As long as there's internal documentation, which virtually every serious shop has, it can be processed and combined with AI. There are startups selling this product already. I've seen first hand some very narrowly focused domain knowledge becoming more accessible when you can ask the chatbot and the thing is right. It works.

Come to think of it, domain knowledge should be an LLMs strong suit as long as you can provide the right documentation, which is working pretty well already.

Right now the main issue I see with AI is that it doesn't do well with scaling. It's great for building demos and examples but you have to fix its code for real production work. But for how long?

In ERP software there are MLOCs without any technical documentation. And nobody would spend a dime to create one. So, the deep expert knowledge on how business processes are supposed to work (in full detail) and how they are implemented is mostly in the heads of a couple of people.

AI is most excellent at reading and understanding large codebases and, with some guidance docs, can easily reproduce accurate technical documentation. Divide and conquer.

Reading a large codebase...perhaps if it is not too large. Understanding... why a tool exists, what is the motivation for its design, what the external human systems requirements for successful utilization of the internal facing tools... especially when that knowledge exists only in the memories of a few developers and PMs... not so much. Deep domain expertise is a long way from AI capability for effective replacement.

Again, nobody would spend a dime to create the technical documentation, even if it could be done somewhat faster with AI support. Also, in my experience AI is not so great explaining the consequences to business processes when documenting code.

Accuracy/faithfulness to the code as written isn't necessarily what you care about though, it's an understanding of the underlying problem. Just translating code doesn't actually help you do that.

Documentation rarely reflects how anything is actually done, referred to by good business analysts as 'shadow functions'.

LLMs are already good enough to read corporate email and document shadow functions and hierarchies.

Corporate email documents even less.

No, current LLMs are already good enough to read the subtexts from documents, email, call transcripts where available. They're extremely good at identifying unwritten business practices, relationships, data flows, etc.

Internal domain knowledge can become pretty useless when you switch companies and have to start over, though.

Right, and you'll not keep everything out of materials like AI generated meeting notes for every repeat of every process so the company doesn't really need many experts in its existing operations.