Putting the ‘human’ in ‘human-in-the-loop’ at KM & AI Summit 2025

How we connect with each other is not only a foundational component of the human experience, but to KM as well. Effectively exchanging information improves people’s lives and is at the core of knowledge management. While ideas—and fears—regarding AI have seemingly pushed humans further away from the systematic center, humans remain fundamental to the way that AI succeeds.

Kim Glover, director, communications change management, TechnipFMC, will lead two sessions at this year’s KM & AI Summit—’Cooking With KM: Knowledge Sharing & Building Skills,’”and “Storytelling for Collaboration & Change”—exploring how “human-in-the-loop” concepts reflect and affirm the broader purpose of AI, technology, and KM itself.

Unlock the future of innovation and knowledge management at the KM & AI Summit in Scottsdale, Arizona, March 17-19, 2025.

Both of Glover’s sessions explore human-centered topics, examining the cultural activities of cooking and storytelling as microcosms for effective, strategic knowledge management.

In ‘Cooking with KM’, Glover depicts cooking as, “a way to preserve cultural heritage.”

Glover said, “It is definitely knowledge transfer at its finest and purest. If you think about how generations learn how to cook from each other—just the same recipes handed down,  enhanced, and improved upon—it's rooted in knowledge management, knowledge sharing, and collaboration”.

“And storytelling is much the same,” added Glover, in reference to her second session. “It goes back time immemorial, to our very beginning…how do we connect to each other? How do we convey that this action will not result in something good? Storytelling is just as important today as it ever was.”

These human-centric sessions highlight the “human-in-the-loop” paradigm; something that is often cited as a success factor and fundamental necessity for AI, according to Glover. Whilefears that AI will replace human workers abound, Glover asserts that AI—like any other technology—is useless if “if it doesn't, in some way, make life better for humans.”

“It's important to position AI as just a next step in an endless flow of ways that…technology builds upon itself,” she continued. “In KM, in particular, everyone was worried…maybe 8-10 years ago about auto-categorization or auto-tagging tools, where humans wouldn't necessarily have to tag their metadata anymore on content. We thought that that was going to do away with KM jobs; it did not.”

“It is crucial to position AI as yet another technology that can enhance what we're already doing with strategic knowledge management,” noted Glover. Because even if “you think of AI as the bigger brain, the human brain, when we connect with each other, when we collaborate, is also a bigger brain.”

That is why conferences such as the KM & AI Summit are so pivotal to the knowledge management space, offering an environment that strikes the very heart of KM—human collaboration, which Glover looks forward to.

“The connections that the conferences enabled for learning, social learning from peers…have been exponential in my [career]. If you could say I've been successful at KM…I give a lot of the credit to the learning that I took at these conferences,” explained Glover.

“There has never been a time when I had a mentor-mentee conversation, or just [one of] those wonderful coffee conversations that you have at conferences like this one, when I didn't get more than I gave, when I didn't leave that conversation with a bright new idea I could apply, or a new lens, just from the way the question was asked, or a book recommendation, or get energized by the excited, sparkly-eyed enthusiasm around something that the other person is implementing,” she added.

Glover’s sessions will take place on Monday, March 17 at 1 p.m., and Wednesday, March 19, at 11:45 a.m.

For more information on KM & AI Summit and to register, please go to https://www.kmworld.com/KMAISummit/2025/Default.aspx.