Can AI save a company’s soul?

{"text":[[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":5.05,"text":"In a zeitgeisty moment this week, Kioxia, Japan’s biggest producer of Nand flash drives, swatted Toyota into third place among the country’s most valuable companies. Humbling for the car no longer in front, but not surprising. The future is memory, not mobility."}],[{"start":22.35,"text":"Well, that at least was the argument presented to me in the East Hall of Fooma 2026, one of the world’s largest food manufacturing trade shows: proudly flogging the “P” in ultra-processed foods and, this being the dystopia we inhabit, bursting to convince the world that an AI-empowered robot is a better hire than a grimy human."}],[{"start":41.95,"text":"My friend, who was attending and runs a fair-sized venture capital fund, had plenty to say about the sunlit uplands of mass human redundancy, shouting over the whirring background noise of the ever more competent, responsive and independent machinery on show. "}],[{"start":58.300000000000004,"text":"The marriage of AI and automation is, according to emerging conventional wisdom, a prosperous industrial destiny and a union that will hunger endlessly for the sort of hardware that Kioxia churns from its factories. But a less well-advertised, transformational opportunity for AI, my friend said excitedly, was as the go-to guardian of institutional memory. "}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":81.55000000000001,"text":"The corporate world may be the first to see real value. The soul of a company is to be found in its living history, its grandiose mythologies and trivial water-cooler lore. The opportunity of trapping that butterfly and pinning it to the digital equivalent of green baize is irresistible. "}],[{"start":99.50000000000001,"text":"And once you get started, the appeal expands. Institutional memory is the retention of techniques, expertise and competitive advantages, the correct way to refill the cup dispenser on the third floor, the founder’s vision, the thing that happened at the 2018 summer barbecue, the collective recollection of what we tried but didn’t work, the real reason we’ve never landed a contract in Norway. All of it, my friend argues, will be far more comprehensively and efficiently preserved by AI than by the flawed flesh stewards currently entrusted with the task. "}],[{"start":131.8,"text":"It is a bold contention, and a superficially compelling one. People leave, people arrive. Japan, in its various demographic extremes, illustrates a continuity crisis throughout the developed world. The country lives in a state of gathering dread of sudden, epic institutional memory loss as the founders underpinning its enormous small- and medium-sized corporate base hit their mid-seventies. An estimated 50 per cent of companies have no successor. So much memory, so much value: all poised for evaporation. "}],[{"start":164.9,"text":"Suddenly, though, we have the possibility of rapidly infusing an absorptive, regurgitant AI agent with everything that a company (or government agency) is and has been. Of turning memory from an overlapping, conflicting series of narratives, debates, experiences and perspectives into a single entity. Of making that entity permanently accessible and of usefully crystallising the hitherto nebulous: why we never call our top client on Wednesdays, why the Frankfurt office submits its accounts in green ink, why the Christmas party can never again be held at Il Pacioccone. "}],[{"start":199,"text":"A second argument is that AI, by threatening (however realistically) to replace oxygen-breathers throughout the workplace, will itself actively increase the value of institutional memory. If the essence of your company is the sum total of people past and present, the sudden threatened shrinkage of that collective makes the need for preservation all the greater and more urgent. "}],[{"start":221.55,"text":"The future battle for competitive edge, across many industries and in politics, may in effect be fought with weaponised institutional memory — sometimes over which of two entities has preserved theirs better or abandoned theirs more ruthlessly. "}],[{"start":235.95000000000002,"text":"Tempting though all this sounds, it presents the considerable risk of missing the entire point of institutional memory: that its greatest strength and greatest chance of longevity lies in its flaws, in its imperfect accessibility and in its susceptibility to revision, tangential oddities and strategic misremembering. "}],[{"start":256.45000000000005,"text":"Memory, argues the psychologist Dan McAdams, is a dynamic process, shaped as the individual builds a personal sense of unity and purpose. Institutions, increasingly, may be doing something similar with narratives that change with the retelling, and are tailored to each new audience. "}],[{"start":272.95000000000005,"text":"AI seems able to create narrative, but one too reliant on the hard contours of memory rather than impressionistic artistry. There is a risk, surely, that the more thoroughly institutional memory is catalogued, indexed and commoditised, the less useful it becomes."}],[{"start":289.50000000000006,"text":"In its quest for comprehensiveness, AI seems destined to present the blandest version of institutional memory. Worse, it could make “we’ve always done it this way” sound more imperative than that line ever, ever has the right to be."}],[{"start":303.30000000000007,"text":"Leo Lewis is the FT’s Tokyo bureau chief"}],[{"start":312.65000000000003,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1780728373_4744.mp3"}