Large Language Models Explain Experts Better Than Experts Themselves
Tacit knowledge, or the "know-how" embedded in experience, is difficult to articulate, making its transfer a challenge in organizations. Tacit knowledge is hard to externalize (transform into explicit knowledge), and expertise is often poorly documented and lost when experts leave. This study examines whether LLMs can externalize tacit knowledge from experts' behaviors and whether such externalized knowledge supports downstream decision-making and transfer to novices. Across two studies, we show that LLM-externalized tacit knowledge improves decision quality and enables novices to approach expert-level performance, often outperforming knowledge articulated by human experts. These findings provide empirical support for Polanyi's Paradox -- that we can know more than we can tell -- and highlight the potential of LLMs as scalable tools that can help overcome human experts' articulation bottleneck. Mechanism analyses and robustness checks show that LLMs meaningfully learn and extract knowledge from expert conversations, and findings generalize across models and retrieval methods.