A friend recently shared a story that made me think about how organisations are using AI.

A team of his organisation had prepared an impressive plan for introducing a new way of working. Everything looked right: the objectives, the responsibilities, the timelines and the risks. The document was well written, carefully structured and convincing.

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But something was missing.

Nobody seemed to have asked whether the organisation was actually ready to put the plan into practice.

The deadlines were tight. Some responsibilities were unclear. The plan expected people to follow processes they had never used before.

The ideas were not necessarily wrong. They simply didn’t reflect how the organisation really worked. It was not tailored.

“Was it written by AI?” I asked.

“Possibly,” my friend replied. “But does that really matter?”

He had a point.

Perhaps the more important question was whether anyone had checked the plan against what the organisation already knew.

The knowledge nobody asked for

AI can help produce an impressive plan in minutes. But a plan that looks complete can make people less likely to question its assumptions, especially when it has management support.

There is also a less visible risk. When AI suggests a deadline and nobody questions it, that assumption can become part of the plan without anyone consciously validating it. It can then shape the decision, even though nobody delegated the decision to AI.

Consider a simple example.

A plan allows three weeks for testing a new process. It sounds reasonable until someone explains that the teams have never done this before and that previous projects needed much more preparation.

The knowledge to spot the problem already existed. It was simply missing from the discussion.

Making that knowledge available at the right moment is what Knowledge Management (KM) is for. KM brings previous experience, lessons learned and the people who understand how the organisation works into the discussion, while the plan can still be questioned.

A 30-minute reality check

Before approving a plan that will significantly change how people work, try three things.

1. Identify the three assumptions most likely to undermine the plan if they are wrong. Think about timelines, available people, skills or dependencies. AI can help you list them. People who know the organisation need to check them.

2. Test them against organisational experience. What evidence supports them? What happened when something similar was attempted? Who has challenged them? Can the people responsible for delivery confirm they are realistic?

3. Make responsibility clear. Who will validate each assumption? Who has the authority to accept the remaining risks?

A simple record is enough:

Assumption: [ ] | Evidence: [ ] | Validated by: [ ] | Risk owner: [ ] | Outcome / change: [ ]

Thirty minutes may not resolve every question, but it can reveal what needs checking before approval.

If an assumption does not hold up, adjust the plan, test the uncertain part first or make the risk explicit before proceeding.

Keep the record with the decision. The next team should not have to rediscover the same problem.
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One question before saying yes

AI has made convincing plans easier to produce. It hasn’t made organisational judgement optional.

A convincing plan is not yet a well-informed decision.

So next time an impressive plan arrives on your desk, don’t begin by asking whether AI helped write it.

Ask: Which assumption could undermine this plan, and who in our organisation would know?

The views expressed in this article are my own and do not represent the position of my employer or any institution I am associated with.

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Not long ago, if you needed to find “best SEO agencies in India”, or “top niacinamide brands”, you might tap on Google search. You would open the top three pages, skim through a handful of reviews, or read a few comparisons.

The process was pretty straightforward then.

Fast forward to now. Everything has changed. Consumers either prefer brand recommendations on Google Overviews or type into ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude.

58% of consumers prefer product recommendations coming from gen AI tools and 68% are ready to act on those recommendations.

Let’s find out how this AI-based digital experience is reshaping the customer journey.

The Evolution: From Traditional Search to AI Answers

The role of your website has shifted entirely. Data and fixed rules once guided buyers toward conversion, but that approach no longer works.

The old question was, "What information should our website show?" Now it's, "Does our website make visitors feel certain?"

The shift has happened from information to confirmation as buyers move from “search and browse” to “ask and receive”. Now, their journey has started even before the first click.

Google users clicked a traditional result link in 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared versus 15% without it did not.

Why does it happen?

1. Your customers have shifted from navigation to interpretation

They won’t like to explore rigid, complex, or lengthy output related to their queries.

Take for example a software product that needs a bit more explaining. Here, AI search can guide your buyers step by step. It breaks down complex API integrations, compares key features, and even answers technical troubleshooting questions after purchase.

AI answers just take the pressure off your sales and support teams from pre-qualifying to post-purchase touchpoints. It acts as your confirmed confidence-building machine.

