Teaching AI the Right Knowledge: Get Better Results. Get Found.
How to help AI understand you, work safely with your organization’s knowledge, and recognize what your business or organization should be known for.
AI can write, analyze, research, summarize, brainstorm and increasingly help us complete everyday work.
But there is something we don't talk about nearly enough:
What does your AI actually know?
Does it understand who you are, what you do and how you like to work? Does it have access to the right information inside your organization? Is that information current and trustworthy?
And here's a question businesses and organizations are only beginning to think about:
What does AI know about you when someone else asks?
As AI becomes part of everyday work and increasingly influences how people research businesses, organizations, services, destinations and solutions, I believe we need to think about AI knowledge in three different ways...
AI can write, analyze, research, summarize, brainstorm and increasingly help us complete everyday work.
But there is something we don't talk about nearly enough:
What does your AI actually know?
Does it understand who you are, what you do and how you like to work? Does it have access to the right information inside your organization? Is that information current and trustworthy?
And here's a question businesses and organizations are only beginning to think about:
What does AI know about you when someone else asks?
As AI becomes part of everyday work and increasingly influences how people research businesses, organizations, services, destinations and solutions, I believe we need to think about AI knowledge in three different ways.
1. PERSONALIZE IT: Help AI Understand You
When you begin using public or personal AI tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini, they don't automatically understand your role, your priorities, your preferences or how you like to work.
You can make AI considerably more useful by providing appropriate context.
Tell it what you do. Explain your goals. Set preferences or instructions where the platform allows it. Give it examples. Create dedicated chats or projects for ongoing work. Correct it when it misunderstands you.
Think of it as developing a working relationship with an assistant.
The better the appropriate context, the less time you spend starting from zero.
This can make public AI extremely useful for brainstorming, learning, research, planning, communications, marketing ideas, problem solving and coaching.
But there is an important boundary:
Personalizing public AI does not mean giving it everything you know.
Sensitive, confidential, client, employee, financial and protected organizational information should only be used in environments approved by your organization for that information.
Which brings us to the second type of AI knowledge.
2. GROUND IT: Help AI Work With Your Organization's Knowledge
If your organization uses Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, AI is increasingly being embedded directly into the systems where work already happens.
Think about Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and SharePoint in the Microsoft environment, or Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Drive and Meet in Google Workspace.
Depending on your organization's licensing, configuration, policies and permissions, embedded AI can work with organizational information that an employee is authorized to access.
That creates a very different relationship with AI.
Instead of repeatedly explaining your organization to a public AI tool, the opportunity is to ground organizational AI in the right approved information.
The question changes from:
"How do I teach AI everything about our organization?"
to:
"How do I make sure AI is working from the right organizational knowledge?"
That means keeping important documents in the right locations, maintaining appropriate permissions, identifying authoritative sources and keeping information current.
It also means something that I think is going to become increasingly important:
AI readiness isn't just about buying an AI licence.
If your SharePoint or Google Drive is filled with duplicate documents, outdated policies, conflicting versions and unclear permissions, adding AI doesn't magically clean the digital filing cabinet.
In fact, AI makes good information management even more important.
AI is only as useful as the knowledge it can appropriately access.
3. PUBLISH IT: Help AI Understand What You Want to Be Known For
Now let's turn the telescope around.
So far we've been talking about giving AI knowledge so you can get better results from it.
But what happens when someone else asks AI about you?
Imagine a potential customer, visitor, investor, client, partner or community member asking:
"Who can help me with this?"
"What organizations provide this service?"
"Who are the experts in this area?"
"Where should I go for this?"
"What businesses near me specialize in this?"
AI needs information to answer those questions too.
And much of that knowledge comes from publicly available information about your business or organization.
Your website, business listings, directories, associations, media coverage, reviews, authoritative third-party mentions, structured content and other digital signals can help AI systems understand who you are, what you do, who you serve, where you operate and what you're known for.
This is where AI Visibility and Generative Engine Optimization, or GEO, enter the picture.
For years, businesses and organizations have worked on being found in search engines such as Google.
Now there's another question we need to ask:
Does AI understand what you want to be found for?
This isn't about stuffing websites with keywords or trying to manipulate AI recommendations.
It's about making your public information clear, consistent, credible, authoritative and easy for both humans and AI systems to understand.
If you want to be known for a particular service, area of expertise or role in your community, but nowhere on your website clearly explains what you do, who you serve, where you operate and why you're credible, AI has very little to work with.
Once again:
AI is only as useful as what it knows.
Three Different Knowledge Jobs
This gives us a surprisingly simple way to think about AI:
PERSONALIZE IT: Help your personal AI understand you so it can work better with you.
GROUND IT: Help organizational AI work from the right approved internal knowledge so it can work better for your organization.
PUBLISH IT: Make clear, credible and authoritative information publicly available so AI systems can better understand what you or your organization should be known for.
And across all three sits another important skill:
INSTRUCT IT.
AI still needs good direction.
That's why I teach the REACT prompting framework:
R = Role: Who do I want AI to be?
E = Expectation: What do I want back?
A = Action: What do I want AI to do?
C = Context: What background does AI need to know?
T = Tone: Who am I speaking to and how should it sound?
Good knowledge without good instructions can still produce poor results.
Here's What This Looks Like in the Real World
Imagine an Executive Director or business leader preparing a monthly update for their Board or leadership team.
They could use public AI to brainstorm a better report structure, develop questions they should consider or create a reusable prompt.
But the actual report may involve internal financial results, staff information, program activity, operational data and confidential organizational documents.
That's a different information environment.
Where the organization has an approved Microsoft or Google AI environment, the leader may be able to work with authorized organizational information within that environment rather than moving sensitive material into an inappropriate public AI tool.
That's Ground It.
Now consider the external side of that same organization.
What happens when a potential customer, client, partner or community member asks an AI assistant:
"Which organization can help me with this?"
Does AI understand what your organization does, who it serves, where it operates, what expertise it has and what makes it credible?
That's Publish It.
And when that Executive Director or business leader uses AI for brainstorming, research, learning or planning and provides appropriate information about their role, objectives and preferences?
That's Personalize It.
Suddenly, internal AI productivity, AI safety and external AI visibility aren't three unrelated subjects.
They're connected by the same underlying issue:
Knowledge.
The Goal Isn't to Teach AI Everything
This may be the most important distinction of all.
The goal isn't:
Give AI as much information as possible.
It's:
Give the right AI the right knowledge in the right environment for the right purpose.
Some information is appropriate for public AI.
Some belongs within your organization's controlled environment.
Some should be intentionally published so customers, stakeholders and AI systems can discover and understand it.
And some information shouldn't be given to AI at all.
That's why AI literacy, information management, governance, prompting and AI visibility are becoming increasingly connected.
The organizations that become good at AI won't necessarily be the ones with the longest list of AI tools.
They'll be the organizations that understand what their AI knows, what it should know, where that knowledge comes from, what it is allowed to access, and what humans still need to verify.
Because the goal isn't simply to use more AI.
It's to use it deliberately.
Understand AI. Apply It. Make It Work for You.
Practical, hands-on AI training and strategy for businesses, organizations and teams. www.SofieAndreou.com
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