Companies often worry about losing customers, market share or profits. However, there is another asset that is much more difficult to measure and probably much more expensive to recover: the knowledge that people accumulate. What happens when an engineer with thirty years of experience retires? Or when a researcher, a programmer or a manager decides to leave for another company or even another country? On many occasions, not only a worker disappears. So do thousands of hours of experiencedecisions, learned mistakes, relationships with clients and solutions that were never written in any manual.
This phenomenon, known as loss of organizational knowledge, is increasingly worrying large companies. According to a survey carried out by Entelgy among 300 CEOs and directors of large Spanish companies, 45% consider that the loss of this knowledge can compromise up to half of certain financial and operational results.
For decades, the wealth of a company was measured by its factories, its buildings or its machinery. Today, a good part of its value lies in something much more intangible: human capital. It is not a minor issue. According to the BBVA Foundation Human capital constitutes the main productive factor in Spain. In 2021 its value was estimated at 15.2 trillion euros, approximately four times higher than the country’s physical capital stock. However, that same report warns of a worrying trend: the value of human capital per inhabitant has decreased by 19.1% since 2000, mainly due to the aging of the population and factors related to the labor market. In other words, the most important resource of the Spanish economy is also one of the most fragile.
Added to this problem is another that Spain has known for years: the emigration of highly qualified professionals. Each engineer, doctor or scientist who develops his career in another country represents an educational investment made by Spanish society whose benefits end up being generated outside its borders. The Valencian Institute of Economic Research (Ivie) has estimated that the value of human capital lost as a result of emigration exceeds 150,000 million eurosa figure that shows that the flight of talent not only has personal consequences, but also economic ones.
Paradoxically, while companies try to preserve the knowledge of those who retire, the country continues to see how some of its most prepared professionals develop their careers abroad. Thus, one of the biggest problems is that much of the accumulated experience is never documented. How to resolve a particularly complex fault. Which provider responds best to an emergency. How to interpret certain production data. Or simply what mistakes should not be repeated. This knowledge, tacit and tactical, constitutes the authentic memory of an organization.
For years, keeping it depended on cross-generational mentoring and the ability to pass on experience before a retirement. Today a new ally begins to appear. Artificial intelligence as external memory. FFaced with the idea that AI will only replace jobs, many companies are beginning to use it to preserve the knowledge of those who are already part of the organization.
According to the Entelgy survey, 46% of managers believe that artificial intelligence will favor the creation of new specialized jobs, while 31.7% believe that it will help retain talent through more personalized policies. Only 22.3% expect that its implementation will mainly lead to staff cuts. Applications are already beginning to spread: models capable of automatically documenting procedures, assistants that answer questions using the experience accumulated by veteran employees, or predictive systems that identify talent flight risks before they occur.
For years, the biggest dream in many sectors was that AI would replace certain functions, that is, replace humans. Now its role may be almost the opposite, dedicated to preventing the human experience from disappearing. For the first time, artificial intelligence could be a reliable and specific resource dedicated to a company’s memory. Powered by humans. That would be a paradigm shift.