Preserving Institutional Knowledge | Part 3: How AI Can Help

In Parts 1 and 2 of our three-part series with Amy Bonner, VP of PRINTING AI, PRINTING United Alliance, we explored what print businesses risk losing when experienced employees leave and how they can begin capturing the institutional knowledge that matters most.

The real value comes from making it accessible and useful to the people who need it. In Part 3 of Preserving Institutional Knowledge, Bonner explains how print businesses can put captured knowledge to work, keep it relevant over time, and use AI to help turn decades of experience into a resource for the next generation of employees.

Amy Servi-Bonner, VP of PRINTING AI, PRINTING United Alliance

How can AI support knowledge capture and make that information easier to organize, search, and share across a company?

Once the knowledge is captured, AI is what makes it usable at the moment someone actually needs it, at 6 am on the floor, not buried in a binder in the office. We call the result an AI Employee, a role-specific AI trained on your people's actual knowledge, not generic training data. It holds context through a real diagnostic conversation the way a human expert would, and it's available every shift regardless of who you can hire that week.

The part that matters most is the governance layer underneath it. A good AI Employee is built to know which calls it can make and which ones it has to hand back to a person. That's not a technology feature; it's a design decision, and it's the difference between AI that's useful and AI that quietly makes calls nobody actually authorized. The tool captures and organizes the knowledge. The governance is what makes it safe to actually use.

What's one piece of advice you'd give print businesses that want to protect decades of expertise before it walks out the door?

Start before the announcement, not after. The window where you have full cooperation and enough time to do this right is open right now, for most operations, and it closes the moment someone gives notice. Pick one person. The one who came to mind when you asked yourself who would make your stomach drop. Start the capture with them this quarter, not next year.

And reframe what you're actually protecting. This was never really a documentation problem. It's a decision governance problem. The knowledge that makes your operation great took decades to build. The question isn't whether you can afford to capture it before it leaves. It's whether you can afford not to.

Is there a real-world example you can share?

I'll give you one from my own history, before PRINTING AI even existed. I was interim CIO at a print company in Michigan for a few years, and we had a graphic designer who had carried a major automotive OEM program for a very long time. When he retired, on paper it looked like a simple replacement. Anyone can pick up the design work. What actually walked out the door was the program DNA. Years of working inside that specific OEM's brand specifications, the particular way each dealership relationship needed to be handled, every exception that had ever come up, and how it got resolved. None of that was written down anywhere because it never had to be. It lived in one person's head, built one job at a time over years.

The impact on the team was real, and I don't say this lightly. It was almost like grief. People weren't just scrambling operationally; they were mourning. That experience is what pushed me to build an actual methodology for capturing that kind of knowledge before it walks out, and I built the first version of it in 2019, using AI to help structure the capture. It was early, and the tools were nowhere near what we have now, but the core idea held up: You cannot rely on someone remembering to document their own judgment on the way out the door. You have to go get it deliberately, while they're still there, and you need a structured process to pull it out, not a request to write it down. That early methodology is the direct ancestor of what we do at PRINTING AI today. Technology has caught up. The problem, and the discipline it takes to solve it, never changed.

Preserving institutional knowledge is an ongoing effort, but print businesses don’t have to navigate it alone.

Learn more about PRINTING AI and the resources available to help companies explore practical ways to use AI, preserve critical expertise, and prepare their workforce for what’s next.