Internal knowledge assistant
A permission-aware assistant that searches approved internal content and shows the source reference for every answer.
- Service
- AI Solutions
- Suits
- Businesses with enough documented policy and procedure that finding it has become a problem
- Industries
- AI, General business, Microsoft 365
The problem
Staff spend time searching policies, procedures and product documents. The information exists somewhere in SharePoint, an old shared drive and a folder someone set up in 2019, and the fastest way to find it is usually to ask a colleague who has been there longest.
How the work is usually done today
- A staff member needs a policy or procedure detail
- They search the intranet and get poor results
- They ask a colleague, interrupting that person
- The answer is given from memory and may be out of date
- The same question is asked again next month by someone else
The ByteX approach
Create a permission-aware assistant that searches approved internal content and shows source references with every answer, so a person can verify what they are told. Answers come only from your documents, not from general knowledge.
Example workflow
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Select the content
Agree which document repositories are in scope and confirm the material is current. Indexing out-of-date policies makes the problem worse.
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Respect permissions
Index in a way that preserves existing access controls, so the assistant cannot surface a document a user could not otherwise open.
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Ground the answers
Retrieve relevant passages and require the assistant to answer from them, with a citation for each claim.
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Handle uncertainty
Where relevant content is not found, the correct response is to say so and point to a person, not to improvise.
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Pilot and measure
Run with a small group, review transcripts, and fix content gaps that the questions reveal.
Potential systems
What may be involved
Indicative only. What is actually possible depends on your platforms, subscription tiers and each vendor's integration terms.
- Microsoft 365, SharePoint and Teams
- Azure OpenAI Service or a comparable hosted provider
- Azure AI Search or a comparable retrieval service
- Existing document management or file storage platforms
- Entra ID for identity and permission awareness
Expected outcomes
What tends to improve
Operational outcomes rather than percentage claims. ByteX does not publish savings figures it has not measured in your business.
- Faster information retrieval while preserving existing access controls
- Fewer interruptions to the people who currently act as the knowledge base
- Answers that can be verified, because sources are shown
- Visibility of which policies are unclear or missing, from the questions asked
- The assistant is only as good as the documents behind it. Out-of-date or contradictory material produces out-of-date or contradictory answers, so content review is part of the work.
- Permission-aware indexing depends on the source platform supporting it. Where it does not, scope has to be restricted to content all users may see.
- It is a retrieval aid, not an authority. Decisions with legal, safety or financial consequences remain with a person.
- Very large document sets increase indexing cost and need a considered scope.
Security and privacy considerations
- Existing permissions are enforced at query time, so the assistant cannot become a way around access controls.
- The model provider's data residency, retention and training terms are reviewed before any internal document is sent.
- Queries and answers are logged for quality review, with an agreed retention period and restricted access.
- Only the minimum necessary content is indexed rather than every repository by default.
- A privacy and security review is completed before the assistant reaches production.
Related services
Services this draws on
AI Solutions
Narrow, well-guarded AI applied to jobs where it genuinely helps, with a person kept in the loop for anything that matters.
- Staff finding policy answers in seconds, with sources shown
- Shared inboxes sorted and drafted, not auto-sent
- First drafts prepared from approved source material
Business Automation
Remove the repetitive copying, chasing and re-keying that quietly consumes hours of staff time every week.
- Scheduled reports that arrive without anyone preparing them
- Enquiries routed to the right person automatically
- Approved data flowing between systems instead of by hand
Related use cases
Problems that often appear alongside this one
AI enquiry assistant
- Business problem
- A business repeatedly answers predictable customer questions about hours, services, process, delivery and pricing structure.
- ByteX approach
- Create a restricted assistant using approved business information with clearly defined escalation rules.
- Expected outcome
- Faster first responses, including outside business hours
Email classification and drafting
- Business problem
- A shared inbox contains different enquiry types requiring manual sorting: new enquiries, existing customer questions, supplier correspondence, invoices and marketing.
- ByteX approach
- Classify incoming messages into agreed categories, suggest a draft response where the type is well understood, and route both to a person for review.
- Expected outcome
- Faster processing of a shared inbox, particularly after busy periods
Approval-based document processing
- Business problem
- Invoices, forms or operational documents arrive as email attachments and are manually renamed, saved to a folder, keyed into a system and assigned to someone for approval.
- ByteX approach
- Extract the agreed fields from each document, apply business rules such as matching to a purchase order or checking a total, file it consistently, and route anything that fails a rule to a person for review.
- Expected outcome
- Reduced administration on routine documents while keeping oversight of unusual ones