Imagine you’re early in your career and newly staffed on a healthcare project. You’ve been asked to help work through the onstage/offstage model for a new facility—a concept you’ve heard before, but you don’t feel fluent enough in to start designing with confidence. You know your firm has done this work many times, and you know the knowledge exists somewhere. What you don’t know is where to look or how to get started.
So you turn to your firm’s AI-powered Healthcare Knowledge Agent.
You ask a simple, situational question: What are the key considerations when designing an effective onstage/offstage model for a healthcare project? The response you get is grounded in how your firm approaches healthcare work. It draws from internal best practices, past projects, and recorded talks from senior healthcare leaders. It highlights what to pay attention to early, where teams often run into trouble, and how different decisions affect patient experience and staff workflows.
Along the way, it points you to specific internal resources—an upskilling video on healthcare planning, linked directly to the exact moment where this concept is discussed; a standards page that captures onstage/offstage best practices; and a case study from a past project that shows how these ideas come together in the real world. If you want to go deeper, you can. If you just need enough context to start shaping a design direction, you have it.
Later that week, you’re asked to begin contributing to an imaging suite—something you’ve never worked on before. You ask the Healthcare Knowledge Agent what’s important to consider. Again, the agent synthesizes the firm’s best thinking, pulling together insights from different people, in different formats, shared at different times. And when follow-up questions move into territory it can’t answer with confidence, it doesn’t pretend otherwise. It clearly signals the limits of its knowledge and points you to the right subject-matter experts to answer the hard questions.
You’re able to stay in the flow of work—learning as you go, making progress, and building confidence.
Now imagine the same moment from the other side of the equation.
You’re one of the firm’s healthcare leaders. You’ve spent years building deep expertise through projects, research, and mentoring. You care deeply about developing the next generation, but you also know how often your time is consumed by answering the same foundational questions—important questions, but repeatable ones. Questions that interrupt deep work and pull you away from clients, strategy, and the harder problems that really need your attention.
By contributing to your firm’s digital knowledge base—through interviews, recorded talks, and curated guidance—your expertise becomes accessible on demand, 24/7, in a form that’s contextual, searchable, and connected. When emerging professionals come to you with questions, they’re better informed and more specific. Your time is spent mentoring at the right level, serving clients, advancing the firm’s thinking, and continuing to add new insights that strengthen the firm’s collective knowledge over time.
In short, your expertise has been leveraged so you can have more impact and your firm’s emerging professionals can develop faster.
Once you can imagine this working in healthcare, it’s not hard to extrapolate the same pattern applying elsewhere—whether that’s a Sustainability Knowledge Agent helping teams navigate materials and approaches, or a Revit Knowledge Agent supporting designers while freeing design technology teams to focus on innovation. Across disciplines, the dynamic is the same: expertise scales, learning accelerates, and the organization gets smarter.
This vision explains why Knowledge Agents will be the next major pillar in the Synthesis platform, alongside Intranet, LMS, and AI Search capabilities.
In this issue of Smarter by Design, I’ll take you deeper into how Knowledge Agents will work, what processes and cultural habits will make them successful, and how you can begin to lay the foundation for their arrival later in 2026.
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