people having the courage to reach out blindly to a senior leader. Unsurprisingly, it wasn't dynamic. Nothing was happening. And, in the few cases when it did, nothing was being measured.
Traditional mentoring is 1-to-1, which is great, but it’s not scalable. It traps knowledge between two people. If I explain a concept to you on a Zoom call, that knowledge evaporates once we hang up. No other colleagues benefit. And we don’t know for real ‘if learning happened’ and how, or if, that contributed to the bottom line.
The Challenge: Moving from "individual expertise" to "collective wisdom." We need to shift from 1-to-1 coffee chats to "one-to-many" mentorship, where a mentor can record advice once and benefit hundreds of employees, regardless of time zone or location.
Stop Guessing. Start Naming Where Knowledge Is Breaking Down
Is it retirement handoffs — decades of expertise leaving with nothing but a farewell card? Onboarding, where new hires spend weeks hunting for obvious answers? Findability, where the right information exists but it's invisible? The frontline, disconnected from knowledge that could solve their problems? Or mentoring that never happens because no one knows who knows what?
Pick one. Own it. Then build for the employee stuck at 2:00 AM, not just during business hours.
Digital workplace leaders aren't managing platforms; they are stewards of organizational intelligence. When you make knowledge visible, accessible and human, you're not optimizing productivity metrics. You're protecting continuity when people leave. Building confidence in people still learning. Creating belonging for workers who shouldn't have to fight their systems to do their jobs.
The work matters. So does getting specific about where it's failing. Let's reunite work and learning.
Editor's Note: Catch up on other takes on the state of knowledge management:
- The Dark Side of Knowledge Management: What Unused Content Tells Us About Employee Experience — Your unused content isn't harmless. It's costing you money, wasting employee time and quietly feeding your AI the wrong answers.
- Connected Intelligence Can't Fix Your Broken Knowledge Management — AI-powered knowledge management is the latest tech promising to fix what 30 years of tools couldn't. But what if the technology was never the problem?
- 5 Key Challenges of Knowledge Management (and How to Conquer Them) — You’re likely sitting on a lot of valuable data and insights. But how you use and share it is everything. Some tips to build a knowledge-sharing culture.
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