I've been chewing on a question since an interview I did last week, and I'd love other people professionals' perspectives on it: is the librarian about to become a role of the future?
Here's my thinking.
Years ago I worked for a company that had an actual librarian. A real one. There was a room full of books, industry reports and publications we'd produced, and it was one person's job to look after it all. They made sure that when you needed something, you could find it, and that what you found could be trusted.
Honestly, at the time it felt like a leftover from another era. Looking back, I don't think I appreciated what the role actually was: a single person accountable for whether the company's knowledge worked.
Fast forward to last week. I interviewed a People leader whose company had just launched what they call their company brain (I'll share the full conversation once the episode is out). The rough shape of it:
Context on how the company works, its goals, and who matters to each role
Every major decision, captured through decision memos and automatically indexed so they're searchable forever
A library of AI skills, roughly 120 at launch, organised into packs per role
An onboarding flow that hands each new starter the skills built for their job, then recommends others based on where they say their friction is
Employees work with AI that sits on top of all that context. The brain is how the AI knows the company.
The build impressed me. But the longer we spoke, the louder one question got:
Who manages this thing?
Not the infrastructure. The knowledge itself. Because when I thought about that question afterwards, the job description started to look very familiar. Librarians were never just people who shelved books, and the discipline has proper names for its work:
Collection development. Deciding what belongs in the library. In company brain terms: which context gets in, which decisions get captured, and what AI should be allowed to act on versus what stays a human judgment call.
Cataloguing. Organising knowledge so it connects. Skills that reference each other and branch into related areas, rather than duplicating or contradicting one another.
Weeding. Pulling stale stock off the shelves. I'd argue this becomes the most important job of the lot. A stale page on a wiki misleads the occasional reader, who will probably double-check anyway. Stale context in a company brain gets applied by AI, at scale, with total confidence.
The reference interview. When you ask a librarian for a book, their first move is working out what you're actually trying to solve. The modern equivalent is helping people match problems to skills, and spotting the gaps where a skill should exist but doesn't yet.
We've also run the "nobody owns it" experiment before. Most of us have watched an intranet or a wiki launch with energy and rot within a year because nobody owned keeping it alive. The difference this time is that the archive isn't passive. Work runs on it. If the brain is wrong, the work is wrong.
Now, the pushbacks I keep testing this against.
Maybe AI manages itself. You can imagine agents that flag stale context, catch contradictions, and suggest new skills based on how people are using the library. Some of that will happen. But someone still writes the rules those agents follow, and someone still owns the calls about what's sensitive, what's wrong and what's missing. That sounds like a person to me.
Maybe it's a slice of an existing role rather than a headcount. At the company I interviewed, one person built the entire brain alongside their day job. That works at launch. I'm less convinced it works at 500 employees, 400 skills and three years of accumulated decisions.
And if it is a role, where does it sit? L&D has a claim (a skills library looks a lot like the next training catalogue, and it completely rewires onboarding). Ops could claim it as infrastructure. Knowledge management, where it still exists, would say this was their job all along. IT will want it for governance reasons. I don't have a firm answer yet.
So I'm throwing it to the group, because I haven't landed on a position:
Would you make this a dedicated role, or fold it into an existing one? Whose?
Is anyone already doing this in your company, formally or informally? What do you call them?
What would you actually put in the job description?
Or am I overcooking it, and the tooling will make most of this self-managing within a couple of years?