Cognification
The process of adding intelligence to already digitized systems.
Kevin Kelly’s term describes how cognitive capabilities get embedded into existing digital infrastructure, not by replacing systems but by augmenting them with reasoning, retrieval, and generation capabilities.
In knowledge graph contexts, cognification refers to transforming unstructured input into structured, semantically grounded graph representations that can support downstream reasoning. The intelligence isn’t just in the model, it’s in how the system structures, retrieves, and synthesizes information.
This framing shifts attention from “what model are you using?” to “how is intelligence embedded across the entire pipeline?”
Related: 06-molecule—knowledge-graph-construction, 05-molecule—rag-architecture-taxonomy