Tissue is a complex system consisting of people coming and going, just as biological organisms are made up of individual cells that die and regenerate. However, unlike biological systems where each cell has the complete genetic code of the organism, the institutional knowledge of the organism is fragmented. One individual does not have a perfect picture. For this reason, organizations invent mechanisms to capture, retain and transmit knowledge, ensuring continuity even when individuals ride their bikes. “If HP is the only one who knows what HP knows, you’ll be three times more productive,” said Lew Platt, former CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
The “knowledge management” marketIt is projected to reach $2.5 trillion by 2030. This explosion of future values is attributed in part to the potential and progress of generative AI as a tool to unearth buried data and implicit knowledge and to recontextualize it and provide a better understanding of the past, as well as a more coherent strategic vision of their future.
Today’s standard approach to knowledge management in organizations is constrained by two limitations. First, they often can’t capture the most important thing. It is a vast repository of tacit knowledge that individuals rarely translate into “final” documents. The reasons behind important decisions, the context of near misses and past actions, and the instincts that shaped the culture of the institution, are types of insights that quietly disappear and erode the organization’s ability to learn from itself. Second, traditional systems are built on the assumption that an organization can predict what knowledge will be needed or useful in the future.
aRecent Art ProjectsLeadered by co-author Zoé Vayssières, Harvard’s Institute of Digital Data Design, we can reveal and engrave Harvard’s early “remembers” that provide powerful illustrations of how technology can not only revive the intelligence of revived facilities, but also not revive us, based on raw data such as salary records, rather than existing historical records, and Harvard’s early “remembers” can be revealed and engraved on Harvard’s early “remembers” based solely on the various contexts.
This shift from static knowledge management to dynamic “memory management” unlocks new possibilities for complex organizations. Rather than relying on predefined categories, Genai allows organizations to classify information at search time and surface relevant insights based on the questions being asked, rather than assumptions made during storage. Its responsiveness makes memory more accessible, and more practical. This is not just a technological change, it is a strategic change. For the first time, an organization can treat it not only as a memory store, but as a resource to activate.
What is memory and why organizations lose it
Organizational memory is often mistaken for recordkeeping. But true memories are not merely archives of the past, but mechanisms by which institutions gain consistency, speed and resilience. It captures the values and critical decision factors that influenced leadership and shortens the learning curve for new talent. Without it, businesses could suffer from “strategic amnesia.” Repeated mistakes from the past and culturally drifted with all leadership changes.
Yet, memories remain vulnerable for all their significance. Unlike individuals, organizations do not remember being “centered.” Their memories should be built on email threads, obsolete systems, unorganized folders, and knowledge scattered across the minds of people who leave without being asked what they know. What is recalled in an organization is often shaped not for understanding, but by the structure of the system (e.g. performance metrics) built for documents. At the same time, softer shapes insights tend to disappear.
Ironically, the more data modern organizations generate, the more difficult it becomes to obtain meaningful insights. The real challenge is not a lack of data, but a lack of context and the difficulty of purpose-specific recollection.
Genai allows for better institutional memory
Generated AI changes what is possible by unlocking what already exists, allowing organizations to interact with large, unstructured archives, and ultimately expose forgotten insights, reconnecting scattered information, and buried patterns.
In this sense, Genai for memory management does not function like an organization’s historian, but rather a personalized corporate archaeologist. This recovery and recontextualization allows Genai to gain a deeper understanding of the context of relevant facts, return to the “origin” or determination of the data, and also be reinterpreted in the future based on the new context of that era. The Arts Project, which includes the Harvard University archives, used the Genai model to analyze institutional records over 200 years. The model surfaced what overlooked institutional rules, social roles, and emotional registrations that even historians would have been challenging to reveal.
For example, an analysis of raw historical pay data revealed how organizational priorities change suddenly and gradually. In 1752, the president of Harvard University was in charge of managing housing operations, earning nearly twice the steward. However, by 1779, amid the rapid ups and rising inflation of wartime changes and rising prices, steward salaries had more than tripled, and the president had fallen.
Beyond the broader Times Spain, pay patterns revealed evolving values placed in a variety of academic disciplines. Science gradually overcame theology of compensation, thwarting deeper changes in the institution’s mission. For business leaders, these patterns provide a powerful reminder. During periods of transformation, it is more informal than formal declarations, particularly revealing where the initial impact is. Genai can surface these hidden dynamics, helping us to understand how organizations have historically adapted under pressure, and where culture and forces diverge from structures.
