---
title: "If we want them to do Knowledge Work, we need to design Knowledge Agents"
category: "talks"
date: "2026-06-29"
time: "1:30pm-1:50pm"
track: "Search & Retrieval"
room: "Track 3"
speakers: ["Benjamin Clavié"]
sourceLabels: ["Official conference schedule", "Public YouTube metadata"]
scheduleTrack: "Search & Retrieval"
scheduleRoom: "Track 3"
scheduleLabels: ["Search & Retrieval", "Track 3", "session", "confirmed"]
---
# If we want them to do Knowledge Work, we need to design Knowledge Agents

## Conference Context
- Date/time: 2026-06-29 · 1:30pm-1:50pm
- Track/room: Search & Retrieval · Track 3
- Speaker(s): Benjamin Clavié
- Session type/status: session · confirmed

- Track: Search & Retrieval
- Room: Track 3
- Session type: session
- Status: confirmed

## Session Description
It's tempting to assume that just like agents revolutionised coding, they will revolutionize other areas: legal, finance, advertising, and even medicine. All of those have in common that they are fundamentally knowledge work. And thankfully, humans have spent thousands of years searching for the best possible workflows for knowledge work. And yet, we seem to be disregarding all of these learnings, forcing every knowledge task into the shape that worked for coding. Today, we're going to talk about the history of knowledge work and how tools were co-designed to support it to understand how we should be building Knowledge Agents, themselves co-designed with their Knowledge Tools. This is key to avoiding falling into a "good enough" local optimum: think about legal clerking, a core part of the legal industry where information gathering and reasoning is performed to support the work of senior lawyers. The practice of clerking follows its own code, rules and best practices, which could not have feasibly emerged from studying software engineering: and similarly, there is no reason to believe knowledge agents could emerge from coding agents.

## Media Evidence
No related AI Engineer channel video found yet.

These are phone-photo slide captures from the Google Photos `AIE Slides` album. They are supporting slide evidence and do not override official schedule fields.
- [[google-photos-aie-slides-9gWZzS1EpXM1C5eK6-knowledge-agents-slides]] - Google Photos Slides: Knowledge Agents (confidence: high).

## Evidence Graph
This evidence graph is generated from currently linked source material: official schedule text, related video pages, cached transcripts, visible slide text, dense/reconstructed slide pages, and AI slide-classification audits.

### Media Signals
No linked video, transcript, or slide source has been attached yet.

### Agent Reading Notes
Use these signals to refine the synopsis, topic links, people/company context, and method notes. If a source is a related external video rather than an exact official recording, keep it framed as supporting evidence.

## Transcript Status
No official session recording transcript was found by exact title match on the AI Engineer YouTube channel during this run.

## People
- [[benjamin-clavi]]

## Notes
- Pending transcript synthesis when an official recording or confirmed matching video is available.

## Synthesis
### Synthesized Breakdown
# If we want them to do Knowledge Work, we need to design Knowledge Agents ## Conference Context - Date/time: 2026-06-29 · 1:30pm-1:50pm - Track/room: Search & Retrieval · Track 3 - Speaker(s): Benjamin Clavié - Session type/status: session · confirmed - Track: Search & Retrieval - Room: Track 3 - Session type: session - Status: confirmed ## Session Description It's tempting to assume that just like agents revolutionised coding, they will revolutionize other areas: legal, finance, advertising, and even medicine. All of those have in common that they are fundamentally knowledge work. And thankfully, humans have spent thousands of years searching for the best possible workflows for knowledge work. And yet, we seem to be disregarding all of these learnings, forcing every knowledge task into the shape that worked for coding.

### Speaker And Company Context
- [[benjamin-clavi|Benjamin Clavié]] — Member of Technical Staff at [[mixedbread-inc|Mixedbread Inc.]].

### Topics Covered
- [[agentic-search]]
- [[coding-agents]]

### Derived Links And Source Material

### Novel Concepts / Clever Methods
- No highlighted novel concept has been detected yet.

### Evidence Boundary
This synthesis is based on the official schedule and linked source pages. It should be revisited when exact session recordings or transcript-backed secondary sources are available.