AI Operates Primarily in Combination Mode

Through Nonaka’s SECI lens, AI systems operate primarily in Combination mode, reconfiguring, synthesizing, and recontextualizing explicit knowledge, with limited capacity for the other three modes.

Combination (Explicit → Explicit): AI excels here. Large language models sort, add, recategorize, and recontextualize vast bodies of explicit knowledge. RAG systems combine knowledge from multiple sources. This is where AI is genuinely powerful.

Socialization (Tacit → Tacit): AI cannot participate. This requires shared physical experience, embodied presence, and the kind of cognitive synchronization that happens when humans work alongside each other. No prompt engineering creates this.

Externalization (Tacit → Explicit): AI can assist but cannot originate. It can help a human articulate what they know, acting as a dialogue partner, but it has no tacit knowledge of its own to externalize. It can generate metaphors, but not from lived experience.

Internalization (Explicit → Tacit): AI has no body or practice context. It cannot “learn by doing” in the embodied sense. There is no tacit knowledge layer for explicit knowledge to sink into.

This explains why AI augments rather than replaces human knowledge work: three of four knowledge creation modes require human presence.

Related: 06-molecule—seci-framework, 06-molecule—tacit-vs-explicit-knowledge