What Happens When Expertise Is Lost Forever?

Forbes

a day ago

CEO/co-founder of SightCall, a visual support platform helping global service teams see more, solve faster and capture critical knowledge.
A service leader told me they lost a century of knowledge in a single day. Three senior technicians—each with more than 33 years of experience—left at once. Two new hires came in to replace them. But the numbers don't add up. You can swap hands, but not hard-earned wisdom.
What they lost wasn't just people—it was an entire library of lived experience. That's the kind of knowledge you won't find in manuals or databases. It lives in memory, muscle and hallway conversations.
His story captured the silent crisis spreading across the service industry, and it made me think of a man who once went into the mountains.
A Field Service Lesson From The Andes
Before working as a National Geographic photographer, a friend of mine went on a mission in the Andes. His goal was to help preserve the voices of a vanishing culture—oral traditions passed down through generations that were never written.
In some cultures, when elders die, their knowledge is sometimes lost with them. Anthropologists call this intangible cultural heritage loss. At first, the community my friend worked with didn't trust outsiders. But after earning their trust, he was able to listen to, record and capture voices that may have otherwise been lost.
The Knowledge Extinction Event
That story might feel far removed from the day-to-day realities of enterprise field service, but it's not. The service industry is facing its own 'knowledge extinction event.' Veteran technicians are retiring faster than we can replace them. Around 25% of the manufacturing workforce is 55 or older, and a growing skills gap could leave 2.1 million jobs unfilled by 2030.
But here's the number that should really concern every service leader: employees believe that over 70% (download required) of institutional knowledge is inaccessible. The most valuable insights in your organization aren't stored in the cloud—they live in the minds of your team, technician conversations, gut instincts built over decades and repair strategies that no AI can yet reproduce.
The more experienced your workforce, the more you're at risk of losing.
Why AI Alone Won't Save Us
We've all heard the hype: AI is set to transform service. And there's real potential. But for many companies, the reality so far has been disappointing. They've rolled out AI tools only to find the answers vague, the recommendations shallow and the users skeptical.
What's the problem? AI is only as smart as the data you give it. Most large language models are trained on public sources—blogs, websites and forums. But the most valuable knowledge? That lives deep inside your organization, in service logs, internal calls and technician conversations.
If you're not capturing and feeding that data into your systems, AI won't reach its potential. Worse, you risk creating a generation of techs who rely on tools that lack the very wisdom their predecessors carried.
Doing Nothing Is Not An Option
Now, you probably can't take my friend's approach and record everything at your organization with a camera and voice recorder, but you can take a page from his playbook: capture what matters before it's gone.
Start with the knowledge that's shared informally. Record technician calls. Document walk-throughs. Archive those side chats where someone cracks a tricky problem. What feels routine today could be mission-critical knowledge tomorrow.
Of course, that's easier said than done. Most service leaders are already stretched thin. Building a knowledge library from scratch isn't just time-consuming—it feels impossible. Some companies have tried with documentation task forces or training centers. Those are smart moves, but they're often not enough.
The sheer variety of equipment, the pace of change and rising customer demands call for something better: a knowledge capture process that's baked into the daily workflow. It needs to be seamless, automatic and scalable. Because if it's not effortless, it won't happen.
Making Knowledge Capture A Habit
Service professionals trust the manual because it was written by the engineers who built the equipment. They trust the veteran tech who's seen every failure and knows every fix. But they don't trust AI. Not yet.
To earn that trust, AI needs more than data—it needs real-world experience. When you capture the tacit knowledge of your technicians and embed it into intelligent systems, you create a resource that's not just smart—it's credible. You raise the institutional IQ of your entire team, and you build a future where experience doesn't walk out the door—it gets passed on.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?