What Organisations Teach Their Machines

When an organisation connects artificial intelligence to its internal knowledge, it is tempting to imagine that the machine has suddenly gained access to institutional memory.

But organisations rarely possess a single coherent memory. They possess fragments: documents, tickets, decisions, policies, informal expertise and abandoned systems whose relationships are often poorly understood.

Retrieval inherits the archive.

A retrieval system can only recover what has been preserved, indexed and made legible. Missing context does not suddenly become available because a model can generate fluent answers around it.

A machine does not inherit what an organisation knew. It inherits what the organisation managed to leave behind.