Last week, I received a newsletter from my friend Nick Milo with a provocative title:
Will AI be the death of PKM?
Short answer: not even close. But it will expose who’s been doing it wrong all along.
AI is Great at "Donkey Work"
I first experimented with AI-powered plugins for Obsidian a full 2 years ago. Back then, there were lots of plugins being released that let you put in your API key and use LLMs to "find" the deep, hidden connections between your notes and ideas.
I never liked this approach. And if that’s how you think about personal knowledge management, then yes, AI will probably be the death of PKM.
You don’t need a fancy connected notes app if you just want information to check a box or complete a task. You need good information and clear instructions.
For example, I hooked my Obsidian vault up to Claude and used it to reformat the frontmatter of 1400+ Daily Notes at once. My Focused co-host David Sparks calls these low-level tasks “donkey work,” and honestly, AI is great for this.
But there are some skills AI just can’t replace. And these skills will be more important than ever.
For example, emotional intelligence skills like empathy and interpersonal communication cannot be reproduced by code. If I were trying to future-proof my career, I’d focus on developing these “soft” skills instead of learning technical skills.
While AI excels at processing information and completing tasks, it fundamentally lacks the one thing that makes PKM worthwhile in the first place: human creativity.
Creativity Can’t Be Automated
The act of creativity is distinctly human. It can’t be automated or delegated, but if you understand how it works, it can be improved.
One of the frameworks I teach inside The Library (my private PKM community) is called The Creativity Flywheel:
- Capture what has your attention
- Curate the high-quality stuff
- Cultivate your ideas to see what they really are
- Connect those ideas to the others in your collection
- Create something new with the pieces you’ve collected
AI can assist (not replace) you with the first four steps. It can capture transcripts, summarize articles, and help you explore your ideas more fully. It can even suggest connections between related notes and ideas. But you still need to forge those connections yourself and remix those ideas into something new.
That last step is the most important. Unfortunately, it’s the one that many people miss.
They collect notes. They organize information. They add connections between their notes in the hopes that they will finally be able to make sense of everything they’ve captured. They build these elaborate storage systems, but they never actually create anything with what they’ve gathered.
So if you view PKM as just an information storage system, then yes - AI will probably replace it. But if you view PKM as the process that facilitates the human act of creativity, then it becomes more valuable than ever.
In my opinion, AI tools are great for augmenting the human creative process. I use AI tools to help me brainstorm YouTube video titles, repurpose long-form content for other mediums, and help me improve the quality of my writing and grammar.
But it doesn’t do the actual creating.
I write all my scripts. I create my thumbnails (with an assist from my editor, Max). Every word of this post is my own.
But I rely heavily on my PKM system in order to do all of this.
Connect to Your Why
So for me, the key question to ask is Why?
- Why do I want to write this newsletter?
- Why do I want to create this video?
- Why do I want to record this podcast?
When I consider these questions, the answers always connect back to my personal core values and my LifeTheme:
I help people multiply their time and talent so they can leave a bigger dent in the universe.
Inside The Library (my private PKM community for serious sensemakers), I teach a framework called The PKM Stack that shows how different levels of personal knowledge management work together to facilitate the flow of information into (and out of) your PKM system. From the tools you choose to use, to the workflows you build, to the information you intentionally consume - your vision and values keep it all in alignment. My LifeTheme sits at the top of that stack as the Identity level, and it’s what gives everything else meaning.
This is where I differ from some folks in my approach to PKM. Staying anchored in my vision and values completely changes the discussion around PKM.
It’s not about connecting notes. It’s about doing more of what matters and staying in alignment.
The Bottom Line: Choose Deep Work Over Quick Answers.
If you are content with surface-level revelation of topics you don’t really understand, chatting with your favorite LLM is fine. You don’t need to go through all the work of capturing, curating, cultivating, connecting, and creating. You don’t need to dial in your vision and values.
But if you want to:
- Actually understand things deeply
- Create something meaningful and original
- Live in alignment with your vision and values
You need a system that supports that kind of thinking. That’s what PKM is for.
And that’s why AI won’t kill it.
