The problem
Operating knowledge lives in PDFs, shared drives, and the heads of long-tenured staff. New hires interrupt senior people, answers vary by who you ask, and policy changes don't reach the front line.
How it works
- Documents are split into passages and stored in a Supabase vector database.
- A question is matched against those passages; only matches above a similarity threshold are kept.
- Claude writes the answer only from the retrieved passages and cites where each fact came from — for example, Refund & Returns Policy.pdf, page 3.
- If nothing relevant is found, the assistant says so and routes the question to the document owner.
Governance notes
The riskiest failure for a knowledge assistant is a confident wrong answer. Restricting answers to retrieved text, showing citations, and sampling answers monthly keeps that risk visible and owned.