What I said
The 2026 Education Trends Scorecard traces this call to 2011, while noting that Jim had been using the underlying concept earlier.
The idea was straightforward: in a world of rapidly changing knowledge, people would increasingly need to obtain the right knowledge at the moment a situation demanded it, rather than relying entirely on knowledge acquired earlier.
Why it mattered then
The conventional education model assumed a substantial amount of useful knowledge could be learned in advance and carried into a career.
The growth of online information, video instruction, professional communities and mobile connectivity was already challenging that assumption.
What happened
By the 2026 retrospective, the behavior had become ordinary.
People routinely use tutorials, online communities, micro-credentials and AI assistants to acquire a specific piece of knowledge at the moment of need.
That does not eliminate expertise. It changes expertise by making learning agility, source judgement and application part of the skill itself.
2026 assessment
Scorecard verdict: Hit
The scorecard’s conclusion is that just-in-time knowledge moved from an emerging behavior to a reflex embedded across much of the economy.
What we learn from it
The interesting part of the prediction is not that information became easier to retrieve. That was already visible.
The deeper shift was that the timing of learning moved closer to the timing of use.
That insight now connects directly to Knowledge Velocity, AI-assisted learning and the transformation of education and professional development.