You know the person. The developer who’s been with the company for a decade—the one who remembers why the billing API uses a quirky authentication method from 2016, or why touching that one legacy service in the back end triggers a cascading failure across the system. They’re the living, breathing repository of institutional knowledge. When they leave, a crucial piece of your company’s collective memory vanishes with them. For years, we’ve been promised that AI would solve this. The narrative was clear: intelligent systems would absorb every line of code, every decision log, every undocumented workaround, and preserve the essence of how things actually work. We’d finally have a system that never forgets, never retires, and never quits. But here, in late 2025, a sobering truth is emerging: companies are investing billions in AI capable of generating code at lightning speed, yet they’re doing so on a foundation of institutional amnesia. The systems are smarter than ever, but the knowledge they’re built upon is disappearing. The real issue isn’t the AI’s intelligence—it’s the gap between what AI can process and what it can’t. AI excels at pattern recognition, code generation, and optimization. But it struggles with context, nuance, and the unspoken rules that govern real-world systems. It can’t understand why a certain database schema was designed the way it was, or why a workaround was implemented during a crisis that no one documented. We’ve been asking the wrong question. We’re fixated on the AI’s IQ—how fast it can write code, how many bugs it can catch—but we’re ignoring the far more critical question: How much of the company’s real knowledge is locked in the minds of people who aren’t being preserved, captured, or passed on? The solution isn’t just better AI. It’s better systems for knowledge retention. It’s deliberate practices—like structured onboarding, documented decision records, and regular knowledge-sharing rituals—that ensure institutional wisdom doesn’t vanish when someone walks out the door. Because the most valuable asset in your company isn’t the AI. It’s the context, the history, the unspoken rules—the stuff your AI can’t read. And if you don’t protect it, no amount of artificial intelligence will save you when the lights go out.