 2. Your customers are leaning on conversational searches

Their queries are now more conversational and contextual. A few keywords are no longer enough to help them decide. Instead, they explicitly describe what they want.

• Which moisturizers are best for my oily pimple-prone skin?
• Which sport shoes are best for a half marathon?
• Which CRM is best for supporting my field sales team?

This is also why more people now turn to voice AI assistants. Your brand gets discovered in these answers long before anyone visits your website. You can use the same technology to improve your own customer experience.

For example, with Murf’s AI voice generator, you can create natural voiceovers for product demos and explainer videos. You can match your customers’ preferred languages, accents, and pacing. A reliable web hosting service also helps ensure these experiences remain accessible to visitors with consistent website performance. You can even use it to power voice support that guides customers in real time. This way, your brand speaks to buyers the same conversational way they now search.

 3. Your customers’ trust transfers to AI recommendations

When AI answers your customer questions, it pulls and cites the sources along with it. The recommendations automatically reflect your brand’s authority and credibility. In fact, customers trust AI answers even more as they refine their follow-up questions.

Adobe’s 2026 Q2 AI Traffic Report shows this in practice. Visitors arriving from AI tools spent 48% more time on retail sites than other visitors. Meanwhile, 38% of consumers said they trust AI more than they used to.

This way, your customers remain more informed, convinced, and confident when AI drives their buying journey.

How You Can Keep Up With AI Visibility to Revamp Your CX

Your goal should be to appear in AI answers, whether as a direct mention, a cited source, or a recommendation. Customer behavior and expectations have shifted, and brands that ignore this risk falling behind.

Here’s where to focus:

Write answer-first content
Before adding depth, answer directly to the questions that target your customers’ sentiments. Lead every single page with authoritative, validated, and context-rich knowledge while keeping brand definition consistent.

Invest in semantic search

Don’t rely on exact match keywords anymore. Your customers are increasingly moving toward conversational searches. By aligning brand discovery with the purchasing journey, AI is fixing the blind spots that keyword searches often miss.

Earn third-party citation

While not all sources carry equal weight, a verified external source can determine validation. For example, for your SaaS product-based brand, a G2 rating and review can be highly influential.  Building a strong presence on platforms like Socialthink can also help your brand reach audiences interested in social media trends, digital marketing, and online brand discovery. Working with a SaaS Link building agency like VH-info can also help your brand earn relevant mentions and citations from trusted industry publications. When evaluating potential publications, use a domain rating checker to assess their backlink strength alongside their topical relevance and editorial quality. As a matter of fact, AI is more likely to trust industry publications, research reports, and analyst platforms. 

Optimize for trust

Mitigate friction in different touchpoints as it can break your customers’ buying intent within a second. Think of reviews and social proof, how they earn trust from your target prospects, and help convert them faster.

Participate in trusted communities

When you join community discussions and share expert input, they spread word of mouth for your brand naturally.  For brands in the design and creative space, platforms like Designers-choice can also help audiences discover useful design tools and resources. And the trust appears in AI responses as well. For example, Reddit and LinkedIn frequently appear in ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude responses.

Connect your data

When AI-driven knowledge management enters, it walks through information from different sources, such as chats, emails, the web, and social media. It can then link product details, behavioral data, CRM insights, and purchase history into one connected view. The more organized and consistent this data is, the more confidently AI can recommend your brand.

Measure, attribute, & improve

Review AI summaries to ensure how they describe your brand offerings and compare with competitors. Check how often AI pulls your brand, links it as a verified source, and recommends your brand whether as a primary or secondary option. To win in the AI visibility environment, you don’t need more data but more clarity.

Turn AI Visibility Into Better CX

Gen AI is shortening the research, simplifying the jargon, connecting multi-touch attribution models, and closing the loop from being invisible to being recommended.

Today, AI is raising customer expectations. At the same time, it rewards brands that offer clarity, trust, and confidence across the customer journey.​

However, that doesn't mean the traditional search result is dead. Strong technical health, quality content, and authority still determine whether AI systems can find and trust your brand.

If you perform well in these areas, you can influence AI to choose your brand. Make your target audience feel understood and convinced. Connect with KM Institute to build the well-governed and trusted knowledge foundation that makes this possible.

