Expert Mind: A Retrieval-Augmented Architecture for Expert Knowledge Preservation in the Energy Sector

Abstract: The departure of subject-matter experts from industrial organizations results in the irreversible loss of tacit knowledge that is rarely captured through conventional documentation practices. This paper proposes Expert Mind, an experimental system that leverages Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), LLMs, and multimodal capture techniques to preserve, structure, and make queryable the deep expertise of organizational knowledge holders. Drawing on the specific context of the energy sector, where decades of operational experience risk being lost to an aging workforce, we describe the system architecture, processing pipeline, ethical framework, and evaluation methodology. The proposed system addresses the knowledge elicitation problem through structured interviews, think-aloud sessions, and text corpus ingestion, which are subsequently embedded into a vector store and queried through a conversational interface. Preliminary design considerations suggest Expert Mind can significantly reduce knowledge transfer latency and improve onboarding efficiency. Ethical dimensions including informed consent, intellectual property, and the right to erasure are addressed as first-class design constraints.