Since its first edition, IFKAD has served as a scientific cognitive platform for scholars and practitioners committed to understanding how knowledge, as a dynamic asset, drives organisational value creation. Each year, the Forum has addressed the founding question from different perspectives: how do organisations generate, govern, and grow wealth through knowledge? For IFKAD 2027, this question addresses a fundamental disruption. Artificial intelligence is no longer an external technology applied to knowledge work; it is becoming an integral part of organisations’ cognitive architecture and knowledge ecosystem. It senses, infers, generates, and decides alongside human beings. This shift is changing how knowledge lives, circulates, and creates value.

IFKAD 2027 proposes “The Ecology of Knowledge in the AI Era” as the lens for examining this transformation. Using ecology as a lens of inquiry highlights knowledge as an ecosystem. It is a dynamic resource and a source of value creation, characterised by an interdependent system of assets populated by human minds, organisational routines, relations, cultural artefacts, and, increasingly, artificial agents. Within such an ecosystem, organisational health and wealth creation depend on diversity, balance, symbiosis, and the quality of relationships among its constituent components. An ecosystem can flourish or degrade; it can sustain a rich plurality of species or collapse into monoculture; it can be cultivated with care or exploited to exhaustion. The same, we argue, holds true for organisational knowledge in the age of AI.

The ecology of knowledge in the AI era suggests that technology cannot be considered neutral: it takes on the characteristics of those who design, finance, regulate, and use it. Applied to management, organisational development, and technology design, this observation invites broader reflection informed by the notion of integral ecology, according to which the technological, human, and moral dimensions of organisational life cannot be governed in isolation. A knowledge ecosystem that optimises for efficiency while eroding human judgement, creativity, or dignity is not, by this view, a healthy ecosystem, however productive it may appear in the short term. IFKAD 2027 places this insight at the core of knowledge management as an engine of sustainable organisational wealth creation, focusing on the vital question: how can organisations design, govern, and sustain knowledge ecosystems in which artificial intelligence and human intelligence do not merely coexist but genuinely co-create value?

A central premise of this year’s theme is that AI should not be understood solely as infrastructure or a productivity tool. Rather, as a knowledge-based technology, AI increasingly acts as an active participant in organisational cognition, sensing signals, generating hypotheses, producing content, and shaping decisions in ways that were previously the exclusive province of human knowledge workers. In this sense, AI is best understood as a partner within the organisation’s knowledge ecosystem, reshaping the organisation’s cognitive architecture: the structures, routines, and distributed capabilities through which an organisation perceives its environment, learns, and acts.

A healthy knowledge ecosystem, however, is not defined by cognitive and computational capabilities alone. Diversity, the same principle that sustains biological ecosystems, also depends on preserving plural ways of knowing, including aesthetic and artistic sensibility, tacit and embodied knowledge, and imaginative modes of enquiry that resist reduction to data and computation. As AI systems scale across industries, organisations face a genuine risk of cognitive and cultural homogenisation. IFKAD 2027 therefore invites reflection on the role of aesthetics, design, and the arts as sources of organisational creativity, innovation capacity, and resilience, which are vital, complementary members of the knowledge ecosystem alongside computational intelligence.

See the Scope of the Conference,  General Key Themes and  Key Research Questions here.