For decades, information professionals have helped organizations find, organize, and make use of information. Today, as artificial intelligence can search and summarize thousands of documents in seconds, their profession is entering a new era. What if their role was becoming more strategic than ever?
From information gatekeeper to knowledge facilitator
There was a time when accessing the right information was a genuine challenge.
Before the widespread adoption of the internet, businesses, institutions, and research organizations relied heavily on information professionals to identify relevant resources, consult specialized publications, and organize available knowledge.
Their expertise combined several skills: source evaluation, research techniques, document classification, and an understanding of users’ information needs.
They knew where to look, how to find information, and how to make it accessible.
Then the internet fundamentally changed the landscape.
Search engines democratized access to vast amounts of content. Digital platforms multiplied the number of available sources. Social networks accelerated the circulation of information.
Gradually, the challenge shifted.
It was no longer simply about finding information that was difficult to access, but about identifying relevant information within an ever-growing flow of content.
Today, artificial intelligence represents another major step in this transformation.
And it raises an important question: what role remains for information professionals when machines can search, classify, and summarize content themselves?
From documentation to monitoring and knowledge management
The information profession has never been static.
As technology evolved, its responsibilities expanded.
Traditional documentation activities focused on organizing resources, indexing, preserving records, and retrieving information.
With the acceleration of information flows and the multiplication of sources, monitoring and intelligence activities became increasingly important.
Information professionals began tracking regulatory developments, technological innovations, industry trends, and competitor activity.
Their role was no longer limited to responding to individual information requests.
It also involved anticipating information needs and identifying developments that could affect their organizations.
At the same time, the growth of knowledge management broadened their responsibilities.
The goal was no longer simply to collect documents, but to facilitate the sharing, preservation, and reuse of knowledge.
A valuable study, industry analysis, or lesson learned should no longer remain isolated in a folder or inbox.
It should be discoverable, understandable, and useful to the people who need it.
This evolution gradually brought documentation, monitoring, content curation, and knowledge sharing closer together.
Artificial intelligence is now accelerating that convergence.
How AI is changing information work
AI is already transforming several activities traditionally associated with information professionals.
1. Search is becoming more conversational
Document research has traditionally relied on keywords, Boolean operators, and indexing systems.
These methods remain valuable, particularly when research requires precision, completeness, or reproducibility.
However, AI tools now allow users to express certain information needs through natural-language questions.
Instead of constructing multiple search queries, someone might ask:
“What are the most important regulatory developments affecting artificial intelligence in my industry?”
AI can help identify relevant documents, provided that it has access to appropriate sources and mechanisms for verifying the results.
2. Classification can be partially automated
Indexing and categorizing content have historically required significant manual effort.
AI technologies can now suggest keywords, recognize themes, and propose document groupings.
This makes it easier to organize large collections of resources.
However, defining categories, maintaining consistency, and adapting classification systems to organizational needs still require human governance.
3. Summarization is becoming faster
One of AI’s most visible contributions is document summarization.
A lengthy report can be condensed in moments. Multiple articles can be compared to identify their main similarities and differences.
These capabilities can reduce the time spent on preliminary reading and analysis.
But automatically generated summaries are not necessarily accurate or complete.
They may omit nuances, oversimplify conclusions, or misinterpret passages.
Verification therefore remains essential, especially when information supports important decisions.
4. Distribution can become more personalized
Digital tools also make it easier to adapt content to the needs of different audiences.
The same monitoring activity can support multiple uses:
- A strategic briefing for executives.
- An industry newsletter for marketing teams.
- A selection of regulatory updates for legal departments.
- A learning resource hub for employees.
AI can help prepare these different formats.
But understanding users’ needs remains essential to making information relevant.
The new challenge: knowing what information to trust
As AI makes content easier to produce and transform, a new challenge emerges.
How can we determine whether information is genuinely reliable?
A well-written text may contain errors. A convincing summary may rely on insufficient evidence. An AI-generated answer may present an uncertain claim as an established fact.
The growing volume of synthetic content can also make it harder to identify where information originally came from.
In this environment, information professionals possess particularly valuable expertise.
They understand that information quality cannot be measured solely by readability or popularity.
It also depends on provenance, context, timeliness, and verifiability.