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Organizations worry about the attrition rate, though they rarely worry about knowledge attrition.

When employees leave, they do not just take skills with them. They take years of context, hard-earned judgement, customer insights, relationship history, workarounds, lessons from failures, and the intuition that never made it into a document.

The result? Teams repeat mistakes, projects reinvent solutions, onboarding takes longer, and organisations lose valuable institutional memory.

The challenge is not simply capturing knowledge; that can be easily achieved. The challenge is preserving the experience and expertise of outgoing employees.

The Problem with Traditional Lessons Learned

Most organisations have a lessons learned repository and they duly promote it, most is it really used as per its worth? The fact is, it’s rarely used, because lessons learned are often treated as a project closure activity rather than a strategic knowledge asset. The outcome typically becomes a static document stored in a SharePoint site, project folder, or archive that is rarely visited.

The real value lies not in recording lessons but in making them discoverable, relevant, and actionable through socialization, by connecting people with similar skills and expertise and giving a preview and glimpse of why these matter and how and where to access the lessons and the experts.

A lesson learned six years ago becomes valuable only when it surfaces at precisely the moment someone faces a similar challenge.

Not All Lessons Learned Are Equal

To build an effective organisational memory, we need to think beyond project retrospectives.

1. Process Lessons

These focus on execution.

Examples:

• Activities that caused delays
• Processes that improved efficiency
• Governance bottlenecks
• Successful delivery approaches

These lessons help teams work smarter.

2. Technical Lessons

These capture knowledge around systems, architecture, integrations, and technology decisions.

Examples:

• Design trade-offs
• Technical debt considerations
• Architecture patterns
• Integration challenges

These lessons often become critical reference points for future projects.

3. Customer Lessons

Many of the most valuable insights come directly from client engagement.

Examples:

• Stakeholder preferences
• Communication strategies
• Change management approaches
• Business priorities

These lessons improve customer outcomes and relationship management.

4. Strategic Lessons

These focus on business impact rather than project execution.

Examples:

• Market insights
• Risk patterns
• Transformation outcomes
• Investment decisions

Strategic lessons help leaders make better decisions.

5. Tacit Lessons

This is where things get interesting.

Tacit knowledge is the knowledge people possess but rarely document.

It’s the “know-how” behind the work.

Examples:

• How an experienced project manager navigates executive stakeholders
• Which client concerns typically emerge during implementation
• Warning signs of project risk before they appear in dashboards
• Informal processes that help accelerate delivery

Tacit knowledge is often the most valuable knowledge an organisation owns and the hardest to capture.

The Tacit Knowledge Challenge

Traditional repositories capture explicit knowledge, while tacit knowledge lives in people’s heads.

Historically, organisations have tried to transfer tacit knowledge through:

• Shadowing
• Mentoring
• Communities of practice
• Interviews
• Knowledge transfer sessions

While valuable, these methods are difficult to scale after a point in time.

The challenge becomes even greater in large organisations where thousands of subject matter experts (SMEs) possess specialised knowledge spread across projects, business units, and geographies.

The question becomes: How do we connect someone who needs knowledge with someone who has knowledge?

From Knowledge Repositories to Knowledge Networks

The future of lessons learned is not just about content but more about connections.

Imagine a project manager beginning a transformation programme.

Instead of searching through hundreds of documents, the system automatically identifies and surfaces:

• Similar projects completed previously
• Relevant lessons learned
• Associated risks and mitigations
• Key project artefacts
• Subject matter experts who participated
• Individuals who solved comparable challenges

This shifts knowledge management from retrieving documents to discovering expertise.

The knowledge asset now becomes the network of people, experiences, decisions, and outcomes connected to that document.

How AI Can Help

Instead of expecting employees to search for knowledge, AI can proactively surface it.

AI-Powered Expertise Discovery

When starting a new project, AI can analyse:

• Project charter
• Industry
• Client information
• Objectives
• Technologies involved

It can then recommend:

• Previous similar engagements
• Relevant project artefacts
• Lessons learned
• Internal experts
• Communities of practice

The employee does not need to know what to search for; the knowledge comes to them.

AI-Powered Contextual Recommendations

Imagine preparing for a client workshop.

