Most organizations are asking whether they are using AI. The more important question, and the one fewer leaders are prepared to answer honestly, is whether they have the knowledge foundation to use AI well.
That distinction is at the heart of Prof. Dr. Andreas Brandner’s Expert Session on Smritex: a 60-minute conversation that reframes the relationship between artificial intelligence and knowledge management in ways that are both practically useful and, at times, uncomfortable.
Who Is Andreas Brandner
Prof. Dr. Andreas Brandner is the founder and managing director of Knowledge Management Associates (KMA), a Vienna-based organization with 25 years of experience in KM consulting, education, and research. He also serves as Executive Director of the Knowledge for Development Partnership, established in 2017, and holds a senior role at the Knowledge for Development Center at Makerere University Business School in Uganda.
His work spans individual organizations, governments, and the global KM community. He has been shaping KM practice and policy at an international level for over two decades, which means his perspective on AI is not that of a technology observer. It is that of someone who has watched knowledge management be misunderstood, underinvested, and sidelined by leadership, and who now sees AI changing that dynamic in ways that matter.
What This Session Covers
The session moves through several interconnected arguments, each grounded in real implementation experience rather than theory:
- Why AI governance and knowledge governance must be integrated, and what breaks when they are not
- Where the real competitive advantage in AI-enabled organizations actually comes from (it is not the data, and it is not the AI tool)
- How the relationship between AI and your knowledge base has changed, and what that means for how KM functions should be operating right now
- What knowledge workers need to develop to remain relevant and effective as AI absorbs more of the routine knowledge work
- How to align an AI strategy with a business strategy in a way that starts from the right place
The Q&A section covers practical ground including how to get documents ready for AI, where to find quick wins, what knowledge curation actually means in operational terms, and how to build an organizational culture that can absorb AI adoption without losing what makes human knowledge valuable.
The Argument That Makes This Session Worth Your Time
Brandner makes one argument in this session that most AI and KM conversations miss entirely. It concerns where the competitive advantage in an AI-enabled organization actually lives, and why organizations investing heavily in data infrastructure and AI tooling are likely building on an incomplete foundation.
He is specific about what that foundation needs to look like, how it should be structured, and why the difference between organizations that get this right and those that do not will become increasingly visible over the next two to three years.
It is the kind of insight that sounds obvious once you hear it, and is easy to act on once you understand it. Getting there, however, requires following the argument he builds across the session.
Watch the Session
This Expert Session runs approximately 60 minutes including Q&A and is available on demand.
If you work in knowledge management, lead a KM function, or are responsible for how your organization adopts AI into its knowledge workflows, this session was built for you.
[View session details and access →]
Smritex Expert Sessions are live online conversations with experienced KM practitioners, built around topics that matter to organizational knowledge practice.