You Don’t Need to Find the Expert

An LLM agent achieved 94.9% full-knowledge recall about organizational data assets without ever contacting the original domain specialist who held complete knowledge.

The agent reconstructed complete documentation by aggregating partial knowledge from employees who had received fragments through informal channels. The correlation between reaching the expert and achieving high-quality descriptions was essentially zero (-0.06).

This challenges a core assumption in knowledge management: that capturing tacit knowledge requires identifying and eliciting from the people who hold it. If knowledge has already fragmented through an organization, the fragments may be sufficient, if you can find and assemble them.

Related: 05-atom—knowledge-epidemic-model, 06-molecule—distributed-knowledge-reconstruction