Technical Knowledge Intelligence™
It won't be AI that replaces you. It'll be someone who's learned to orchestrate AI and their technical performance better than you have.
GenAI and Agentic AI change the game for technical professionals.
Our framework builds competence and judgement when working with AI.
“The brain, focusing hard, is an incredibly powerful tool. Be wary of things that get in the way of that.”
- Cal Newport
Technical sectors need more skilled people.¹
Sectors like energy and infrastructure need more technical people.
They need more from existing people.
Industry challenges are becoming increasingly complex.
Collectively, we need to think better.
Build stronger judgement to make better decisions.
GenAI and Agentic AI (’AI’) present an opportunity to amplify and augment technical people significantly.
But, the technology amplifies the good the bad and the ugly…
Cognitive debt, a compounding risk?
Take the challenge of Cognitive Debt - the accumulation of unintegrated understanding you “borrow” to move faster in the short term.
Outsourcing thinking, skipping foundational concepts, or relying on templates and tools results in the cost of having to “repay” that gap later with time, attention, and effort.
AI can amplify the accumulation of this debt or mitigate it, allowing you to leverage this for a competitive advantage.
In our latest survey, we found:
73% of technical professionals are using GenAI in their working day.
Trust of GenAI output is, rightly, low and requires verification prior to use.
Verification requires time and expertise.
Time pressures result in unverified output entering decision loops and corporate knowledge.
One unverified decision for ‘low risk work’ at first then “Everyone’s doing it”.
Cognitive debt is created and starts to compound…
A potential worst-case scenario:
Day 1: A technical professional uses AI → 90% accurate
Day 30: Technical professional trusts AI more → Verifies less → 85% accurate
Day 90: Technical professional applies less rigour → 75% accurate
Day 180: New technical professional influenced by AI outputs → 60% accurate
Day 730: Pre-AI methods are muddled in a high AI environment → Accuracy unmeasurable
Day 1,095: Catastrophic failure → No one knows why or can respond robustly.
Cognitive debt is a good example of a potential challenge to building technical judgement with AI.
Along with efficient integration to workflows, data risks, AI safety and systemic safety risks, amongst others.
These are chalelnges - not barriers - for technical organisations to adopt AI.
To tackle these challenges we developed our framework:
Technical Knowledge Intelligence™
How technical professionals, who make decisions that matter, use AI competently.
A framework designed for technical professionals and engineers that establishes the necessary competencies and systems to effectively work with AI within their specific technical domain.
Think with AI, not through it. To amplify better technical judgement.
It’s made up of 4 parts:
Human Practice - the focused discipline to implement and do TKI consistently.
Flywheel - the cycle that drives results and impact.
Operating System - the people, workflows, tools, information and knowledge.
Competence Framework - the skills, knowledge, attitude, training and experience.
“Deliberate practice is what turns amateurs into professionals. Across every field, deliberate practice is what creates top performers and what they use to stay at the top of their game. It’s absolutely essential for expert performance."
The Ultimate Deliberate Practice Guide
Deliberate (human) practice
Deliberate practice transforms good technical professionals into exceptional ones.
It's structured, focused, deep work.
Not a comfortable practice, but a challenging engagement with clear metrics and rich feedback.
Think of it like this: Instead of mindlessly running to train for a marathon, you deliberately structure your approach. Clear purpose and objectives, a structured training plan, milestones, better nutrition etc.
You iterate continuously. This isn't about grinding hours.
It's about intelligent, measured progress that compounds over time.
With modern working environments and AI this is even more important.
AI amplifies those who practice effectively. It won't be AI that replaces you. It'll be someone who's learned to orchestrate AI and their technical performance better than you have.
The durable skills aren't prompt tricks; they're problem identification, system design and implementation.
Deliberate practice with AI involves establishing concise feedback loops: define clear objectives, iteratively adjust prompts and contexts, evaluate outcomes, analyse shortcomings, and implement improvements.
Maintain human judgement through AI-in-the-loop collaboration where you actively steer, verify, and learn from the system.
Leveraging the technology to do more deep work and collaborate with peers.
Avoid the over-automation trap; fluency comes from doing the hard parts intentionally, not outsourcing everything to AI.
Technical Gains
Upgrade your technical knowledge intelligence in three minutes per week.
“We must first create the space to reason… and deliberately use that space to think clearly. Once you have mastered this skill, you will find you have an unstoppable advantage.”
- Shane Parrish
The Technical Knowledge Intelligence™ flywheel
Jim Collins captures the compounding impact of a flywheel:
"Once you fully grasp how to create flywheel momentum in your particular circumstance and apply that understanding with creativity and discipline, you get the power of strategic compounding.
Each turn builds upon previous work as you make a series of good decisions, supremely well executed, that compound one upon another. This is how you build greatness."
Every technical professional, team and organisation has a TKI flywheel. How well this is turning determines performance and trajectory.
Technical professionals who can reliably make better decisions faster become exponentially more valuable and gain access to increasingly complex, higher-stakes work.
Creating a virtuous cycle: better decisions → more trust → bigger projects → higher stakes → more learning opportunities → better decisions.
The TKI Flywheel is designed to deliver this; each step is designed to re-enforce and accelerate the next, each turn to build momentum:
Consistently turning the flywheel with discipline and focus—combining deep domain expertise and intelligent AI application—establishes a technical professional, team, or organisation as a highly trusted authority for complex, high-stakes decision-making.
This is where true competitive advantage live, not in using AI tools, but in becoming someone whose AI-enhanced technical judgment is demonstrably superior and consistently reliable.
“The challenge of modern work is how to create systems that free up attention, instead of consuming more of it.”
- Tiago Forte
TKI operating system
We all operate and do our work in systems.
All with their own constraints, abilities, quirks and characteristics.
The Technical Knowledge Intelligence operating system combines people, process, tools, data and information.
It is structured around four blocks:
Competence - Of humans in the system
AI Tooling - The digital and AI tooling needed.
Process and Knowledge Operations - The Processes, Knowledge and Information
AI Safety - AI safety, systemic safety, risk and any governance or controls.
It provides a template for technical knowledge work adaptable to the domain and use case. It is designed to be scalable to an individual, a team or an organisation:
“In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it. In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it"
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
A competence framework
As GenAI and Agentic AI become more prevalent in technical knowledge domains, the role of professionals and teams moves from information and knowledge to the application of judgement and wisdom.
As spans of control for individuals increase and dependence on human involvement in operating systems grows, there is greater emphasis on their decision-making, supported not only by domain expertise but also by competence in AI and AI safety.
Delivering technical excellence with master technical knowledge workers is becoming the key to strategic advantage and the long-term foundation of safe operations.
We’ve developed a competence framework to build their practice, to amplify their judgement and capacity with longevity in mind. A unique integration of first principles and foremost thinking across the topics of Better Performing People, Knowledge Intelligence and AI Safety. All integrated in technical domains:
Prevent technical risks, build your advantage…
Technical Gains
Upgrade your technical knowledge intelligence in three minutes per week.