The Consortium helps you make progress on complex and evolving challenges without having to figure them out alone or start from scratch.
Consortium guidance evolves based on what Members and the wider community are trying, learning, and adapting in real time. This past quarter, we hosted more than 650 people from 300+ different companies across 21 workshops or events.
What did we observe? Amongst accelerating change, we’re still seeing an evergreen progression: get the foundation right → connect the work to value → evolve the organization around it.
1. Build a stronger foundation for AI
AI progress is a knowledge and operating model challenge rather than a technology requirement.
- How do you give AI access to knowledge that people can trust?
- What new work is required to evaluate and improve AI outputs?
- Which use cases are ready now, and which are still more aspiration than reality?
An Open Space conversation from Service Innovation Summit about AI and Knowledge Domain Analysis (KDA) has turned into follow-up sessions about how AI-powered digital agents are changing knowledge roles and responsibilities, including new AI skills for knowledge experts, evaluation of agent conversations, and shifts toward technical content development. We are continuing to turn those examples into a clearer view of potential KDA + AI activities and responsibilities.
During sessions focused on AI-Ready Knowledge Ecosystems and Knowledge with AI, Knowledge from AI, Knowledge for AI, participants compared what they are building and learning.
Members shared their experiments with agentic knowledge programs, proactive agents, knowledge guardianship, and multi-agent approaches.
We saw implementations that help people use knowledge, insights generated from AI activity, and the evolving effort required to create and govern knowledge for AI.
This is the context in which KCS evolved into Knowledge-Centered Success: AI agents and LLMs are only as useful as the knowledge they can access. The updated methodology puts even more emphasis on creating structured, trusted knowledge that improves through use and can support people and AI across the enterprise.
How to build a stronger foundation for AI
- For everyone: Explore The Next Era of KCS: Understanding Why So AI Can Help with How for a practical overview of why knowledge has become such an important part of AI readiness.
- For Members: Use the AI Blueprint for a comprehensive approach to strategy, prioritization, implementation, governance, and continuous improvement.
- Looking ahead: Save the date for Service Innovation Summit 2027 (April 26-29 in Boulder, Colorado) for the best opportunity to learn from enterprises having the most success with Knowledge and AI.
The AI knowledge opportunity lives in the content ecosystem underneath the model, not in producing more content. We’ve spent years documenting answers. The next step is building the connective tissue — architecture that lets AI reason across a knowledge ecosystem built around what customers actually need to accomplish.
Aurélia Guillaume-Fabbri, Autodesk
2. Connect service & support to customer and company value
Efficiency still matters, but is no longer a sufficient story about the value of service and support.
- What would become possible if organizations had a function specifically focused on customer value realization?
- What new cross-functional capabilities could this function create?
- What are we learning that the rest of the company can use?
AI is changing demand, customer journeys, and how work gets done. If organizations continue to measure success primarily through tickets or cost reduction metrics, they risk missing much of the value service and support already creates.
In our Measuring and Communicating Value working group, Ping Identity shared how they are looking beyond visits to owned content to understand more of the customer’s self-service journey—including what happens before someone ever reaches the company’s knowledge base. That conversation will continue in a Member Meetup in July.
We also continued exploring how organizations can recognize the value of KCS earlier, rather than waiting for a fully mature program or a perfect ROI calculation. The Knowledge Optimization technique in the new Knowledge-Centered Success Practices Guide offers one path: use patterns in demand and knowledge to identify opportunities for better experiences, better products, and better business outcomes.
How to connect service & support to customer and company value
- For everyone: See the latest additions to Customer Experience Models, especially Service Organization’s New Value and Value Map Framework, to consider the value your organization creates beyond resolving issues.
- For Members: Executive Director Matt Seaman is offering tailored AI Paradox workshops to give Member company teams a shared view and discussion of what the current AI landscape means for their own organization. Contact us to schedule for your team.
- Looking ahead: Join us September 30 for Support as the Company Value Engine: Measuring What Matters, a three-hour session on repositioning service and support around revenue, trust, and outcomes that matter to the business.
I found it helpful to get a lay of the landscape for how many of our customers and prospects are experiencing AI during this snapshot in time. It made me feel like there could be a real need for seamless knowledge solutions, first-class support, and consulting from a trusted organization like Upland Software!”
Lana Kosnik, Upland RightAnswers
3. Prepare your people and organization for changing work
People are the shock absorbers when technology changes faster than most roles, structures, and leadership practices.
- What new responsibilities are emerging?
- How should teams organize around them?
- How do leaders help people navigate the transition?
AI is automating some work and exposing places where existing organizational models no longer make sense. New work is accumulating around AI evaluation, knowledge curation, cross-functional insight, and helping people and agents learn from one another.
The Organizational Change & Emerging Roles Innovation Lab explored the roles and skills organizations are beginning to need. The AI + KDA follow-up conversations surfaced concrete examples of that shift in knowledge work. Members are seeing responsibilities emerge around evaluating agent conversations, curating knowledge for AI, connecting operational insights across the business, and helping technical experts contribute in new ways.
Multiple sessions on the idea of a coherent organization connected many of these threads. New technology layered onto fragmented processes, unclear ownership, and disconnected teams rarely produces the transformation organizations expect. Q2 conversations explored what it takes to align people, process, knowledge, technology, and measures around a clearer purpose.
How to prepare your people and organization for changing work
- For everyone: Use Taking Leadership Personally: Turning Principles into Action to get explicit about the values that shape how you lead, especially when roles, expectations, and ways of working are changing.
- For Members: Chief Engagement Officer (and Certified Professional Coach) Kelly Murray is offering a fun, hour-long exercise to help leaders articulate their own values on the path to developing leadership presence. Contact her to schedule!
- Looking ahead: Build the leadership perspective and skills needed to make knowledge sharing and collaboration part of how work gets done in an upcoming KCS Leadership workshop.
“You get what you inspect, not what you expect.”
Dave Cutler, Palo Alto Networks
Shaping the Future of Customer Engagement
The questions organizations are facing right now do not have simple or complete answers, which is exactly why the Consortium brings together challenges, experiments, and experience from across the industry.
If one of these challenges is on your plate, use the resources above, join an upcoming event, or add a comment below about anything particular on your mind.
Chances are that someone else is working through it too, and we’re here to connect you to collaborative answers!
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