186,000 companies are facing succession – and risk losing their most important knowledge. A founder wants to prevent this with AI.
Germany is heading towards a wave of successors: around 186,000 companies will be looking for a new CEO by 2030. This is a challenge for companies and German medium-sized businesses. Because: Anyone who takes over a company usually only sees the explicit data: CRM lists, order backlogs and operational KPIs.
But the critical internal knowledge is often not visible. Why a customer has certain special conditions, how informal decision-making processes shape everyday work or why a process runs well – usually remains invisible to the new CEO. “The entire know-how of a company is not captured by an AI search because it is in people’s heads,” says Oliver Diekmann.
This is exactly where Diekmann starts with his startup Wingmaite: It is developing an AI platform that captures implicit company knowledge – i.e. the know-how from the employees’ heads -, structures it and makes it usable for successors in order to prevent loss of knowledge during handovers.
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Why knowledge is lost during handover
The risk of losing important knowledge has increased significantly in recent years. In the past, internal succession would have been the standard: the son or daughter grew into the business over the years, knew the customers by name and remembered the informal processes. Today, however, almost 50 percent of the successors come from external sources.
According to Diekmann, many successors would then make a crucial mistake when entering their new role: They come into the company, look at the balance sheet, scan the key figures and immediately begin to break down the existing structures. “Many people want to change something immediately, and that’s the biggest mistake, because they don’t really understand the company itself,” he says.
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“If an owner has managed the CRM in his head and on his cell phone for 40 years, there is no documentation for the successor about which experiences led to certain decisions,” says Diekmann. This loss of knowledge is not just an organizational problem for companies, but a real economic risk. The operational basis of the company could be lost when the founder leaves.
Four tips for a successful handover
According to Diekmann, successors should consider the following four points so that important knowledge is not lost during the handover, but rather forms the basis for the next step in growth:
- First understand, then transform: A new owner should consciously take six to nine months before initiating major transformations or changes of course, says Diekmann. Only when the informal decision trees and cultural nuances of the workforce have been internalized can things be changed meaningfully and respectfully without damaging the trust of employees.
- Systematically secure implicit knowledge: Processes in mature companies often work according to the unwritten rule: “We’ve always done it this way.” Anyone who doesn’t actively query this knowledge will run blindly into problems, says Diekmann. Here it helps to simply let employees “think out loud” in order to record the logic behind daily decisions instead of just documenting the results.
- Knowledge transfer as a process, not as an event: Even if the founder stays on board for a year through a consulting contract, simply being present is often not enough to transfer deep contextual knowledge. A clean handover process must be planned over months – supported by tools that go beyond classic knowledge databases and make the implicit knowledge tangible.
- Focus beyond the CEO: The valuable knowledge is never solely the responsibility of the founder, but is spread across all key roles. Anyone who only asks the boss when handing over loses essential information from sales, purchasing or production that is crucial for long-term customer loyalty, says Diekmann.
Technology as a bridge between generations
Tools such as the “context layer” developed by Diekmann could help here to lower the inhibition thresholds when it comes to securing knowledge. The context layer is a tool that creates the necessary company knowledge and the context behind it from mere data. Employees could “store” their knowledge here for the next generation. “We see that people speak more openly and in more detail with an AI than with their direct superior because they are not in a justifying position,” says Diekmann.