Information assistance helps in many application domains to structure, guide and control human work processes. However, it lacks a formalisation and automated processing of background knowledge which vice versa is required to provide ad-hoc assistance. In this paper, we describe our conceptual and technical work towards this cognitive automation. We focus here on including contextual background knowledge to raise the worker’s awareness, guide, and monitor assembly activities. We present cognitive architectures as missing link between highly sophisticated manufacturing data systems and implicitly available contextual knowledge on work procedures and concepts of the work domain. Our work is illustrated with examples in SWI-Prolog and the Soar cognitive architecture which is part of the Plant@Hand assembly assistance system.