By Noeleen Schenk |
June 20, 2025
Top takeaways from the KIMRA Conference 2025
On Wednesday 4th June, I was lucky enough to attend the KIMRA conference in London. It was a CB Resourcing conference.
The day was absolutely jam-packed with excellent speakers full of ideas, examples and insights into the strategic issues and opportunities facing the knowledge and information management, research and analysis professions.
It’s difficult to distil some of the key takeaways, but here are mine:
1. AI is being used by our profession to gain operational efficiencies
AI is being used by our profession and the businesses we support to gain operational efficiencies. It’s been used to support productivity, for example research into topics, data analysis, due diligence, summaries, supporting early creating thinking. But it does not take the place for the need to original thinking and insights – providing higher strategic value content. It is now increasingly being seen as not so much a tool as a co-creator.
2. AI will not replace the need for human curation
AI and GENAI do not take the place, or replace the need, for human curation, critical thinking, spotting what is missing from the content and deriving insights from those. This will have significant impact on our professional roles.
3. Allow for innovation with AI enabled tools
Analysing the case study experiences it was clear that organisations introducing AI need to allow their staff to be innovative with the tools. People will always find unexpected ways to use the tools, and as long as the tools are not out of governance and that outputs are checked by a human for validation, that is ok. Part of the introduction of AI enabled tools should include messaging that IA outputs aren’t a magic bullet, but they also require human intervention and curation.
4. Quality of prompting is vital
Staff need a conceptual shift and realise that in research we used to arrive at a single version of the truth, however, GENAI answers are probabilistic answers and not the definitive truth. What matters is the quality of prompting, allied with critical thinking.
5. Core skills are important
Core skills that are coming to the fore include digital literacy, flexibility and agility in thinking, and critical thinking and reasoning using deep practitioner level knowledge.
Noeleen Schenk, Director at Metataxis, conludes:
“One of the presenters did mention that organisations must not assume that a quality LLM will make up for poor data quality. However, the elephant in the room for me as an information management professional – was data quality and data governance – this wasn’t discussed. Maybe a topic for next year?”
