A few weeks ago I joined Katie Cash from Smartegies on the AEC Marketing for Principals podcast to talk about how knowledge management is evolving in the AI era. The episode is called “Knowledge is Power: How AEC Firms Are Leveraging Data to Win Smarter.”
The upside of AI for AEC marketing is enormous: faster research, better positioning, richer storytelling, and time saved on repetitive work. But those gains depend on high-quality firmwide knowledge. Marketers are discovering that AI doesn’t magically retrieve the right information from existing systems and network drives — it only accelerates what has been made accurate, structured, and accessible.
This is why marketing teams are increasingly becoming the builders and stewards of their firms’ knowledge foundation.
As I re-listened to the episode, five observations stood out to me about where I think marketing, knowledge management, and AI go from here.
Five Observations
1. AI Is Removing the Retrieval Barrier — How Solid Is Your Knowledge Foundation?
For years, many AEC firms have made progress in knowledge management — especially those that invested early in good data, well-documented project history, and stronger storytelling. Those firms are now seeing early and more substantial benefits from AI because they already have a cultural, procedural, and technical foundation in place.
The historical challenge for those early movers in AEC knowledge management was one of retrieval — for the marketing teams and others involved in marketing activities. Searching and filtering database fields for more complicated questions was difficult for even the most seasoned/tech forward users. This was a huge barrier and dampened enthusiasm for knowledge capture.
But retrieval is no longer the limiting factor — with AI solutions like Synthesis AI Search the user can now search your knowledge base using natural, conversational language, making accessing knowledge significantly easier. Now the bottleneck is the quality of the knowledge itself.
Firms increasingly recognize that AI can accelerate marketing, but only if the knowledge it draws from is accurate, structured, and ready for reuse. And that’s why this conversation has moved to the executive level: to fully unlock the promise of AI, firms need to establish solid knowledge foundations.
2. Externalizing and Digitizing Expertise Makes It Scalable and Marketable
In most AEC firms, deep expertise still lives with a handful of people — the architect who knows healthcare planning inside and out, the MEP lead who has solved fifty data center challenges, the planner who can walk into a community meeting and predict issues before they arise. That expertise is real, but it is also finite. A firm can only deploy it on as many projects as one person can personally touch.
When deep expertise remains internalized in people rather than externalized and digitized, your firm’s ability to scale is limited. Once the expertise is documented, structured, and made available to others, the expert is no longer the bottleneck — they become the force-multiplier. Plus, they can spend more time advancing the practice, mentoring emerging experts, and less time re-explaining what they already know.
The same shift that unlocks the capacity to scale and deliver expertise also fuels marketing capacity. When knowledge is digitized, marketing teams don’t need to chase subject matter experts or depend on recall — they can draw directly from the firm’s knowledge base to assist in positioning, pursuit strategy, and storytelling.
3. Why AEC Firms Are Moving Toward a Mindset of Continuous Onboarding
The pace of change in AEC means people are stepping into new responsibilities faster than ever before — not only because technology is evolving rapidly, but because of demographics. As Baby Boomers retire and the smaller Gen X cohort caps out in capacity, Millennials and Gen Z are being asked to lead earlier: managing teams, interfacing with clients, and pursuing work long before prior generations would have performed those roles. This demographic shift creates a new urgency around faster and more intentional upskilling.
This is why continuous onboarding is becoming a mindset rather than a moment. It doesn’t replace apprenticeship — people still need repetition, coaching, and judgment earned through real work — but digital knowledge and learning foundations can dramatically accelerate readiness. When people can access the 101s and 201s of a building type, client type, or delivery method on their own time via a learning management solution like Synthesis LMS, they arrive at the mentoring moment better prepared, more confident, and able to learn at a higher altitude.
As firms move toward being modern learning organizations, marketing isn’t just telling the firm’s story externally — it is helping to create and shape learning experiences internally as well. By influencing the UX of knowledge access, the design of learning touchpoints, and the clarity of internal narratives, marketing plays a direct role in the firm’s ability to scale capability — which is now a prerequisite for growth.
4. Create Business Value First — Then Scale KM Roles and Tools
The question many firms are asking right now is whether they need to hire a knowledge manager or stand up a new KM function. In practice, the more strategic starting point would be to create visible business value using the resources you already have. When knowledge work is tied directly to growth, quality, or talent outcomes, it earns executive sponsorship naturally — because leaders can see the return.
This is why the most successful KM efforts don’t begin with staffing or platforms; they begin with solving a problem the business already cares about. For example, faster proposals, clearer positioning, better onboarding for a key practice area, or more consistent storytelling. If you solve one or more of these problems in a measurable way, it quickly becomes obvious why the firm should invest in a durable KM capability that can be formalized and scaled.
For marketers specifically, this might mean improving project data to support better search and pursuit strategy, mining past proposals into more accurate and reusable language, or helping experts translate what they know into teachable formats that can scale beyond them. Once leadership sees that kind of lift, the question shifts from “Why KM?” to “How soon can we get more of this?”
5. Structured Knowledge Unlocks the Upside of AI for Marketing
AI delivers its strongest value when it can operate on top of a clear and trustworthy representation of what the firm actually knows. High-quality, structured knowledge doesn’t just help marketing move faster; it enables confident marketing — positioning rooted in verified truth..
Right now, firms are approaching AI in two very different ways:
In Approach 1, AI is pointed at a large pile of past deliverables — hundreds of proposals or narratives that contain an array of slightly different “truths.” When you ask a question like “What was the square footage of the Canal Street residential project?” — you have no idea which proposal the AI system will use as a source.
In Approach 2, the firm curates and structures critical knowledge so there is a single authoritative answer in their knowledge base — one that is easily explainable, maintainable, and integrated with other systems. The result is dramatically higher reliability and interpretability.
Taking the time to structure core knowledge — project data, expertise narratives, client histories, differentiators, and boilerplate language — is what enables AI to become a strategic accelerant instead of a slot machine. Structured knowledge is what allows AI to operate as a force multiplier for your marketing team.
Listen to the Full Conversation
If these observations resonate, you’ll enjoy the full discussion with Katie — especially the examples of how firms are reorganizing themselves around knowledge as a growth capability.