By Ashu Roy, CEO, eGain

There’s a blind spot in most boardrooms today, and it’s costing enterprises their competitive edge in the AI era. Despite decades of digital transformation, most organizations still fundamentally misunderstand the strategic value of business knowledge.

The Knowledge Paradox

Walk into any Fortune 500 company and ask who owns customer data. You’ll get a clear answer—likely the Chief Data Officer or Chief Analytics Officer. Ask about transaction data, employee records, or financial information. Again, clear ownership, robust governance, sophisticated management systems.

Now ask who owns business knowledge—the procedures, policies, best practices, and operational expertise that actually drive how work gets done. You’ll likely be met with blank stares or finger-pointing across silos.

This isn’t just an organizational oversight. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what knowledge represents in the modern enterprise.

How We Got Here: The Great Knowledge Undervaluation

Historically, enterprises have fallen into two traps when it comes to business knowledge:

Trap #1: Treating Knowledge as Low-Value Content

Because knowledge is less structured than traditional data, companies have relegated it to second-class status. Customer data gets C-suite attention and million-dollar investments. Business knowledge gets a SharePoint site and a junior content manager.

Trap #2: Treating Knowledge as Compliance Overhead

When organizations do pay attention to knowledge, it’s often purely defensive—policies to control, procedures to audit, documentation to satisfy regulators. Knowledge becomes a cost center focused on risk mitigation, not a strategic asset for value creation.

The result? Critical business knowledge ends up fragmented across departmental silos—customer service has their knowledge base, sales has their playbooks, marketing has their guidelines. Each function creates, manages, and hoards their own content, leading to duplication, inconsistency, and massive inefficiency. Even worse, this knowledge rarely drives actual operations in systematic ways.

The AI Inflection Point: Why Everything Just Changed

The explosion of generative AI and agentic systems has fundamentally altered the economics and strategic importance of business knowledge.

Here’s the inconvenient truth: AI is only as good as the knowledge you feed it.

Want your AI agents to deliver accurate, consistent, compliant customer experiences? They need trusted knowledge. Want to automate complex business processes? You need well-structured procedural knowledge. Want to scale expertise across your organization? You need to capture and systematize the knowledge in your experts’ heads.

The quality of your knowledge directly determines the quality of your AI outcomes. Garbage in, garbage out—but now at the speed and scale of automation.

This means business knowledge has suddenly become your most critical AI fuel. Yet most organizations are trying to power their AI future with knowledge management practices designed for the 1990s intranet era.

The Opportunity: Knowledge as Competitive Advantage

Here’s what forward-thinking leaders are beginning to recognize: business knowledge can be a far more defensible source of competitive advantage than most other assets.

Why? Because knowledge that captures your unique business processes, hard-won expertise, and operational best practices is:

• Difficult to replicate – Your competitors can’t simply buy it or copy it
• Continuously evolving – With AI, you can capture expert knowledge and keep it fresh in ways that were never possible before
• Multiplicative in value – When leveraged by AI, knowledge scales across every operation, every customer interaction, every decision point

The companies that figure out how to systematically capture, curate, and deploy their business knowledge through AI will outperform those that continue to treat it as an afterthought.

The Leadership Gap: Where’s Your Chief Knowledge Officer?

Here’s a question every board should be asking: Who on your executive team is responsible for business knowledge?

Almost every large enterprise now has a Chief Data Officer or Chief Analytics Officer. Many have Chief Digital Officers. Some are adding Chief AI Officers.

But how many have a Chief Knowledge Officer? Or even a C-suite executive with knowledge management clearly in their remit?

This gap is stunning when you consider that knowledge—not data—is the real bottleneck to AI effectiveness. You can have pristine data warehouses and cutting-edge AI models, but without trusted, well-managed knowledge to guide them, you’ll automate your way to inconsistent, unreliable, or even dangerous outcomes.

The CEO Imperative: Three Questions to Ask Tomorrow

If you’re a CEO or board member, here are the questions you should be asking your executive team this week:

1. Who owns business knowledge in our organization? Not content management, not document control—actual strategic ownership of knowledge as a corporate asset.
2. How are we capturing and systematizing the expertise in our people’s heads? With AI tools, this is now technically feasible at scale. Are you doing it?
3. How is our knowledge architecture enabling or limiting our AI ambitions? If you’re investing millions in AI but haven’t modernized your approach to knowledge management, you’re building on quicksand.

The Path Forward

The organizations that will win in the AI era will be those that recognize this moment for what it is: a fundamental revaluation of business knowledge from operational overhead to strategic asset.

This starts with leadership. CEOs and boards must elevate knowledge stewardship to a strategic priority, with clear executive ownership, appropriate investment, and integration into AI initiatives from day one.

The opportunity is enormous. The window won’t stay open forever. Your competitors are likely just as blind to this as you’ve been—but the first movers who crack the code on knowledge-powered AI will build advantages that are very difficult to overcome.

The question isn’t whether to treat business knowledge as invaluable IP. The question is whether you’ll recognize it before or after your competition does.

Ashu Roy is CEO of eGain, a leader in AI knowledge solutions for customer experience and enterprise automation.