Published on the 06/10/2026 | Written by Heather Wright

Knowledge gaps become a costly business risk…

What happens when critical knowledge sits with one person in a business and that person leaves?

For The Warehouse Group a missing shoe buyer cost the company millions, with declining sales, weaker profitability, stock markdowns and lost market share as product assortments went largely unchanged for two years.

“Where you have the real risk in the organisation is your people and processes – and that’s where the unstructured data lives.”

The experience convinced group chief executive Mark Stirton that one of the biggest risks facing organisations isn’t a lack of data, but a lack of accessible knowledge, and it’s helped shape the Kiwi retailer’s thinking about data, knowledge and emerging AI technologies.

Speaking at the recent Snowflake World Tour Auckland, Stirton outlined how the company is exploring what he calls a ‘digital bench’ and an ‘agentic university’ as part of a broader effort to make organisational knowledge easier to access and less dependent on individual employees.

Stirton was blunt that the retail game is changing. “If you don’t think its changing, I think you might be under a rock. And when the game’s changing, you’ve got to decide what are the new rules? And what is the new playbook you need to run these rules against?”

He described what he sees as the next major shift in business. The first wave gave organisations access to manufacturing, infrastructure and eCommerce capabilities on demand. The next, he says is ‘pay-as-you-go intelligence’.

“When you think about tokens and all these models, you’re getting intelligence at scale, which has never happened in the history of man.”

The belief is influencing how the company is preparing for the future.

Stirton says he has challenged leaders across the business to rethink how their departments operate, saying ’30 percent of it must change’ as the organisation prepares for changing business and operating models.

The catalyst isn’t a new technology – not even AI. Instead it’s that recognition that critical expertise often sits inside people’s heads.

In the footwear example, the absence of a buyer did not simply create a vacancy, it triggered a chain reaction as assortments were not refreshed and decisions were delayed and effects flowed on to other areas of the team and business.

“It’s the contagion of small risks. They don’t look big in isolation but when you add them up they start to look like a really destructive force.”

Building a digital bench…

The challenge sits behind one of the more unusual concepts discussed during the presentation – that of a ‘digital bench’.

Using a rugby analogy, Grayston suggested many companies are trying to deliver the same outcomes despite effectively playing short-handed. Businesses expect results even when expertise is missing, teams are understaffed or key knowledge exists only with a handful of employees.

The digital bench is his attempt to address that problem.

Rather than relying on individual employees to hold critical information, Stirton wants organisational knowledge to become more accessible across the enterprise. The goal is not to simply store information, but to make expertise available when people need it.

That ambition is shaping the retailer’s technology foundations.

The Warehouse is working with Snowflake on semantic layers and vector-based capabilities, while also experimenting with Cortex to surface insights from existing dashboards and data assets. Stirton describes this work as the ‘unglamorous’ foundations required before organisations can take advantage of future capabilities.

He argues that structured enterprise data is only part of the picture.

While information stored in systems such as ERP platforms can be managed and analysed, many organisational risks sit elsewhere.

“But where you have the real risk in the organisation is your people and processes – and that’s where the unstructured data lives and where most of the gaps start to form when you lose a person.”

…And an agentic university

That thinking has given rise to an even bigger concept: what Stirton calls an ‘agentic university’.

Universities, he noted, create knowledge, preserve knowledge and transmit knowledge. In his view, businesses increasingly need to do the same thing.

He described a future where employees can work alongside knowledge layers and context layers that help connect information from across the organisation. Rather than expertise being concentrated within individuals, it would become easier to access and share.

“There would be abundance of knowledge and those knowledge gaps where there’s no training or there’s no parts where knowledge is transferred, that starts to be on tap for someone and then connected brains start to connect the whole organisation.

“So if I’m a buyer and I want to ask a question on my supply chain, suddenly you’ve actually got a knowledge layer – ‘your professors with your long-term knowledge’ and a context layer that now connects with each other.”

Stirton, who admits he’s ‘a bit of a dreamer and what I call a metaphor person’ referred to the concept as a corporate ‘second brain’. The idea is that organisational memory, historical decisions, operational context and expertise become easier to draw upon regardless of where they originate.

Stirton is not approaching the challenge as a company-wide technology rollout, saying he’s avoiding the ‘spray and pray’ approach that leads to burning tokens.

He says the retailer is focusing on innovators and early adopters – the 2.5 percent who ‘statistically will always move the organisation faster because they’re the ones who are braver, more courageous and curious’  arguing that change rarely happens evenly across an organisation. These groups, he believes, can help accelerate adoption and encourage new ways of working across the wider business.

“Adoption will always be uneven in technology,” he says.

“I think the people with the highest desire to have a growth mindset will start to use the technology and the knowledge layer and the context layer at much more rapid speed.”

The result is a view of AI that differs from many enterprise discussions focused on productivity gains or automation.

Instead, Grayston’s presentation centred on something more fundamental: knowledge.

Who owns it. Where it lives. What happens when it disappears.

The footwear example offered a costly reminder of the consequences when critical expertise resides with one person. The digital bench and agentic university are attempts to ensure that knowledge becomes an organisational asset rather than an individual one.