Top Knowledge Management Priorities & Trends for 2025

Knowledge management in 2025 is being pulled into the AI spotlight—yet the strongest signal from KM practitioners is that AI funding and pilots are accelerating while core KM work (transfer, critical knowledge, communities, search, and learning) must stay anchored to measurable business outcomes. In APQC’s 2025 survey of about 340 global KM experts and practitioners, 10% describe KM as “thriving,” while more than half say it’s continuing to gain ground. Investment expectations remain broadly positive: nearly half report KM investment is increasing “a little,” and about one-fifth say it’s increasing “a lot,” with only a small minority reporting decline.

That momentum shows up most clearly in priorities. AI sits at the top of KM teams’ agendas, rising sharply from the prior year’s already-high placement. KM teams are spending time both investigating and implementing AI—often as an augmenting layer rather than a replacement for KM fundamentals. Alongside AI, the perennial priorities remain steady: transferring knowledge between experts and identifying and prioritizing critical knowledge. These two themes have stayed near the top for four to five years, suggesting AI is being treated as a tool to sharpen KM’s existing mission rather than redefine it.

The survey also flags outside forces that can slow or complicate KM adoption. Data privacy and legal risk have moved to the center of planning, especially as organizations worry about IP leakage and information security. Sustainability—linked to the computing power required for AI—adds another constraint, including downstream effects like energy demand and data center growth. Meanwhile, the pace of technological change is described as exponential, creating distraction and disruption inside organizations.

Organizational culture emerges as a make-or-break factor. Some organizations are embracing AI and embedding it into KM capabilities, but others risk absorbing KM into broader technology initiatives, disbanding programs that don’t show distinct impact. The result is a cultural “dark side” of transformation: KM can succeed or become stressed depending on whether leaders treat it as a strategic capability and whether change management keeps pace.

Practitioners see both opportunities and threats. The biggest opportunity is KM’s growing role in AI solutions—KM teams understand organizational knowledge flows and culture, and can help ensure AI use cases target real needs. Other opportunities include fixing disorganized information and repository sprawl, addressing “great retirement” knowledge loss, and supporting leaders who increasingly recognize knowledge as a strategic asset. Threats remain familiar: employees feel too busy to participate, KM is hard to measure, leaders sometimes cut KM during cost pressure, and culture can resist knowledge sharing.

On the technology front, generative AI is the top focus, while collaboration tools drop in priority rankings—less because collaboration is irrelevant and more because cloud-based collaboration has become baseline infrastructure. Business priorities reinforce the efficiency angle: operational efficiency and process improvement lead, with productivity still central. For user experience, the survey points to embedding KM “in the flow” of work as the leading goal, with automation rising as a growing expectation.

Finally, the future outlook is blunt: AI is urgent, but scaling depends heavily on leadership alignment around privacy, legal, and trust. The clearest prescription for KM teams is to keep traditional KM priorities alive, use AI to augment them, and tie every initiative to business value—so knowledge transfer, critical knowledge, and learning remain the engine behind AI-enabled performance gains.