Tacit-Knowledge Elicitation Agent

Problem

Tacit knowledge is, by definition, not in the corpus, so a retrieval layer pointed only at documents returns the documented procedure and silently omits the expert judgement that actually decides outcomes. The expert cannot simply be asked to write it down, because much of what they know is unconscious and surfaces only when a concrete situation is interrogated. Without a deliberate elicitation step, every downstream agent inherits a knowledge base that looks complete but is missing the load-bearing decision criteria, and its answers are confidently shallow.

Solution

Treat externalisation as an explicit pipeline phase that runs before the task agents are switched on. An interviewing agent works through veteran staff with open-ended, case-anchored questions, capturing transcripts of how each concrete decision was actually made. A processing step transcribes the sessions, then automatically summarises and classifies the content, extracting the decision criteria and rules of thumb that distinguish an expert's call from a novice's. A consolidation step merges these with existing internal and external documents and writes them into a structured knowledge base — schema-tagged criteria, worked cases, and the conditions under which each applies — that downstream retrieval and task agents query. The phase maps onto the SECI externalisation move: turn what was tacit and individual into explicit, organisational knowledge that can be reused and reproduced.

When to use

• The decisive knowledge for a task lives in a few experts' heads and is largely absent from the documents a retrieval layer can index.
• Those experts are at risk of leaving, retiring, or being unavailable, so the know-how must be captured before it is lost.
• Downstream agents will repeatedly query the captured knowledge, so a one-time elicitation cost is amortised across many uses.