Every year, APQC checks the pulse of knowledge management (KM) professionals to understand their priorities, challenges, and predictions for the future of the discipline. Throughout 2024, I was able to interact with a lot of practitioners while doing research, participating in and hosting conferences, webinars, and roundtables. What a year it has been! KM continues to be top of mind for a lot of business leaders who see the value of implementing knowledge management capabilities and the overall success for their organization.
While some KM teams continue to ride this wave of momentum, there are many new opportunities along with new and continued challenges. . We will share the results early next year in our resource library and you can sign up to attend the webinar where we reveal the Top Knowledge Management Priorities & Trends for 2025 . Below are some of my predictions for where KM will be focused in 2025 and what obstacles the discipline may face.
1. KM and AI Partnership: Connecting Humans and Machines
Incorporating artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI was one of the top priorities for KM professionals in 2024 and I believe that trend will continue. As with any new technology, many companies have already begun investing significant resources into exploring AI’s potential capabilities for KM. Despite significant investments from some leading organizations, our research in 2024 indicates that less than one-quarter of organizations have fully deployed AI for KM, and the amount of time most organizations expect to see the benefit of their deployment is still 1-3 years out.
KM’s traditional partnership with digital and/or IT makes for a great opportunity for AI success. The two functions have always been a natural fit. While KM relies on IT to build, configure, and manage many of the applications employees use for knowledge sharing and access; KM provides input on user needs, helps to shape change management plans, and develop training and knowledge transfer approaches to ensure employee understanding. Even better, KM brings content management capabilities to the table. Ensuring that content is authoritative, relevant, and up to date is a key success factor in implementing and training AI models effectively.
To learn more about AI and the partnership with KM, consider these additional resources AI for Knowledge Management: Unlocking the Future with a Human Centric Focus and Work at the Speed of Knowledge: Generative AI and the Future of Knowledge Management.
2. Trust and Adoption: Addressing Change Management Challenges
The amount of investment in AI is also expected to increase for a majority of organizations surveyed, adding to the ongoing challenges that can delay KM teams from successfully executing their plans. Employees feel overworked and don’t have time for KM, the impact of KM is hard to measure and build buy-in with leaders, and people are dealing with a lot of other changes. Sound familiar? These are just some of the barriers KM teams deal with.
Because KM professionals see KM as a “people first” business, APQC’s research continually identifies change management as the top skillset to develop in KM priorities and trends research. I believe 2025 will be no different. Bottom line is, KM requires a holistic strategy and approach that includes a focus on people, process, content and technology. And the people aspect continues to remain the greatest challenge for most organizations. The more momentum KM gains and the more upskilling KM professionals can do in the area of change management, the more they will continue to build trust and ensure leader buy-in and employee adoption of KM approaches within the organization—including AI.
To learn more about change management for KM, consider these additional resources: Understanding Knowledge Management Change Management and Effective Change Management Practices to Support Emerging Technologies in KM.
3. Knowledge Transfer: Ensuring Knowledge is Used
One quarter of KM professionals identified expert knowledge transfer as a top priority for 2024. It has remained an ongoing hot topic in KM and has been the focus of many KM efforts for more than two decades. Retirements, employee ongoing development, onboarding new hires, learning new technologies, improving productivity, and engaging employees are just some of the reasons organizations need to remain focused on incorporating intentional knowledge transfer capabilities. How organizations choose to approach knowledge transfer will remain agile and varied, but it needs to be intentional.
KM is, after all, about ensuring the preservation of our institutional knowledge for the survival and competitiveness of our organizations. Ensuring knowledge has been transferred effectively means that knowledge has not only been communicated or documented, but has been accessed, understood and then put to use again in the same capacity or even evolved in a way that new knowledge emerges.
To learn more about knowledge transfer, consider these additional resources: Understanding Structured Knowledge Transfer and Structured Knowledge Transfer.