AI identifies that:

• Three previous teams worked with the same client
• Similar implementation challenges occurred
• Specific stakeholder concerns emerged repeatedly
• Particular mitigation approaches were successful

These insights can be surfaced directly within the employee’s workflow.

AI-Powered Knowledge Graphs

One of the most exciting opportunities lies in creating organisational knowledge graphs.

Knowledge graphs connect:

• Projects
• Clients
• Deliverables
• Lessons learned
• Risks
• SMEs
• Communities
• Business capabilities

Instead of a collection of disconnected documents, organisations gain an interconnected knowledge ecosystem.

Why Metadata Becomes the Foundation

Many organisations view metadata as an administrative burden.

In reality, metadata is the backbone of AI-powered knowledge discovery.

Without metadata, AI can search; with metadata, AI can reason.

Consider a lesson learned document. It’s simply a text doc without metadata; however, with metadata, it’s a pathway to

• Client name
• Industry
• Project type
• Business capability
• Geography
• Technology stack
• Risks
• Authors
• SMEs
• Outcomes
• Project lifecycle phase

Good metadata transforms isolated information into connected organisational intelligence; with the help of AI, tagging and content surfacing becomes so much easier.

Beyond Lessons Learned: Building an Organisational Memory System

The future is not another lessons learned repository, but an organisational system that combines:

• Content – Lessons learned, playbooks, templates, project artefacts.
• Context – Metadata, business taxonomy, project characteristics.
• Connections – Relationships between projects, clients, risks, decisions, and outcomes.
• Communities – Experts, practitioners, and communities of practice.
• AI – Intelligent discovery, recommendation, summarisation, and expertise location.

Together, these elements create a living knowledge ecosystem rather than a static archive.

The most valuable knowledge in any organisation is rarely stored in documents.

It exists in experiences, conversations, decisions, and the judgement of people who have solved problems before.

As experienced employees move on and organisations continue to transform, the challenge is no longer simply capturing lessons learned, but ensuring that those lessons remain accessible, discoverable, and connected to the people who need them most.

In the age of AI, the question is no longer:

“How do we store knowledge?”

The real question is:

“How do we ensure the right knowledge, from the right experience, reaches the right person at the right moment?”

Because when knowledge remains connected to context, expertise, and people, organisational memory doesn’t walk out the door. It continues to create value long after individuals have moved on.

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Many organizations still operate without a formal Knowledge Management (KM) practice and it often shows:

Important knowledge lives in inboxes, chat threads, personal files and in the heads of a few key people. When that knowledge is not captured, organized and shared. Organizations lose time, repeat mistakes and become dependent on individuals instead of building collective capability.

Setting up knowledge management is not just about storing documents. It is about creating a culture and system where knowledge is easy to find, trust, reuse and improve.

A strong KM practice can help organizations:
- reduce duplication of work
- speed up onboarding and training
- improve decision-making
- preserve expertise when people move roles or leave
- increase consistency, quality, and collaboration

For organizations without KM today, the biggest risk is not just inefficiency, it is knowledge loss.
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The good news is that KM does not have to start big. It can begin with simple steps: identifying critical knowledge, creating a shared structure, defining ownership and making knowledge easy to access.

Organizations that invest in KM build stronger teams, smarter operations and a more resilient future.

"Knowledge management is not a nice-to-have. It is foundational."

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Change Management helps people move through the change. Knowledge Management helps people learn through the change

Every organization today is somewhere on the curve of change, especially with the heavy focus on AI adaptation, digital transformation, and constantly evolving ways of working. But there is one question I believe organizations often overlook:

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Where does Knowledge Management fit into the change journey?

We often talk about Change Management and Knowledge Management as two separate disciplines. In reality, I see them as two parallel processes that need to move together.

Change creates the disruption while KM helps people navigate that disruption.

Change creates uncertainty. Knowledge creates clarity.

Whenever a new technology, process, operating model, or organizational structure is introduced, people naturally have questions.

What is changing?
Why are we changing it?
How will this impact my role?
What worked for others?
Where can I find the information I need?

This is where KM can play a much bigger role than simply being a repository of documents.

KM can become the connective tissue of the change journey.

It can bring together the knowledge, experiences, conversations, and lessons that help people move from uncertainty to understanding—and eventually to adoption.

And this is where I see four important KM interventions.

