Your company's knowledge base, without writing it

First level: what your vendors already publish

The online help for your software is connected in one move, source by source. There is more in it than people think: 886 articles at ACD, 715 at EBP, 684 at Pennylane, 759 at Cegid Loop, 397 at Silae. On top of that comes the official material for your profession, BOFiP and BOSS for accounting firms.

The assistant reads them once, then resyncs at the frequency set for each source. What the vendor publishes this morning ends up in the answers without anyone having to do a thing. Your own documents go in the same way: PDF guides, internal procedures, public forums for the tools you use.

Second layer: the answers you already get

Every week, your teams prise answers out of support desks, by phone or by email. Those answers cost time on hold, and they ended up in someone's inbox before vanishing.

Here, they come back into the original conversation and join the knowledge base. The same question will never go off to the vendor again, even if everyone has forgotten it in the meantime. It is this mechanism, more than anything else, that makes a firm's memory grow.

Third floor: what your own house knows how to do

Your know-how is written down nowhere. Internal notes, templates, the way you handle a particular case: all of it gets added and becomes available to those who are allowed to see it.

At our first client, the whole thing now amounts to 2,752 articles and 27,154 indexed passages. Nobody spent an evening documenting anything.

The analysis stays on your machine

Your documents are chunked and vectorised locally, on a multilingual engine installed with the instance. Your texts don't go off to be analysed elsewhere. Only the wording of the answer may pass through a secure interface, and even that can stay entirely with you if you decide so.

When an answer deserves to be certified

Some questions come up constantly and deserve a fixed answer, approved by someone who puts their signature to it. So an answer can be certified by an authorised person: from then on it is served automatically to equivalent questions, always marked as automatic, and can be withdrawn at any time.

The downside is one we accept: certifying takes a human being to certify. Without that action, the answer stays an assistant's answer, sourced but not binding.

Day one isn't magic

An empty knowledge base answers nothing. The first week is about connecting the right sources and saying which procedures are authoritative, with someone from your side. Only then does everyday use take over, and the base grows without effort.