Knowledge Management in the Age of AI:
Keeping Humans at the Centre
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the way organisations manage knowledge: processing information at speed, surfacing connections across vast data sets, and automating tasks that once required significant human effort. But AI also hallucinates, amplifies bias, and operates entirely without curiosity, humility, or critical thought. Left ungoverned, it can quietly degrade the quality of our decisions, our strategies, and our organisational knowledge.
This workshop explores what it really means to use AI responsibly in knowledge management, making the case that the most important investment any organisation can make is not in better AI tools, but in better human thinking.
Drawing on Entelechy's Radical KM framework and more than 30 years of KM strategy and consulting practice, the workshop covers three interconnected themes:
- Keeping humans genuinely in the loop: not as rubber stamps, but as curious, critical, contextually-aware knowledge workers
- Governance: the structures, roles, and questions every organisation needs before AI becomes embedded in knowledge work
- Curiosity and critical thinking: why these skills have atrophied, why AI makes their recovery urgent, and how arts-based interventions offer a practical, evidence-based path to reactivating them
Part provocation, part practical framework, and part hands-on experience, participants will engage in short arts-based activities during the workshop, leaving with concrete ways to strengthen the human infrastructure that makes AI genuinely useful, rather than simply fast.
What the Workshop Covers
- What AI can and cannot do in knowledge management
- Why human knowledge (tacit, relational, and experiential) remains irreplaceable
- Governance frameworks: accuracy, accountability, access, equity, and values alignment
- The role of curiosity and critical thinking as strategic competencies
- Arts-based interventions to activate creative and associative thinking
- Practical steps to build meaningful (not shallow) human oversight
Who Should Attend
- Knowledge managers and KM practitioners navigating AI adoption thoughtfully and responsibly
- Strategy, innovation & OD professionals thinking about AI's impact on organisational learning
- Leaders and managers responsible for governance, risk, or technology adoption
- HR and L&D professionals focused on building human skills AI cannot replicate
Learning Outcomes
By the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:
- Articulate the difference between what AI can and cannot do, with clarity on where human knowledge remains irreplaceable
- Distinguish between shallow and meaningful human oversight of AI-generated knowledge outputs
- Apply a governance framework to AI in KM, covering accuracy, accountability, access, equity, and values alignment
- Explain the role of curiosity and critical thinking as strategic competencies that require deliberate cultivation
- Experience arts-based interventions first-hand and understand how they activate thinking that supports knowledge creation
- Identify at least one concrete action to strengthen the human infrastructure around AI in their organisation
Stephanie Barnes is a knowledge management consultant, strategist, and artist with more than 30 years of experience helping organisations become more effective, innovative, and creative with what they know. She is the founder of Entelechy, where her consulting practice centres on aligning people, process, and technology — not only to improve efficiency, but to build the cultures of curiosity, trust, and continuous learning that allow organisations to thrive in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.
Stephanie is the originator of Radical Knowledge Management (Radical KM) — a creativity-infused approach to KM that reintroduces arts-based interventions into organisational life as a practical mechanism for enabling continuous learning, innovation, and knowledge creation. Her work in this area has been published in academic journals and downloaded thousands of times by practitioners around the world.
She is the co-author of Designing a Successful KM Strategy: A Guide for the Knowledge Management Professional (Information Today Inc., 2015, with Nick Milton) and the author of Aligning People, Process, and Technology in Knowledge Management (Ark Group, 2011). She has contributed chapters and articles to numerous publications and spoken at conferences across North America, Europe, and beyond.
Stephanie has worked with clients across a wide range of sectors internationally, with experience spanning Canada, the United States, Germany, Austria, China, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates. She is an accomplished artist with exhibitions in Toronto and Berlin, and brings this creative practice directly into her consulting and facilitation work.
Stephanie holds a BBA in Accounting from Brock University and an MBA in Information Technology from McMaster University. She is ITIL Masters certified, a Professional Scrum Master (PSM I), and holds certificates in Business Systems Analysis and Gamification.
Secure your workshop seat – Limited places
Inquiries: contact@smritex.com