1. Leaders need to walk the talk

Change cannot be communicated only through emails, presentations, and training sessions.

People watch what leaders do to understand and accept the gravity of change.

If leaders expect teams to share knowledge, collaborate and adopt new ways of working, they need to demonstrate those behaviours themselves.

This is where KM can support leadership.

Leader conversations, knowledge-sharing sessions, town halls and storytelling can create visibility around the change while also creating space for people to ask questions and share concerns.

Sometimes, a 30-minute conversation with a leader can achieve what a 30-page communication document cannot.

Because change is not just about information, it is about trust.

2. Collaboration becomes more important when change accelerates

One of the biggest risks during transformation is the creation of knowledge silos.

One team runs a successful pilot.

Another team faces the same challenge six months later.

A lesson has already been learned—but nobody knows where it is.

This is where KM can turn individual experiences into organizational knowledge.

Communities of Practice, cross-functional forums, collaboration spaces, and knowledge-sharing platforms can help connect people who are solving similar problems.

The objective is not to create more content.

The objective is to make sure that knowledge does not remain trapped in pockets of the organization.

3. Lessons learned should not become lessons forgotten

This is probably one of the biggest opportunities for KM during transformation.

Organizations run pilots. They experiment. Some initiatives succeed. Others don’t.

But what happens afterwards?

Too often, the project closes, and the learning disappears with it.

A strong KM approach can capture:

• What worked?
• What didn’t?
• What surprised us?
• What would we do differently?
• What can another team reuse?
• What should we avoid repeating?

The real value of lessons learned isn’t in documenting them.

It is in reusing them.

That is when a lesson moves from being project knowledge to becoming organizational knowledge.

4. Don’t underestimate the power of informal KM

One thing I have learned through my KM journey is that not all knowledge sharing happens inside a repository.

Some of the most valuable knowledge emerges through conversations.

A Knowledge Café.

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A Leader Talk.

A storytelling session.

A small group discussing what went wrong in a pilot.

A colleague sharing how they solved a problem that another team is now facing.

These informal spaces are particularly valuable during change because they create room for something that formal communication often doesn’t:

conversation.

People can express resistance.

They can challenge assumptions.

They can share experiences.

And they can hear how others are navigating the same change.

Resistance isn’t always a barrier that needs to be eliminated.

Sometimes, it is simply a signal that people need more context, clarity, or involvement.

From Resistance to Adaptation

If we look at the change curve—Status Quo → Resistance → Acceptance → Adaptation—KM can play a role at every stage.

At Status Quo:
KM helps people understand why change is happening by making knowledge and context accessible.

At Resistance:
KM creates spaces for questions, conversations, experiences, and concerns.

At Acceptance:
KM enables learning, training, peer sharing, and access to practical knowledge.

At Adaptation:
KM captures new experiences, lessons, and emerging practices so that they can be shared and scaled.

And this is where the relationship between Change Management and Knowledge Management becomes particularly interesting.

Change Management helps people move through the change.

Knowledge Management helps people learn through the change.

When the two work together, change doesn’t have to feel like something being done to people.

It can become something people learn, experience, and evolve through together.

Perhaps we need to stop thinking of KM as something that comes after transformation.

The repository shouldn’t be populated only after the project is complete.

We shouldn’t capture lessons only at the end.

Training shouldn’t be the only knowledge intervention.

And KM shouldn’t simply be the place where people go to find a document.

KM needs to be part of the change journey from the beginning.

Because every transformation creates knowledge.

The question is whether that knowledge is captured, connected, shared, and reused—or whether it disappears into project folders, individual inboxes, and people’s memories.

A final thought

Change is inevitable, but the way organizations learn through change is a choice.

For me, this is where KM’s real opportunity lies.

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Ekta Sachania has over 15 years of experience in learning and talent development disciplines, including knowledge management, content management, and learning & collaboration with expertise in content harvesting, practice enablement, metrics analysis, site management, collaboration activities, communications strategy and market trends analysis. Demonstrated success in managing multiple stakeholder expectations across time zones and exhibiting good project management skills, by successfully developing and deploying projects for large audiences.  Ability to adapt and work in emerging areas with fast-shifting priorities.  

‍Connect with Ekta at LinkedIn...