This blog content comes from an interview conducted on March 9, 2026. For more information or context, watch the full episode where you get your podcasts.
“We don’t have 20 years to build a 20-year architect anymore. We have to become much more explicit and intentional about building their skills and capabilities.”
- Christopher Parsons, Founder and CEO, Knowledge Architecture
Knowledge management used to be a phrase most AEC leaders rarely heard. Now it shows up in executive conversations everywhere. On Episode 4 of the AEC GrowthCast, host Greg Hart talked with Christopher Parsons, founder and CEO of Knowledge Architecture and host of the Smarter by Design podcast, about what changed, and how firms can capture what their people know before it walks out the door.
1. AI is only as good as the knowledge behind it
“AI is the catalyst for why we’re talking about it now. And the simplest way to explain it is if you want to have good experience with AI, you have to have really good data and really good knowledge. It’s a foundation that powers it. You can see the fanciest demo in the world of how AI is going to help you. But your project history, your knowledge, your processes, your way of working, your values, all that context can help AI actually get to the outcome you’re looking for. It all points back to having good knowledge.”
He describes what that looks like at Bora, an architecture and interiors firm in Portland, where the director of sustainability loaded his own book into the firm’s knowledge base:
“It’s created this digital ambassador for him within the firm that’s available 24 by 7 to answer level one and level two questions. He still can take the hard questions, and consult and mentor and do more research and development. It’s not like that’s going to replace the need to have experts within the company, but those experts will be able to be so much better leveraged.”
His advice on timing:
“It’s never a better time than now to start knowledge capture, because it’s only going to get more and more valuable as it goes on.”
2. The apprenticeship model is broken
“What I’ve been hearing from our clients is that the apprenticeship model is broken. Some people would argue it was always kind of broken, but it’s extra broken now, in that it takes too long for somebody to become a competent architect or engineer or project manager because they’re learning one project at a time.”
The pressure comes from the workforce itself:
“You have this large generation of people retiring, you have a missing middle, and then you have these millennials and Gen Zs who have to accelerate into doing work at a higher level and more complicated than you would have asked somebody with five years of experience to do in the past. As a matter of survival, firms have to accelerate their learning curve.”
His answer is to write down what firms already know:
“If you’re new to health care architecture, we need to teach you different equipment. We need to teach you about user groups. We need to teach you the different kinds of codes and the room layouts. We know these things. We just need to write them down or turn them into videos or turn them into courses so that we can intentionally upskill you faster.”
3. Replace the hour-long lunch-and-learn with learning on demand
“Our current best model right now is the hour-long lunch and learn. We record it and we put it on our intranet and people can go back and watch it later if it’s useful. I’m being a little unfair, but not very unfair. That’s kind of the state of the art in most AEC firms now.”
He argues that people need targeted knowledge, not marathon sessions:
“People don’t need to watch an hour-long lecture. They need to get to 1:45 and watch five minutes of it, because that’s what’s relevant to the problem they’re trying to solve right now.”
Onboarding is where Parsons hears the most frustration:
“They try and fire hose them within a day or two and give them so much information they’re never going to remember. How can we spread that out over maybe an hour a day over seven days, and then in two weeks, and then a month, and then 60 days, and then 90 days, and just try and drop things in in a much more digestible format, but then also have it available to be searched and retrieved when you need it, because you’re not going to remember what they told you on Day 2.”
The goal stays the same as the technology changes:
“That picture of connecting the right person to the right knowledge at the right time, that’s still going to be the North Star.”
4. Experts don’t know what they know, so pair them with a beginner
“One of the challenges is experts don’t know what they know. They have the curse of knowledge. They’ve been doing this for 25 years or 30 years, and they’re just like, ‘How would I teach somebody to do this?’”
One firm’s solution:
“LS3P does this cool thing they call expert hours, where they pair an expert in the firm with somebody who doesn’t know anything about what they do, like someone from the marketing team, to just have them explain it to them like they’re just a normal civilian.”
The technique works because the beginner asks the questions an insider wouldn’t:
“Experts just get going really fast and speak in a kind of shorthand, and you need somebody who represents the person that will be the learner who will be hearing this for the first time. You need someone to be their representative in the room and asking those clarifying and kind of dumb questions. Generally, experts can’t do this on their own. You don’t just point them at a video or give them a document and say, ‘Here, write it all down.’ You really need to work with them to help tease it out.”
5. Treat knowledge like clients, employees, and money
“What does an AEC firm really need? It needs employees, clients, money, and knowledge. With clients, we’ve got marketing, business development. With employees, we’ve got HR. With money, we’ve got accounting and finance. What are we doing about the knowledge piece? In general, it’s some kind of ad hoc informal thing. I think the enlightenment that’s happened is people realize we need to be as intentional about this as we are about those other things.”
He’s just as direct about where to begin:
“You cannot manage all the knowledge in your firm. There’s too much. So it has to start with prioritization. You start with those core business challenges and you work back to, well, what’s the knowledge you need to unlock and support that?”
Ownership is shifting, too:
“I’m seeing more and more knowledge and learning reporting up through operations, which I think is a very good sign.”
6. Make sharing expertise part of the job
“A lot of times for experts, they feel like that’s an extracurricular activity that’s just thrown on top of an already busy workload. I think these modern firms are figuring out that part of the role of being a senior PM or a senior technical expert in the firm is creating knowledge and sharing knowledge and scaling that, not just being at a 90% utilization rate or cranking out as much work as possible. That’s optimizing for the short term and not the long view.”
Hear the full conversation
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Ready to put AI to work at your own firm? Explore PSMJ’s AEC AI Acceleration Workshop.