Boulder Associates is a 250-person architecture, interior design, and consulting firm based in Boulder, Colorado. The business challenge they’ve taken on with knowledge management is a big one:
How do you scale expert knowledge across a firm of 250, when your subject matter experts are busy, billable, and deeply embedded in project work?
In this 8-minute clip from my “KM 3.0” webinar, I share how Boulder Associates is doing just that—starting with one of their top experts in healthcare design, Darci Hernandez, and a looming deadline that’s reshaping hospital planning in California.
Darci has deep experience navigating SB 1953, a seismic safety mandate requiring California hospitals to meet compliance standards by 2030. While the legislation itself is public, Darci’s knowledge goes beyond the text—into the messy reality of how health systems are actually responding, what trade-offs they’re making, and how architects can help clients manage risk and make informed decisions.
So how do you capture all that insight without asking Darci to write a white paper she doesn’t have time to write?
Todd Henderson, Boulder’s Director of Practice Improvement, sat down with her for a recorded interview. Then he used Synthesis to automatically transcribe the video, ran it through AI tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT to generate takeaways and summaries, and published the resulting page to their intranet—where it’s now indexed by AI Search and easy to retrieve when teammates have questions like:
“What is SB 1953 and how are our clients responding to it?”
“How can I help a hospital client weigh their retrofit options?”
“Who at Boulder can help me go deeper on this topic?”
The same playbook was used with Emily Nightingale, a Bluebeam expert at Boulder, to answer questions like:
“When should I use Bluebeam Sessions vs. Projects?”
“What’s the best way to do redlining in Bluebeam for project workflows?”
This approach—record, transcribe, summarize, publish, index—delivers on the promise of KM 3.0.
It’s efficient for experts. It respects their time. And it turns deep, tacit knowledge into accessible, actionable assets that scale—without sacrificing nuance.
And when AI Search surfaces an answer from one of these interviews, it doesn’t just give you information—it links directly to the expert who said it, so you know where it came from and who to follow up with if you need more.
This is KM 3.0 in action.
Not just storing knowledge—but helping people find it, trust it, and use it in the flow of work.
