01
Establish trusted sources
Inventory owners, current versions, access rules, and removal paths before connecting anything.
Illustrative scenario / Knowledge & decisions
Answers your team
can check, not just read.
Connect owned, current sources to the questions staff actually ask, show the evidence behind each answer, and escalate what cannot be supported.
How to read this page
Illustrative scenario — not a named customer result. The profile, baseline, and arithmetic below are a worked example. Replace every input with evidence from your own workflow before making an investment decision.
Illustrative profile & problem
Where the work
stalls today.
Illustrative profile: an 80-person service organization whose policies, procedures, and client guidance live across a document store, wiki, and shared drives, with about 500 recurring internal questions a month.
Staff lose time searching across versions, cannot tell which procedure is current, and interrupt the same few experts. A fluent answer without sources would make the underlying trust problem worse.
Measure before building
Establish the baseline
you will be judged against.
- Questions per month by topic, team, and whether an authoritative source exists.
- Minutes to find, validate, and apply an answer, including expert interruptions.
- Share of answers based on superseded material and share left unresolved.
- Expert time spent answering repeats and correcting avoidable errors.
Record who measured each input, over what period, and which cases were excluded. A baseline nobody trusts cannot support an investment decision.
Illustrative solution
Connect the steps
that create value.
02
Retrieve with permission
Answer only from sources the requester may see, with passages linked to each claim.
03
Support the decision
Show freshness and conflicts, decline unsupported questions, and route them to the source owner.
04
Learn from use
Review unanswered and corrected questions with knowledge owners and update sources, not just prompts.
Controls & evaluation
Keep judgment
and evidence explicit.
- Retrieval enforces the requester’s permissions. Neither answers nor citations may reveal restricted material.
- Each answer identifies its sources and version context. Missing evidence is a valid, visible outcome.
- Evaluation uses representative, outdated-source, restricted, conflicting, and unanswerable questions with domain reviewers.
- Source owners control publication and withdrawal. Usage counts alone never justify widening access.
Illustrative value model
Do the arithmetic.
Then test the assumptions.
Worked example at 500 questions a month. Baseline effort is 24 minutes per question. Where a trusted answer exists, the illustrative path is 11 minutes including validation. The model assumes 70% of questions are answerable from maintained sources.
Scroll across the table to read all columns.
| Effort | Illustrative baseline | Illustrative future state |
|---|---|---|
| Find relevant material | 14 min | 6 min |
| Validate currency and fit | 7 min | 4 min |
| Ask, clarify, or give feedback | 3 min | 1 min |
| Total per answerable question | 24 min | 11 min |
| Blended effect at 70% answerable | 24 min | About 15 min; roughly 76 hours a month before upkeep |
Allow about 10 hours a month in this example for source maintenance and quality review, leaving roughly 66 hours. If only 40% of questions have maintained sources, the effect falls below 45 hours and fixing the source base matters more than the assistant. Track expert interruptions and wrong-version use alongside time.
Released capacity is not automatically cash saved. Agree with the operating owner how time would be redeployed and which recurring technology and support costs must be deducted.
Acceptance & handover
Agree what “working”
must prove.
- Answers are correct, current, and source-linked on representative questions as judged by domain reviewers.
- Restricted sources never leak through answers, citations, or follow-up questions in evaluation.
- Unsupported and conflicting questions are declined or escalated with the gap made explicit.
- Time to a validated answer and repeat expert interruptions fall without increasing use of superseded guidance.
When we would recommend stopping
Pause and fix knowledge ownership first if authoritative sources cannot be identified, permissions cannot be carried into retrieval, or owners will not maintain the material the assistant depends on.
Your next step
Test this scenario against your workflow.
Bring your volumes, systems, and difficult cases. We will help establish the baseline and whether an assessment is worthwhile.