The Anti-Copilot
From Institutional Knowledge to Business Intellectual Property
Institutional Knowledge in Industry
If we imagine automation as tying processes together with tight wire, institutional knowledge is the necessary slack in the system that keeps fickle connections from breaking. While more and more human work is abstracted, the importance of those tasks that require human knowledge only increases. Here lies a vulnerability.
Institutional knowledge is the knowledge or wisdom developed that is unique to an organization. That process that no one has ever written down but you can always shoot Sally a Slack message about when you get stuck, that’s institutional knowledge that Sally holds. Or when that valuable, long-time customer that is a bit finicky but Joe always knows the right thing to say, that’s institutional knowledge he is leveraging. Or perhaps that “gut instinct” that Sue has about estimating the cost of a new project, she’s probably leaning on her institutional knowledge in doing that.
Particularly in many foundational industries, such as manufacturing, construction, healthcare, and aerospace/defense, among others, this institutional knowledge is both a valuable commodity and business risk.
It is a valuable commodity in that, on an individual level, having institutional knowledge gives you a leg up on your colleagues. In a similar vein, on a company level, in many industries, having a concentration of institutional knowledge within your workforce can help you beat competition.
At the same time, institutional knowledge is a business risk for a company. It leaves the company vulnerable to turnover in key employees and increases the cost of labor given the importance of particular roles that depend heavily on institutional knowledge. In a different vein, if the aforementioned Sally and Joe have the same job at the same company but they depend on their stored knowledge and “gut”, their output will often differ. This represents a challenges towards automation, which often requires standardization.
For these reasons, and for the sake of ‘constant progress’ in our path towards further augmentation and automation, there will be significant money to be made by using software to digitize and standardize
A Proposal: The Anti-Copilot
But what might this look like? One theory is many roles will be joined by the ‘anti-copilot’. Increasingly, our actions, both in the digital and physical world, output data. Put crudely, they are tracked and quantified. Even if we are not writing things down or doing the thankless work of documentation, through data, computers can do so on our behalf. To this end, an anti-copilot would be a platform that records, digitizes, and documents everything from workflows to communications utilizing computer vision, large language models (LLMs), and multi-modal models on text, video, and audio.
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For instance, let’s pretend I am a project manager for a big engineering project, such as building a bridge, tasked with addressing complex regulatory requirements
Why We Need a Future without Institutional Knowledge
Perhaps this all sounds a bit dystopian. But digitization of institutional knowledge is inevitable and important to the continued running of major industries. As you might have experienced in your own workplace, such stored knowledge is often crucial to core competencies of a business
So, next time you are impressed by your colleagues' instinct in the work place, appreciate their knowledge and perhaps consider what your job might look like without it.
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[1]: BLS via Fortune
[2]: Korn Ferry