Another example: the resurrection of women who played a role in the early developments of Harvard University but rarely existed in traditional historical accounts. These contributions were not lost, but rather were historically stripped away because they did not reflect what previous generations were trying to emphasize. But when prompted in today’s context, Genai surfaced rich details about more than a dozen leading women (including Squaw Sachem, Anne Dudley Bradstreet and Elizabeth Glover Dunster). A Genai-enabled search of these contributions challenges assumptions about who holds critical knowledge and what roles they play. In a company’s settings, the same blind spot exists. Genai allows organizations to revisit their history with fresh eyes and modern understandings, underrated individuals, overlooked features, or informal systems that quietly maintain performance.
Memories as a strategic use case of genai
Much of the attention around Genai today focuses on automation and productivity, but it has important long-term value Operation The same goes for institutional memory. Genai can use a wide range of applications to enhance onboarding, strategic development, risk management and more. It surfaces overlooked experiments that could make sense under new market conditions, connect fragmented threads between business units, and identify workarounds where repetition is not documented. Leadership transitions and onboarding allow you to maintain informal know-how, not just how the system works, but how things are done.
The example to tell comes fromFrench electricity distribution company RexelAI-powered sales tools designed to recommend Next-Best offers quickly became more than just a productivity enhancer. New employees relied on guidance, but experienced vendors used it to train their systems. In doing so, each embed his tacit knowledge in a tool that could support others. Over time, the platform evolved from a recommended engine to a memory system, capturing expertise that might otherwise have come out the door.
Similar dynamics are being played in software development. Here, AI agent Coday is being developed.whoz– The implicit, undocumented problem-solving techniques and coding style of capture engineers. As Whoz CEO Jean-Philippe Couturier explains, “By turning individual intuition into collective, reusable knowledge, Coday transforms the most intangible aspects of expertise into organizational memories.” Put another way, AI agents not only restore insights, but also expand them.
When genai is used richly, organizations can reconstruct, strengthen and project core DNA. It can surface instincts in decision making, consistent tone of communication, and embedded values that have shaped the organization over time. Genai can transform legacy wisdom from a fixed repository into a dynamic, strategic asset without idealizing it. It can change the platform for future actions that will help organizations move forward with greater consistency and confidence.
Faster and smarter fundamentals of change
During periods of rapid change, organizations simply don’t have to change. They need to change consistently. That consistency ensures that change is not only carried out, but is absorbed and in line with the culture, values and strategic intentions that underlie the institution. As BCG Research Although it is shown, transformations often loosen when they cannot explain informal norms and the shared assumptions governing the way work is truly done. Memory becomes essential in this regard. It is connective tissue that quickly aligns decisions while allowing decisions to be reduced while making faster, while allowing for less overlap, confusion and drift. Without it, businesses will respond in fragmented ways, losing sight of not only where they are, but who they are.
For leaders navigating change, this is both a powerful asset and a change of context. The CEO is no longer the only steward of the past, but not the only storyteller of the future. As institutional memory becomes more accessible across the enterprise, leadership is less about carrying the total weight of continuity and drawing from a shared source of insight. In this context, decisions gain traction not because they are imposed, but because they resonate with what the organization already knows and remembers. Once employees understand the reasons behind previous decisions and how the organization has evolved, they engage not only in their roles, but in the institution itself. Strategic memory becomes a tool for organizational cohesion, reducing information asymmetry, promoting trust, and creating more confident and coordinated conditions for action at all levels.
Genai’s value as a “corporate archaeologist” is not to be reversible. It is building strategic memory as an infrastructure. This isn’t as important as CRM or data warehouse, but it requires embedding memory in onboarding, leadership development and decision-making. In an age of constant reinvention, memory ensures that each reinvention is consistent. Therefore, strategic memory is not merely a record of the past, but an investment in the quality of future decisions, and is an important source of competitive advantage.
Read other fortune columns by François Canderon.
François Canderon He is a partner at private equity company Seven2 and a former global director of BCG Henderson Institute.
Zoé Variety He is an artist and executive fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Digital Data Design.
David Zuluaga Martinez He is the senior director of BCG Henderson Institute.
Amartia Das He is the principal of BCG and ambassador of the BCG Henderson Institute.
Some of the companies mentioned in this column are past or present clients of the author’s employer.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.
