Illustrative scenario
A professional firm that can't find its own knowledge
Overview
How we'd approach knowledge retrieval for an accountancy or consultancy practice where the answers exist but nobody can find them quickly.
The situation
The pain point Junior staff ask the same questions again and again, and senior people lose time answering them.
A 30-person accountancy practice has years of guidance, templates and email threads spread across shared drives and inboxes. Often the answer already exists somewhere nobody can find.
Where AI could help
The opportunity is knowledge retrieval: a way to ask a plain-English question and get an answer grounded in the firm's own documents, with a link to the source. Done properly it cites where each answer came from, so people can check it.
How we'd approach it
- Intake. Which questions get asked most, and where the trustworthy source material lives.
- Opportunity scoring. We'd be upfront about document quality, because retrieval is only as good as what it's searching.
- Proof of concept. We'd build a working demo over a slice of the firm's real, anonymised material and let the team ask it real questions, checking the answers cite the right sources.
- Report. Accuracy, the risk of confident but wrong answers, how to keep it current, and the running cost.
- Build or handover. We build it, or hand a development-ready brief to their own team or supplier, with the guardrails spelled out.
What success would look like
We'd measure how often the tool returns a correct, well-sourced answer to the firm's real questions, and the time saved compared with asking a colleague. If it can't answer reliably with citations, it isn't ready, and we'd say so plainly.
See it on your own data
Every business is different, so the proof of concept is where we find out whether this works for yours.