What does your best operator know?

What does your best operator know that the SOP doesn’t?

She hears a slight change in a pump and eases back the load before any alarm goes off.

Ask her why and the answer might be tricky to explain. Years of experience teach us to know, intuitively, when something isn’t quite right. But we might not have a form of words to express the feeling it elicits.

Our new paper ‘Tacit Fragments’ explores how organisations can capture small pieces of this expert judgement – without turning them straight into rules, or letting an AI decide when they apply.

How are they captured? It can start with a short question at the right moment – a fragment of experience recorded with where it came from and when it applies. And a human review before an agent can use it.

Over time, AI can then gain something documents alone can’t provide: access to the judgements people make when doing the job.

Because in-the-end-at-the-end? Knowing the procedure isn’t the same thing as knowing the work.

Interesting ideas? Read the full thought piece, written by Arsalan Shahid (opens in a new tab), Gordon Suttie and Philip Black (opens in a new tab), with Antonio Garzón-Vico (opens in a new tab) of University College Dublin (opens in a new tab).

The paper: https://www.preprints.org/manuscript/202608.0927 (opens in a new tab)

Metis reference architecture + open code: https://github.com/BrightbeamAI/metis (opens in a new tab)