Guide
Glossary
Knowledge assistant
A knowledge assistant is an AI tool that answers staff questions from an organisation's own documents, such as precedents, policies, procedures and past advice, and shows which documents each answer came from. It usually works through retrieval-augmented generation: it searches an approved document collection, then has a language model write an answer from the passages it found. A good knowledge assistant respects existing permissions, so staff only get answers from files they are allowed to open, and it says when it cannot find an answer instead of guessing. It is only as reliable as the documents behind it, so outdated or duplicate versions need to be removed or clearly labelled.
Also called AI knowledge assistant, document assistant, ask-our-documents tool
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Example
In an accounting firm
For example, an accounting firm connects a knowledge assistant to its procedures manual, engagement letter templates and internal technical notes. A senior accountant asks what the firm needs from a client before lodging a trust tax return, and gets the firm's own checklist with links to the source documents, rather than a generic answer from the internet.
Guides that explain it in context
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