Institutional memory

Artificial intelligence introduces something new into that process.

For most of human organizational history, institutional memory has been carried by people and artifacts.

Stories, documents, procedures, emails, meeting notes, policies, and traditions.

Preserved pieces of what happened.

AI can make far more of that memory accessible.

An organization can increasingly interrogate enormous collections of past information and retrieve patterns that no individual employee could possibly remember that could make institutional memory more powerful.

It could also make institutional mythology more durable.

If the archive contains an old assumption repeated 500 times, AI may discover 500 pieces of supporting language.

Her fix isn't more tooling.

It's a chief of staff AI that sits inside the channels where work already happens, assembling institutional memory in real time and surfacing it before the CISO has to go digging.

But how much of a security program's institutional memory currently lives only in one person's head? Oh, we've got a history of this in technology like crazy.

So I'll ask you, Andy, most decisions are based on options.

Can AI help surface these options for the CISO to start making decisions? Like you would think this would make sense.

The, the problem is your organizational design, not your use of AI or not.

Okay.

If you do not value institutional memory as an organization, then AI is not going to help you.

I ended up interviewing my grandpa like a bunch of times over the course of the semester to like get that information that had only been kind of an oral tradition in our family.

There's a version of that to be done in this organization, potentially.

How do we set up a rhythm of gathering around the folks who have the wisdom and systematically extracting that through interviews? This is very obviously a place, I think, where AI transcription and summarization would be a useful tool.

So that's the straightforward part of it.

And then the other part where my brain goes is, okay, well, why maybe has this organization resisted doing this in the past? There's probably a lot of power in having information, especially if it is not written down anywhere.

And that's super hard to do in writing.

And so one way to maybe start making some moves this direction, and I'm not saying that this is just about a leader.

I'm assuming that there's sort of this tradition of oral storytelling generally, is can you start leaning into... more like the sharing of loom videos or the summarizing of transcripts from meetings because those things like let people have a little bit more texture and a little bit more control rather than just like i wrote this static thing one time and now it might haunt me forever i think like starting to shift in those ways to things that have more permanence more shareability um than just you know stories told in in the hallway but not the same level of formality and potential scrutiny as like hardcore documentation and again i'm not talking about like workflow and like processes like you gotta just write that down but because you specifically mentioned storytelling you know i'm talking about like stories and nuance and things that require like narrative and context and whatever.

Absolutely.

You aren't just paying for their time, you are paying to internalize institutional memory.

Precisely.

When you hire an employee, their learnings compound inside your venture.