Today, I am not here to talk to you so much about gathering and managing external information about the organisation, but rather about internal knowledge within the organisation and its strategic value. Beyond the information that circulates externally, what really drives innovation and sound decisions is the ability to integrate it with existing knowledge within our organisations, and to do this we must place importance on what we already know within our organisations.

The other day, while reading Javier Martínez Aldanondo‘s April newsletter, I came across a reflection that perfectly illustrates a current problem. Imagine asking an AI such as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot about a key decision in your company, an internal process, or your experience with a strategic client. The result? A generic or polite response: ‘I don’t have any information about that.’ But if you ask about Beyoncé’s discography or the Cold War, you get a detailed report. The reason is simple: AI is trained with public information, not with the critical knowledge of your business.

And here lies a major contradiction: many companies are investing millions in artificial intelligence… but they are feeding it with external knowledge, instead of leveraging their intellectual capital. AI can be a powerful tool, but for it to be truly useful, it needs to understand the internal reality of your organisation. And that is only possible if it is trained with the critical knowledge that already exists within it.

Feed with knowledge, not just data

We are feeding AI with ‘paper’: loose data that is easy to obtain but has low nutritional value. What we really need is to feed it with “wood”: deep, contextualised, living knowledge. That ‘wood’ is in the people in your organisation: in their experience, their learning, their mistakes and their recommendations. In order to capture and transform that data into accessible intelligence, it is essential to have a robust surveillance and ideation process that not only detects critical information from the environment, but also converts it into actionable ideas and decisions aligned with business objectives. But if we don’t capture that knowledge and transform it into accessible intelligence, AI will continue to be ignorant of your business.

Corporate AI is much more than just technology

It’s not just about models and algorithms. It’s about having a clear knowledge management strategy: identifying what is critical, capturing it, systematising it, training the AI with it and keeping it up to date with continuous learning.

Imagine if you add to that internal knowledge AI the strategic information you capture with your surveillance system and which is valued by your experts in different areas of surveillance.

Having AI trained with your organisation’s knowledge and combined with the surveillance and intelligence process is not only a competitive advantage: it is like having an expert advisor, always available, who thinks like you and helps you make better decisions every day.