Not long ago, a service leader shared a stark reality: in just one month, their organization lost over 100 years of frontline experience.
Three senior technicians, each with decades of service behind them, retired within weeks of one another. Their replacements were capable and motivated—but the expertise those veterans carried out the door wasn’t captured in a system or stored in a manual.
It was gone forever.
Unfortunately, this isn’t an isolated event—it’s the shape of things to come.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 25% of the manufacturing workforce is 55 or older. The Service Council reports that 67% of service leaders now rank knowledge loss due to turnover and retirement among their top concerns.
And yet, over half admit their knowledge capture systems are outdated or inconsistent.
For years, field service has poured investment into automation, AI, and IoT—but overlooked the biggest variable: human knowledge.
While machines absolutely impact operations and efficiency, the crucial insights that drive real service success still live in the heads of seasoned techs—passed along through quick chats, site visits, or unspoken habits formed over years.
These are the instincts that don’t show up in manuals or training decks. They’re judgment calls, visual cues, and hard-won workarounds—tacit knowledge that anchors performance.
And right now, that knowledge is walking out the door faster than we can replace it.
“Fortune 500 companies lose $31.5B annually due to critical knowledge exiting their organizations.”
Source: Fast Company, June 2024
How Xpert Knowledge Turns Every Service Call Into an Asset
At SightCall, we’ve watched this problem play out across industries. And we’ve built something to address it: Xpert Knowledge™, a new capability in SightCall VISION that automatically captures and transforms real service interactions into structured, searchable knowledge—at scale.
Every visual support call becomes a potential how-to.
Your experts and techs capture what actually happens—video, audio, voice notes, photos, annotations—and turn it into a tutorial that someone else can use. No manual write-up, no delay. Just authentic, in-the-moment knowledge, preserved and published where your people and systems can find it.
That unique content becomes immediately useful to new hires in training, technicians in the field, support teams trying to deflect a call, or AI systems that need high-quality, real-world inputs to learn from.
Because AI can’t help if it doesn’t know what your technicians know.
AI is Only as Smart as What You Feed It
The promise of AI is real. But here’s the hard truth: most service organizations aren’t giving AI what it actually needs.
You’ve heard the saying “garbage in, garbage out.” Nowhere is that more true than in field service.
AI needs context to make smart decisions—especially when it comes to real-world repairs and troubleshooting. But right now, the kind of data AI needs most is messy, lost, or locked in someone’s head.
What’s missing? Field interactions.
The back-and-forth problem-solving. The quick visual checks. The improvised fixes when things don’t go by the book. The real “how it’s actually done” moments.
Most of the companies who manage to find the time to capture expertise are still relying on written documentation, after-action reports, or tribal knowledge passed down in informal ways. That’s not enough. Manuals can’t record the weird noises, visual cues, or improvised workarounds that make or break a successful field repair.
If you want AI to become a valuable member of your team, you need to get it out of the black box and onto the front lines.
Real-World Credibility Matters More Than Hype
Field service techs are skeptical of new technology.
Most have been burned before by tools that sound smart but fail in the field. Recommendations that look plausible on paper, but fall apart in practice.
Margins for error are already razor thin. Not many technicians are excited to risk everything by asking a chatbot for answers.
Field service professionals trust each other, and that trust is earned over time.
That’s exactly why what’s needed isn’t more generic content or after-the-fact reporting. It’s real-time, visual, frontline experience—captured as it happens, structured automatically, and delivered exactly where it matters.
That’s the difference Xpert Knowledge™ makes. It doesn’t ask technicians to write reports or managers to create content from scratch. It captures the work as it’s being done and turns that into useful knowledge.
And it’s not a future-state vision. It’s already producing results for service leaders in complex, high-stakes environments.
Here are just a few examples of how Xpert Knowledge is making an impact in the field:
Don’t Just Collect Data—Preserve the Expertise That Makes It Work
Field service has always been about more than the machines. It’s about the people who understand them—who can see what’s missing, hear what doesn’t sound right, and act with confidence in high-stakes environments.
That kind of judgment isn’t easy to replicate. But it is possible to retain, scale, and share—if you start capturing it now.
Xpert Knowledge™ was designed for this moment.
It doesn’t just help your team perform better today. It helps you build a sustainable, resilient service organization for the future—one where knowledge flows freely, onboarding happens faster, and every technician, no matter how new, has access to the experience of your best people.
You don’t need to overhaul your systems. You don’t need to train a team of content creators. You just need to turn what’s already happening on the front line into knowledge that sticks.
Because when expertise becomes a shared asset—not just something a few people carry—you don’t just protect your performance. You multiply it.
