Taxonomist Role in the New World of Generative AI

We have been at the forefront of implementing generative technologies to augment traditional taxonomy workflows offering new capabilities for content modeling, classification, and semantic enrichment. This raises an important question for practitioners: What are the implications of Generative AI for the role of the Taxonomist? It is important to highlight, as emphasized in several blogs authored by EK’s Taxonomy and AI experts, that a major part of implementing AI capabilities is the need for human expertise and/or human-in-the-loop workflows. While AI promotes the ability to achieve more with less, it is only as effective as the data available. Human involvement remains a necessary facet to provide context, decision-making, and strategy. Taxonomists who set the overall strategy and standards for how taxonomies are developed and used can guide how the advanced capabilities are used.