Transforming modern teams with AI powered sense-making
Why organizations repeat the same decisions monthly and how AI-powered sense making breaks the cycle of corporate forgetting.
The memory problem no one talks about
Every organization faces an invisible crisis that silently drains productivity, innovation, and competitive advantage. The systematic loss of critical knowledge, decisions, and context that evaporates after every meeting, email, and conversation.
In our conversations with dozens of companies, we've witnessed the same pattern: organizations making identical decisions month after month, valuable insights that don't survive beyond the meeting room, and teams drowning in transcripts they'll never read. Research confirms that organizations struggle to preserve and leverage collective knowledge, with valuable insights lost due to siloed teams and employee transitions.
This isn't just inefficient - it's a fundamental breakdown in how organizations make sense of their world.
Sense-making: The core of organizational intelligence
Karl Weick's pioneering work on organizational sensemaking reveals why this matters so deeply. Sensemaking is the ongoing, collective process by which people interpret ambiguous or unexpected events to create shared understanding and action. It's how organizations navigate uncertainty, cope with change, and adapt to new situations.
As Weick established, sensemaking involves several critical aspects:
Enactment: Recognizing and bracketing relevant information from the environment
Selection: Drawing on past experiences to interpret these cues
Retention: Storing outcomes and applying them to ongoing interactions
The process is both retrospective - looking back to understand - and prospective, using that understanding to shape future actions. Most importantly, it's fundamentally social and narrative-based, with people creating stories to make sense of events.
Yet here's the paradox: The problem for sensemaking is not to decide what to do, but to understand what we have just done. Organizations are constantly struggling to make sense of their own actions and experiences, caught in what Weick describes as a "blooming, buzzing confusion" of continuous activity.
The breakdown of traditional approaches
What we've observed firsthand is that most organizations attempt to solve this with capture and summarization tools that fundamentally misunderstand the problem. After implementing these solutions, companies tell us they end up with:
Isolated documents that sit unused in folders
Long-format summaries that still overwhelm cognitive capacity
Passive memory that requires manual effort to activate
No actionable outcomes from captured information
The human brain simply isn't designed to interface with huge datasets. While we can create and retrieve vast amounts of information digitally, this doesn't mean our minds can actually use it effectively. We're creating information for the sake of creation, not for action.
This represents a fundamental misunderstanding of how sensemaking actually works in organizations. Sensemaking addresses the question: "What's going on here?" as teams try to make sense of situations so they can act on them. It's not about having more data - it's about creating meaning that drives action.
Our approach: Recall and activation
Our approach with Internode fundamentally reimagines organizational memory through two core principles: recall and activation.
Rather than generating more documents, we focus on:
1. Connected context
Every task, decision, and insight maintains its relationship to the broader organizational narrative. When you need information, you don't just get an isolated fact - you get the web of connections that give it meaning.
2. Short, actionable formats
We've learned that people need information they can process in seconds, not minutes. Every resurfaced insight is formatted for immediate understanding and action, with the option to dive deeper when needed.
3. Intelligent resurfacing
Internode doesn't wait for you to search - it proactively recalls relevant information when you need it most. When a meeting discusses a specific topic, past decisions and context automatically surface.
4. Execution-ready output
Every piece of recalled information includes deadlines, assigned owners, and clear next steps. This isn't passive memory - it's active organizational intelligence.
From data overload to Sense-Making excellence
The transformation we enable goes beyond efficiency metrics. When AI can remember and contextualize organizational knowledge, it becomes a powerful tool for preserving best practices, institutional wisdom, and nuanced information that might otherwise be lost.
Consider what happens in practice: During a strategy meeting about market expansion, Internode automatically surfaces:
Previous expansion discussions and their outcomes
Decisions made about similar initiatives
Lessons learned from past attempts
Relevant market research previously gathered
Team members who have expertise in this area
All of this appears in digestible, actionable formats that enhance rather than overwhelm the conversation.
The future of organizational intelligence
As Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, recently emphasized, memory is not just a feature but a transformative force reshaping how AI interacts with humans. The organizations that thrive in the coming decade will be those that successfully augment human sensemaking with AI-powered memory systems.
Internode represents this future - where every conversation builds on the last, where no insight is lost, and where organizations can finally achieve true collective intelligence. We're not just capturing information; we're enabling organizations to become better executors by ensuring that the right knowledge appears at the right moment for the right action.
Moving to intelligence
The goal of any organization is sense-making, giving meaning to collective experiences and turning that meaning into effective action. Yet most are trapped in cycles of forgetting and rediscovery, making the same decisions repeatedly while valuable insights evaporate into the organizational ether.
Internode breaks this cycle. By providing recall and activation rather than just capture and storage, we help teams build an interconnected living knowledge library that resurfaces insights precisely when needed, ensuring actions actually get done.
For leaders and investors looking to build sustainable competitive advantages, the question isn't whether to invest in organizational memory - it's how quickly you can transform your organization's relationship with its own knowledge. The companies that master this transformation won't just remember better; they'll think better, decide better, and execute better.
Internode helps teams capture and organize key takeaways from all communications, building an interconnected living Knowledge Library that resurfaces insights at the right time so actions actually get done. Learn more about transforming your organization's sense-making capabilities at LinkedIn.