THE KNOWLEDGE THAT ISN’T IN THE MANUAL
You soon find out what isn’t in the manual when your most experienced colleague goes on holiday.
And that’s worth remembering when we ask an AI agent to work from the same manual.
An experienced engineer can hear a pump starting to fail before an alarm sounds. But ask her how she knew and the explanation may be frustratingly brief. What took years to learn now feels obvious.
So getting at that knowledge takes a different sort of conversation. Pick a difficult incident and work through it together. What caught her attention? Why did it matter? What would a newer colleague have missed?
That’s the work of Cognitive Task Analysis. It gives us a way to record the cues behind an expert’s judgement, along with when that judgement applies, so an agent has something useful to draw on.
In ‘What the model never read’, we explore how to put that into practice. So if you’re building agents around the documents you have, it’s worth looking at the knowledge you haven’t captured.
Read the full essay on Integrated Intelligence.
What the model never read:
