Intelligent technologies offer new possibilities for how organizations can search for, create, retain and transfer knowledge – the key processes involved in organizational learning. Technologies like generative AI are sometimes depicted as agentic in producing important outcomes, whether assistive or harmful. Informed by our study of organizational learning in a health system, we contend that to realize a new forms of organizational learning with GenAI, actors must leverage enabling organizational contexts that permit them to act upon novel affordances made possible by GenAI’s distinctive features. We identify key organizational context features – promptathons, on-demand help from GenAI experts, risk screens, hub-and-spoke structure, and communities of practice. We find that GenAI use situated in these contexts enable actors to use five novel affordances of GenAI – democratizing, conversational, creational, guardrailing and personalization affordances – to extend existing organizational learning practices. We analyze how generative catalyzing, iterating, curating, guardrailing, and personalizing extend current knowledge search, creation, retention, and transfer processes. We thus offer a model that highlights how actors, contexts and technology together produce new modes of organizational learning with generative AI.
