Blog: Expertise
What stops when your most experienced person is unavailable?
Published by Forever Foundry
A problem appears. Work pauses. Someone calls the person who always knows the answer.
That person may be your best engineer, an experienced operator or the colleague who understands every exception in the order system.
Their expertise is valuable. The queue around it can be expensive.
AI is changing access to expertise
On 8 October, SAP published an account of warehouse automation company KNAPP’s use of an AI assistant to help workers resolve problems without waiting for an expert.
SAP reports that issue-resolution times fell by about 90%. This is a vendor-published customer result; the article does not provide enough measurement detail to treat it as a benchmark for other organisations. Read SAP’s account.
The FOFO™ view
The opportunity starts with identifying where the business depends on knowledge that too few people can access.
Imagine a manufacturer where one experienced colleague handles recurring production queries.
Some answers may already exist in approved instructions. Others depend on knowing which document applies, recognising an unusual condition or understanding why the standard process sometimes fails.
Those are different problems.
An AI assistant might make reliable instructions easier to find. Undocumented exceptions may first need investigation. Decisions involving safety or quality may still require qualified human judgement.
Listening to both the expert and the people waiting for help reveals what should change.
Find the knowledge queues
Before buying a tool, ask:
- Which questions repeatedly reach the same person?
- How long does work wait for an answer?
- Where is the answer held, and who keeps it current?
- Which cases need judgement rather than information?
- What happens when the expert is absent?
Choose one recurring problem and record the baseline. Measure waiting time, resolution time, repeat queries, errors and expert interruptions.
Test whether people can resolve appropriate cases correctly with less support. Faster answers have little value if they increase rework or send people confidently in the wrong direction.
The value of a faster answer still has to be proven in financial terms. Read why your CFO should help choose the AI problem.
AI Compass™ uses AI to listen across the organisation, bringing these hidden dependencies into the evidence. Slid3rs™ helps your people compare their importance with other priorities. FlowRoom™ supports leadership agreement on what happens next.
The aim is to make expertise available where it creates value, while giving experienced people more time for the decisions that need them.
Before automating around the expert, check the process itself. Read why you should not automate a process nobody would design today.
Find the knowledge bottlenecks worth addressing. Explore AI Compass™.
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