Preparing company knowledge for an AI assistant
A source register and permission checklist for a bilingual knowledge assistant, including stale documents and restricted information.
A retrieval layer cannot repair unclear ownership
Inventory what the assistant may use, who owns each source and who approves changes. A document being in a shared folder does not establish that it is current or available to every employee. Set authoritative versions and access boundaries before indexing.
The minimum useful source register
Record title, owner, language, effective date, allowed audience and approval status. If Arabic and English versions disagree, specify which is authoritative and who resolves the discrepancy. Define removal of retired versions from retrieval and a fallback for broken source links. Preserve visible provenance so reviewers can inspect what supported an answer.
Test a valid question from the wrong user
In a fictional internal assistant, a salesperson asks for a leadership-only decision. A refusal in the final interface is insufficient if unauthorized material was already retrieved. Test retrieval permissions as well as the answer, then add an outdated policy, malicious instructions inside a source and an unanswerable question. Each needs an explicit acceptable outcome and a human escalation route.
Plan the update process
Decide when changes are indexed, how retired copies are removed and who reviews reported errors. Maintain representative questions and rerun them after material changes to sources or retrieval. Reliability is an operating responsibility affected by the evolving knowledge base and the way people use it.