Your biggest decisions probably don’t live in your wiki. They were likely made, well, everywhere else: In Slack threads a few months ago, or in that meeting last week (that wasn’t transcribed), or in a buried Jira comment.
That challenge is a symptom of a larger problem. Work is just too spread out. Most systems teams use to manage knowledge are often ignored—not deliberately, but because they’re disconnected. The actual knowledge you need to reference and take action on stays locked away, while your company wiki is only filled with the information people remembered to document at the time.
The real problem isn’t how we organize information. It’s that we separated that information from action and real work.
The three taxes of siloed knowledge
Lots of teams have tools upon tools, purpose-built to solve problems. Everyone has a project management tool, and a task manager, and a communication tool. But add to that a tool to manage company knowledge, a handful of specific AI tools, a CRM, and more—and you’re already juggling too much.
Companies have accepted they need to pay for seats in every tool imaginable to get work done. But they’re actually paying three taxes on top of those licenses that are quietly killing productivity.
The Switching Tax
This is the cost of context-switching between all those tools. When your knowledge lives separated from your projects, tasks, and collaboration, it takes real cognitive power and time to track down everything you need just to get even the most basic tasks done.
Every tab jump or app switch comes at this cost—the average employee toggles between apps and websites hundreds of times a day, each distracting from deep work. OpenAI built a reporting system in Notion that saves over an hour on prep each week simply by bringing work into one place and eliminating the switching tax.
The Adoption Tax
Here’s the elephant in the room: Companies pay for tools employees don’t use. When important decisions and general knowledge need to be documented in a separate tool, it becomes a chore. All that information then goes stale when people don’t update the tool reliably, so teams stop contributing. Then they stop using it altogether.
The result is wasted money on licenses that sit unused, and work is just done elsewhere—usually in those threads and meetings and comments that are lost in the void. Ramp, for example, saved 70% on per-employee productivity tool costs when consolidating workflows from their old tool stack into Notion.
The Innovation Tax
To solve the other two issues, companies will often just try to bolt on an AI tool to help. But the real context that AI needs—conversations, decisions, project statuses, tasks—lives in other tools that AI doesn’t have access to. So the real innovation that could happen with AI’s help is lost.
When Faire was building out their AI strategy, they found that connecting years of structured company knowledge in Notion gave AI all the context it needed, resulting in 71% of employees calling Notion AI their most valuable tool and an estimated 8x ROI.
These taxes all compound, and the tool sprawl problem that used to cause some friction now and again has real business-impacting cost. Tools go unused, which leads to stale and outdated knowledge, which makes AI useless, which forces teams to buy more tools to compensate.
It’s a vicious cycle.
Breaking down tool-made silos
So what’s the fix then?
Luckily, you don’t need to perfect your process to make it work. Today’s leading companies are completely rethinking what a knowledge management tool should even do. The shift: Shrinking the distance between company knowledge and action by bringing everything together in one place. And the necessary work tools—like Slack, Figma, GitHub—are still heavily used but are connected, therefore searchable, through AI.
What does this look like in reality? Documentation happens as work happens, not as an afterthought. Company knowledge becomes a living and breathing entity rather than a stale artifact.
For example, Ramp consolidated scattered documentation and project work into a single connected workspace where engineering specs live alongside product roadmaps, where OKRs connect directly to the projects driving them forward. When a new engineer joins, they’re not hunting through multiple tools to understand what’s being built—everything is linked and accessible in one tool.
Cursor took it a step further by building their entire operation around this principle from the start. Their product specs, technical docs, and project tracking all flow together seamlessly. Engineers don’t context-switch and instead work where knowledge and action are inseparable. They ship faster, onboard engineers in days (not weeks), and AI is actually useful with all the context is needs.
What these companies—and so many more—have in common is that they stopped treating knowledge management as a separate workflow that lives separately from their actual work. Now, they’re more connected and can move faster than ever.
What modern knowledge management actually requires
If managing your knowledge also means you have separate tools for project management, task tracking, collaboration, AI—and sometimes multiples of each—do you really have a knowledge management tool? Or do you just have organized chaos?
Use this framework to evaluate where you stand today—fragmented, consolidating, or integrated—and where you’d like to be soon:
Fragmented | Consolidating | Integrated | |
|---|---|---|---|
Connected | Knowledge, projects, and tasks exist in 3+ separate tools with no integration | Some workflows are unified, but teams still context-switch between multiple systems daily | Docs, projects, and collaboration exist in one connected workspace |
Alive | Documentation is an afterthought that quickly becomes outdated | Teams make an effort to update knowledge, but it requires manual work and discipline | Knowledge evolves naturally as work progresses, staying current without extra effort |
Accessible | Teams check 4+ tools to find what they need | Most information lives in one place, but critical context still exists elsewhere | One search surface covers all work and connected tools |
Intelligent | AI tools exist but only access static pages in one system | AI can search across some tools, but lacks full context to be truly useful | AI has complete visibility into docs, projects, tasks, and integrated tools—and can take action |
Adopted | Low contribution rates, and real knowledge lives in Slack and email instead | Some teams use it regularly while others maintain their own separate systems | High engagement across all teams because it fits naturally into daily workflows |
If you’re operating in “Fragmented” for even just one pillar, you’re likely paying an extra tax. The closer you can get to “Integrated” on all pillars, the more connected (and less costly) your knowledge will be.
So maybe the problem isn’t your wiki—it’s that your wiki is only a wiki. The companies moving fastest are building workflows around tools that are flexible, connected, and intelligent so they can shrink the distance between knowledge and action.
Want to see what connected knowledge looks like in practice? Check out our interactive demo and experience how leading companies like Ramp, OpenAI, and Faire are rethinking knowledge management.
