When AI Gets Smarter Than Your Content: Why the Kinetic Council Arrived Right on Time

By Scott Abel, The Content Wrangler

If you’ve spent the last two years working to convince executives that generative artificial intelligence (genAI) is not a magical oracle that can decode your company’s content chaos into helpful customer experiences, congratulations — you’ve already glimpsed the future that the newly formed Kinetic Council is preparing us for.

Of course, artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t the problem. The problem is that we’re feeding AI systems content the way a toddler feeds a DVD player — shoving in whatever fits and hoping something delightful happens.

Instead, we get mishaps, hallucinations, compliance failures, broken customer journeys, and outputs that read like the chatbot is having an existential crisis.

AI augmentation (think adding semantic metadata) and structural transformation aren’t “nice to have” any longer. They are the cost of entry for intelligent experiences.

And the savvy pros who know how to build this foundation — content strategists, technical writers, data modelers, taxonomists, ontologists — are suddenly more essential than ever. So essential, in fact, that they just got a new professional home.

Enter the Kinetic Council, a freshly minted 501(c)(3) nonprofit built for this moment of upheaval, transformation, and (dare we say) opportunity. Think of it as the guild for the era of intelligent systems. A place where the people who design, structure, model, and operationalize knowledge can build the future together instead of quietly fixing everyone else’s messes from the shadows.

A Professional Landscape in Freefall

The Kinetic Council didn’t appear because someone thought, “What the world really needs is another association.” It appeared because the institutions that once served knowledge professionals collapsed. The Society for Technical Communication (STC) — a foundational organization for more than 70 years — shut down. The Special Libraries Association also shuttered. Two pillars of the knowledge industry vanished just as AI reshaped everything about how knowledge distribution works.

As Cruce Saunders, the Council’s founder and chair, says, “The death of STC isn’t just an ending. It’s a signal that we’re ready for something new.”

For decades, content creators, data architects, and semantic specialists were treated like separate species who occasionally shared a conference hallway but rarely a strategic conversation. AI shattered that illusion.

Today, every functioning intelligent system depends on the convergence of these domains. Content professionals shape what humans need. Data professionals shape how information flows. Semantic professionals shape how concepts relate and how systems reason.

These worlds are no longer adjacent. They are — as Peter Morville of Semantic Studios declares — intertwingled.

We Need “Kinetic” Content Because Static Knowledge Doesn’t Power AI

The Council’s name reflects a foundational shift. Nothing is static anymore (not content, not data, not user intent, and certainly not the systems delivering knowledge). We’ve moved from publishing to orchestrating. From structured documents to continuously adapting knowledge flows. From managing information to engineering the substrate that AI relies upon to behave responsibly.

The Council expresses this as a “golden thread”: Human structured content → semantically enriched → powering intelligent AI systems