External signal·California Management Review·Mar 16, 2026·Teresa Tung, Philippe Roussiere·9 min read
Tacit Knowledge Is Your Next Competitive Moat
Summary
Teresa Tung and Philippe Roussiere of Accenture argue that as data becomes abundant and frontier models become widely available, a firm's durable advantage in agentic AI shifts to its tacit knowledge: the reasoning patterns, heuristics, and situational judgment experts accumulate over years. They contend the bottleneck for AI agents is not the model but the uncodified know-how that never made it into documentation. The authors lay out five actions: map where tacit knowledge lives, codify it without flattening its richness, embed it in semantic structures agents can reason with, design human-AI collaboration, and have leaders govern how AI is used. They illustrate with an automaker that built agents to capture how master engineers reasoned.
Predictions for the future of work
The authors predict competitive advantage will accrue to organizations that systematically extract and operationalize the tacit expertise of senior staff, making expert judgment a reusable asset for AI agents rather than something lost to attrition. Roles will shift toward knowledge elicitation, semantic modeling, and supervising human-AI collaboration, while experienced practitioners become sources whose reasoning is codified into agent workflows. They treat this as an active, near-term shift driven by enterprises deploying agentic AI now; the burden falls on leaders to govern adoption and on workers whose know-how must be made explicit.
Originally published by California Management Review · Mar 16, 2026
Read the original at California Management Review