The problem
Everyone on the team already uses a chatbot, and each one answers from the open web with no idea how your company works. The person who knows the answer gets the same question every week, and the answer never lands where the next person can find it.
What goes wrong
- Each person has a private assistant. It answers from the open web, it does not know your templates or your rules, and nothing one person learns reaches the rest of the team.
- The assistant is confident when it should not be. It writes a plausible policy that does not match yours. A new hire follows it, and with no citation, nobody catches it until a customer does.
- It reads too much or too little. Either it was pointed at the whole drive, HR files included, or it was pointed at nothing and answers from memory.
The approach
- One assistant per team, in the Slack, Teams, or Telegram channel the team already uses. It reads only the folders and documents the team chooses to share.
- Every answer cites the document it came from. When the answer is not in the material, it says so and names who to ask.
- Scope is set by what you share. Customer files, HR folders, and executive drives stay out unless you add them on purpose.
- Tune it on 30 to 50 questions the team asked last month. Run it beside three to five named people. Review the unanswered list every month.
When it works
A team answers the same questions from the same documents all week. The documents exist and are mostly right. One person owns the monthly list of questions the assistant could not answer.
Why a team assistant, not a personal one
Every planner, buyer, and coordinator already has a chatbot open in a tab. Each one is private and answers from the open web. None of them has read your quality procedure, your supplier terms, or the plant manager's March note that changed the changeover checklist.
So the company's real knowledge still lives in two places: the senior person who answers the same question every week, and the folder nobody can find. A team assistant moves that knowledge to one place the whole team can ask, and keeps the senior person for the questions that need judgment.
One assistant per team, not one per person. A fix made for one person is a fix for everyone.
What a good answer looks like
A buyer asks which supplier terms apply to a rush order. The answer comes from your current terms and the note that retired the old ones, not from a guess about what companies usually do, and it names both.
When the material has no answer, the assistant does not invent a policy. A confident wrong answer on the plant floor or in a loan file costs more than no answer at all.
Adding or removing a folder is one step in the runbook your admin keeps.
How we build it
First comes access. Your team shares the folders, we inventory what is there, and we agree in writing which groups see what. The assistant's tone and its rules for what it will not answer are written and you approve them.
Next is loading and tuning. We run it against 30 to 50 real questions your team asked last month, set the citation format, and open a review queue for wrong answers.
Then comes the shadow run. Three to five named people ask it real questions beside their normal process. We fix what it missed, then open it to the team with a runbook. Then operation starts: new and changed files are picked up every week, wrong-answer flags are reviewed, and you get a monthly report of what it was asked and what it could not answer.
When it does not work
It does not work when the documents are wrong or missing. The assistant will tell you that, but someone has to own the gap list and fill it. And it does not act. When an answer should turn into a draft or a task with a person approving it first, that is the Workflow Agent, built beside it, behind an approval gate.
Where to start
If the shared assistant is the first thing to fix, start with the Knowledge Agent. For a manufacturer or distributor, manufacturing and distribution covers orders read into your ERP and supplier invoices matched before you pay. For a bank or lender, banking and financial services covers loan document review and approvals on the record. If you are not sure the assistant is the first thing, ask Roo, Webaroo's AI: Should my team share one AI assistant instead of personal chatbots?
Book 15 minutes with Connor