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Forbes
09-07-2025
- Business
- Forbes
What Happens When Expertise Is Lost Forever?
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?
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
SightCall Launches Xpert Knowledge™ the Agentic AI Remedy for the $30B Knowledge Crisis
SAN FRANCISCO, June 12, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- SightCall, a global leader in AR-powered visual support, today launched Xpert Knowledge™, a powerful new agentic AI feature built into its SightCall Vision™ platform, a live, learning memory system that captures frontline expertise in the moment of service—before it's gone forever. As record numbers of seasoned experts exit the workforce, companies are hemorrhaging know-how. Studies estimate this "knowledge drain" costs businesses over $30 billion annually, with up to 25% of revenue loss tied to poor knowledge management. With the introduction of Xpert Knowledge, SightCall tackles the crisis head-on. "I'll never forget the manufacturing executive who told me he lost 100 years of knowledge when three senior techs retired within 30 days," said Thomas Cottereau, Founder & CEO of SightCall. "Decades of insights, workarounds, and lessons that were never written down left with them. Experience shouldn't walk out the door," said Cottereau. "With Xpert Knowledge, it never does." Companies have poured millions into AI—and were left with inadequate chatbots, hallucinations, and frustrated technicians. The reason? As Forbes points out, AI is only as good as the data behind it, and custom AI RAG models can't see what your techs are doing–they miss tacit knowledge, which research shows makes up 80% of all enterprise expertise. Xpert Knowledge changes that. It works in the moment, capturing audio, video, screen shares, annotations, and conversations. Then, using agentic AI, it turns this raw input into interactive, step-by-step tutorials that can train new technicians, inform AI assistants, and preserve critical knowledge for the future. The launch of Xpert Knowledge comes at a critical inflection point. According to Gartner, most knowledge management initiatives fail because they rely on centralized documentation after the fact and ignore the tacit, tribal knowledge that lives in heads and conversations. Xpert Knowledge challenges this by acting during the moment of service—automatically capturing annotated video, audio instructions, and visual cues, then generating structured, editable tutorials. Gartner calls this shift KnowledgeOps: a model where AI-driven agents continuously ingest, structure, and circulate knowledge across roles, systems, and moments of need. The timing is strategic. According to a 2025 Service Council report, over 60% of service leaders cite expert attrition and knowledge loss as top threats to operational continuity. Meanwhile, training and onboarding costs continue to rise amid persistent skilled labor shortages. "Traditional knowledge management is episodic. Xpert Knowledge is continuous," said David Swift, VP of Product Marketing at SightCall. "It captures context, condenses action, and creates a visual language that anyone can learn from—whether they're on day one or year ten." Xpert Knowledge offers a "shift-left" solution: capture the best resolution moments as they happen, automatically convert them into reusable content, and make them accessible to new technicians or even AI assistants. It's also engineered to be agentic—plugging into service copilots, field service tools, or even embedded in autonomous systems. "Let's face it—no one reads the manual," Cottereau said. "But everyone watches videos. With Xpert Knowledge, we're turning every expert fix into something your entire organization can learn from… including your AI." For more information about Xpert Knowledge, visit: About SightCallSightCall is the world's leading agentic visual intelligence platform, trusted by global leaders and the Fortune 500. With Xpert Knowledge, SightCall continues its mission to empower service organizations with tools that see, solve, and scale expertise like never before. To learn more about SightCall, visit: View original content to download multimedia: SOURCE SightCall, Inc. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
