Featured Guests
Andrea Moede, Knowledge Specialist, EUA
Jim Martin, Vice President and CIO, Shepley Bulfinch
Marco Marcoccia, Manager, Knowledge Management, Turner Fleischer
Webinar Summary
How do you transfer knowledge from retiring experts?
AEC firms have been working on this challenge for years with varying degrees of success. What’s changing is how easily we can capture that expertise and make it useful. Video, transcription, and AI agents are creating new possibilities for helping employees learn from their colleagues’ experience and apply it in the flow of work.
In this 90-minute webinar, EUA, Shepley Bulfinch, and Turner Fleischer shared three approaches to expert knowledge transfer, supported by Synthesis Knowledge Agents:
EUA is preserving 25 years of specifications questions and answers from a retiring expert through a Knowledge Agent called Marty+, with a dedicated team maintaining and growing that knowledge.
Shepley Bulfinch brought employees into one-on-one interviews with retiring leaders, creating immediate learning opportunities and a collection of recorded expertise others can explore through a Knowledge Agent.
Turner Fleischer captured a retiring senior contract administrator’s experience through guided conversations, then used a Knowledge Agent to help identify lessons, knowledge gaps, and opportunities to improve practice guidance.
Following the presentations, Susan Strom, Chief Client Officer at Knowledge Architecture, facilitated a conversation about encouraging experts to share, designing useful interviews, maintaining captured knowledge, and where human relationships and judgment remain essential.
One of the most important insights emerged toward the end of the conversation: these approaches don’t just apply to retiring experts.
An upcoming retirement can create urgency, but the broader opportunity is to continuously preserve, strengthen, and scale the critical capabilities your firm depends on to succeed. Whenever difficult-to-replace and highly useful knowledge is concentrated in a single person or a few people, AEC firms can proactively use the techniques shared in this webinar to transfer that knowledge more broadly through their organizations.
Webinar Timeline
Introduction
00:00 Welcome and Defining Critical Knowledge
Andrea Moede of EUA
02:19 Meet Marty, EUA's Specifications Expert
05:06 25 Years of Documented Questions and Answers
07:53 Every Firm Has a Marty: Building a Lasting Agent
12:18 Marty+ Knowledge Agent Demo
Jim Martin of Shepley Bulfinch
17:18 Interviews with Retiring Leaders at Shepley Bulfinch
22:38 15 Hours of Interviews? Put an Agent On It
25:44 Lessons Learned
28:35 Expert Interview Knowledge Agent Demo
Marco Marcoccia of Turner Fleischer
35:13 Capturing Expert Judgment at Turner Fleischer
39:34 Building the Knowledge Analyst Agent
47:43 Knowledge Analyst Agent Demo: Reviewing the Output
51:46 Applying Captured Expertise to Practice Guidance
Q+A
54:32 Q: Why not use a Gemini notebook?
1:00:43 Q: When did you formalize your capture process?
1:03:24 Q: How do you convince experts to participate?
1:06:33 Q: Why use an agent vs AI search?
1:09:38 Q: How did you build your agent actions?
1:17:55 Q: What do we lose without the expert in the room?
1:22:15 Q: What's the minimum time to capture knowledge?
