Transforming Dead Knowledge into Living Help: Balancing Hope, User-Ambivalence, and Expertise in Fire Safety Digitization

Many industries worldwide are digitizing professionals’ expertise to boost productivity, enhance collaboration, and improve knowledge sharing. The current spread of increasingly capable AI technologies has accelerated this transformation further. But such changes are not without challenges. This research article explores the challenges of digitization in fire safety based on ethnographic fieldwork at the Danish Institute of Fire and Security Technology (DBI). The case focuses on fire safety professionals who must relinquish expertise early in digitalization processes, and traces some of the tensions between the imperative of user involvement in digitalization vis-à-vis the need for expertise and caution in fire safety. I argue that digitization first “transforms” (Knox et al. 2007) and later “informates” (Zuboff 1988) expertise, posing the risk of destabilizing industry hierarchies and reshaping how fire safety professionals perceive expertise and responsibility. This anticipated disruption fosters a user-ambivalence among the professionals, ultimately leading to project stagnation and unrealized promises.