Knowledge engineering: the digital prerequisite of the AI era
Ferréol Mayoly and Geoffroy Decroocq were invited on the set of Focus Business x Le Figaro to discuss knowledge transmission, demographic shifts and artificial intelligence. Watch the interview and discover their vision.
In most companies, financial capital is managed with precision. We track patents, brands, equipment. But there is another asset, just as real, just as strategic, that too often erodes in silence: knowledge.
This is the conviction that Ferréol Mayoly and Geoffroy Decroocq defended on the set of Focus Business x Le Figaro. A conviction forged over 25 years of knowledge engineering at the service of major French organisations.
Knowledge: an asset like any other
“Knowledge within a company is an asset, just like patents, brands or certain machines. And like any asset, it can appreciate or depreciate if it isn’t maintained.”
With this statement, Ferréol Mayoly sums up TAKOMA’s mission: helping companies maintain their knowledge capital. Not in an abstract way, but with the same rigour an engineer applies to physical structures. Hence the claimed positioning: knowledge engineers.
In concrete terms, this means a four-step process: identifying critical knowledge assets, structuring them, designing knowledge transfer programs, and then measuring the results.
Knowledge lives in people’s heads, not in PowerPoints
Geoffroy Decroocq puts it simply: “Knowledge doesn’t live in PowerPoint presentations. It lives in people’s heads.”
And that’s precisely where the challenge lies. Knowledge transfer cannot be decreed. You cannot ask an expert to write everything down — it won’t work. Why? Because with experience, know-how becomes automatic. It becomes invisible. There are things experts know how to do that they can no longer even describe.
TAKOMA’s role is to go and find this tacit knowledge where it actually lives: in the field, through observation, structured interviews, and active listening. “Our role is to act as translators, making this knowledge as transmissible and useful as possible.”
A concrete example: the aerospace industry
This fieldwork enabled a major French aerospace manufacturer to navigate an unprecedented wave of recruitment. The knowledge needed to launch its new program resided in the heads of only a handful of experts, exposing the company to a double risk: new hires lagging behind in skill acquisition, and the risk of jeopardising the program before it even had a chance to take off.
TAKOMA captured and structured this specific know-how to build a training program grounded in the experts’ real-world practices. The result: new engineers ramped up quickly, not just in theory, but with the right operational practices, from day one. A key success factor for the program.
AI: an amplifier, not a silver bullet
Artificial Intelligence is at the heart of most organisations’ concerns today. And TAKOMA is on the front line of these questions.
“We almost always see clients asking themselves: how can I deploy AI within my company? And quite often, the answer is: not easily.”
The reason is simple: AI amplifies whatever you feed it. Knowledge that is well organised, documented and maintained — AI will multiply its value. Knowledge that is scattered, inconsistent, sometimes contradictory — AI will only amplify the organisation’s weaknesses.
The question to ask before any AI deployment isn’t technical. It’s: “Is your knowledge capital actually usable?”
TAKOMA positions itself as the partner that prepares this foundation. “We’re not in competition with AI — we’re what makes it useful.”
Sovereignty and reindustrialisation: a challenge beyond company lines
Beyond organisational concerns, Geoffroy Decroocq points to a broader dimension: in a context of rearmament and reindustrialisation across Europe, anticipating tomorrow’s skills has become a matter of national sovereignty.
Industrial knowledge, critical know-how, rare expertise — these are assets that organisations can no longer afford to let evaporate. Not only for their own performance, but to maintain strategic autonomy in their fields of activity.
From knowledge preservation to workforce anticipation
TAKOMA takes a new step forward with the acquisition of Model RH, based in Toulouse. The logic is clear: TAKOMA gathers, transforms and transmits an organisation’s current knowledge. Model RH brings predictive skills modelling, answering the question: what skills will the organisation need tomorrow?
Together, the two entities support clients across the full spectrum: preserving what they know how to do today, and identifying the gap with what they will need to know how to do tomorrow, to implement training plans well in advance.