This expertise is essential to building trustworthy monitoring and knowledge management practices.
Information professionals no longer simply help people find answers.
They help establish the conditions under which those answers can be trusted.
Validation, contextualization, and traceability: three essential responsibilities
In an AI-augmented information environment, three responsibilities are becoming increasingly important.
Validating sources
Information should not be considered reliable simply because it appears in an AI-generated response.
Information professionals must be able to identify original sources, assess their credibility, and cross-check important claims against other references.
They must also distinguish verified facts from assumptions and interpretations.
Contextualizing content
Even accurate information can be misleading when removed from its original context.
A statistic, for example, only becomes meaningful when its methodology, timeframe, and scope are understood.
The professional’s role is to preserve that context and explain why the information matters to a particular audience.
Ensuring traceability
In an environment where content can be automatically summarized, rewritten, and redistributed, maintaining a connection to the original source is essential.
Traceability makes it possible to verify claims, retrieve original documents, and understand how information has been transformed.
It also helps organizations respect copyright requirements and internal information governance policies.
Trust shouldn’t simply be claimed. It should be verifiable.
The emergence of the knowledge curator
These changes are reshaping the role of information professionals within organizations.
The term knowledge curator offers one way to describe this evolution.
It does not necessarily represent an entirely new profession, but rather a combination of responsibilities that are becoming increasingly important.
A knowledge curator does more than collect and classify resources.
They organize knowledge so that it can be understood, shared, and reused.
Their work combines several complementary activities:
- Selection: identifying genuinely useful resources from large volumes of content.
- Evaluation: assessing reliability and relevance.
- Contextualization: explaining why information matters and what it implies.
- Organization: structuring content to make it easier to discover.
- Distribution: making knowledge accessible to the right audiences.
- Preservation: maintaining valuable resources and insights over time.
This role requires traditional information management skills alongside an understanding of digital tools, artificial intelligence, and business needs.
The information professional increasingly becomes a facilitator of knowledge flows, operating at the intersection of monitoring, documentation, and organizational learning.
Why organizations need these professionals
Organizations now have access to enormous amounts of information.
Reports, studies, articles, internal documents, knowledge bases, newsletters, and collaborative content support their daily operations.
Yet having information does not necessarily mean having usable knowledge.
Content may be scattered across multiple tools, duplicated, outdated, or difficult to retrieve.
Employees may also receive more information than they can reasonably process, without knowing which resources deserve their attention.
The knowledge curator helps bridge this gap.
They contribute to transforming fragmented resources into a more coherent information environment.
This approach can help organizations:
- Reduce information overload.
- Improve knowledge sharing across departments.
- Support employee onboarding and learning.
- Preserve internal expertise.
- Make decisions based on better-documented information.
AI can accelerate certain parts of this process.
But it does not eliminate the need to define quality standards, understand user requirements, and organize knowledge for long-term use.
Curation platforms supporting this evolution
As information professions evolve, so do the tools supporting them.
Monitoring and curation platforms are no longer simply places to collect articles.
They can become environments where information is selected, contextualized, organized, and distributed to different communities.
This is the approach behind Scoop.it.
By enabling professionals to select content, enrich it with commentary, and organize it by topic, the platform helps turn monitoring into shareable knowledge.
The progressive integration of AI-related capabilities also creates opportunities to simplify certain tasks and highlight the editorial work of curators.
But the underlying principle remains the same: technology should support human expertise, not replace the judgment that gives information its value.
Conclusion: from access to information to trust in information
Artificial intelligence does not signal the end of the information profession.
It is part of a long history of transformation, from organizing documentary resources to strategic monitoring and knowledge management.
Today, as information becomes more abundant, easier to produce, and sometimes harder to verify, the skills of information professionals are taking on new significance.
Their value no longer lies solely in their ability to find and organize documents.
It also comes from evaluating sources, contextualizing content, preserving traceability, and making knowledge genuinely useful.
Yesterday, information professionals helped people access information.
Tomorrow, knowledge curators will help people decide which information to trust — and how to use it.
In a world where machines can generate answers in seconds, the ability to build trust may become one of the most strategic skills in the knowledge economy.
(No Ratings Yet)
Loading...