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Google Photos Slides: Knowledge Agents

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But... What Even is Knowledge Work?

Knowledge work is all work where the main input is information and the main output is a (broadly) actionable judgement.

a knowledge problem,you probably need search. It's tautological with retrieval: if you need search, it's likely a knowledge problem, and if it's

Each knowledge industry has contributed to the ever-improving structuring of knowledgework... Doctors, Actuaries, etc... all perform knowledge work on a daily basis. In thereal world,it iseverywhere:awyers,Academics,SoftwareEngineers,Paralegals,

But agents have focused on a special case: software engineering.

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Code is Knowledge, but Knowledge isn't Code

Code Has Unique Features Knowledge Work is Broader

1 Durable clues greppable Narrow, surface 12 13 14 16 /src/app/main.py raise ValueErr forpinpeople: StringIo.seek sortPeople HashMap::new ifkey in cache: key=sortPeople（p return cache[key] d method #identifier API <1> match exact works things implicit Meaningis different The same clue can mean noticewindow deadine 30days retentionrule graceperiod

Tasksare pre-cut already Fix crash on login #1234 TICKET make no mistakes login page, Add beautiful #5678 FEATURE Searchstarts fromintent dutytoprevent 'the part where theft"

Codehas logical,stableidentifiers. Non-code knowledge isoften contextual and meaning-driven.

米Runlayer

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KnowledgeWork Is Two Self-Optimising Loops

More knowledge →harder to find/use → better tools →more people can produce/use knowledge → more knowledge 1.THE TOOL LOOP

Writing,archives, written cultures Oral /early scribes Alexandria catalogues Pinakes/ Scriptoria, copying, Monasteries preservation Indexes,bibliographies, Early modern/ industrial age Late 19th century Dewey +universal bibliography associative indexing Memex/ 1945 Web → AI era Search engines, AI systems ranking,

y yyysdsdspspsopfoudm gathers,interpets, 2.THE ORGANISATION LOOP Lone expert One person records Scribes&clerks record-keeping Thinking and separate Monastic scriptoria Copying, correcting, organised labour storing-berore Universities/guilds Training,ranking, credentialing professions institutional memory Bureaucracies procedures, Files,forms, Each new tool makes somekind of knowledge work cheaper. Partner associate→ analyst→assistant services firms Professional Judgment vs research, documents,process Paralegals/ assistants

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Organisation changes who does what in knowledge work.

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Loop, Running Self-Optimising For Centuries Work Is Actually Just One Knowledge 4.RETRAINING & absorb knowledge to produce and Raises capacity KNOWLEDGE WORK REORGANIZED Workers adapt, specialize,and use the tools 1.NEW New findings, information, reinforces itself. KNOWLEDGE methods The loop 人 人 Too much knowledge to absorb by hand 2. NEED FoR BETTER TOOLS More knowledge to process

both organisation and tooling To deal with the specificities of knowledge,we've developed workflows,and Changes jobs, training WORKFLOWS & ROLES Software,automation, 3.NEW TooLS, organizing work new ways of Drives invention and adoption

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In Practice:A DeepResearch Example

Even on a simple Abad tool will collapse DeepResearch task, tooling has an outsized your performance. impact. As tool qualityimproves, LLMs are increasingly abletoreach theright answer... rapidly drop as quality Butcost continues to plateaus. Lexical Semantic Search Lexical(PiSerini BM25) Lexical (Unoptimised BM25) Qwen3-Embed-8B MixedbreadSearch Hybrid Harnesses Lexical+MixedbreadSearch Lexical+Qwen3-Embed-8B GPT-5onBrowseComp-Pluswith100RandomQueriesAvg.of 3runs Retrieval Tools Accuracy 73.2 59.8 72.0 89.8 85.7 90.2 Avg #Search 13.4 25.1 19.7 10.2 12.5 8.6 12

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Proper Knowledge Work Needs Organisation

are mostly self-contained technical, terminal interface alleviate issues, and tasks and verifiable enough. For programming, this is not as important:users are breadth of information and efficiency. enablesmuch greater tools, fields develop a Along with the evolution of division of labour that tosearch,vaidate They use tools and summarize information REQUESTER PATIENT/ CLIENT/ SOMETHING. INEED FINALANSWER (DELIVERED) ASSISTANTI REQUEST INITIAL NOTES PEMO RESEARCH TOOLS/SOURCES BREAKDOWN (BROKEN-DOWN (SHARED) QUERY TASKS) ASSISTANT2 SHOT BIG &FRAMESTHE REQUIREMENTS ANALYZES PROBLEM /NOTES MEMO ASSISTANT3 SYNTHESiZES RESPONSE &WRITES FINAL

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Better Tools and Organisation are about breaking ceilings

demonstrates theimportance ofboth tools and organisation. benchmark. The current state of the leaderboard MadQA is a PDF-based enterprise task QA Gemini 3.5 Flash + Mixedbread Searcher Agent Gemini 3.5 Flash+Mixedbread Search Tool Human + Oracle (Perfect) Documents Accuracy 99.4 93.4 88.9

needed! for human and agent. Better tools are For tools, BM25 hits the same ceiling Human+BM25 Gemini3Pro+BM25 82.2 82.2

over a third! between agents and humansby assistantsparadigm narrows the gap For organisation,moving from an "everything-agent” to a decoupled From theOfficial MadQA Leaderboard

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So, what does this mean?

betterknowledgeworkfor humans,and AI Agents Weknowhowtodesign benefitfrom thesame patterns. 1 the appropriate tool to avoid that agents know how to use ceilings, and we must ensure Tools evolve to overcome local minimas. 2 as context is a finite resource. The right orchestration of search tasks can result in much better performance, 3 Orchestrator