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AI Knowledge Base for Franchise Operations
Short answer
An AI knowledge base for a franchise network points to the instruction that applies to the site and the date, takes an approved exception into account only where it applies, and shows the source. At Syntalith an AI app on company documents costs from €3,000 net. At 600 questions from sites a month with 10 minutes of searching each, it pays back in 1.0 month.
How we workDetails ↓
- 01Call30 minutes with an engineer, free
- 02PrototypeA working system on your process and data, free
- 03ImplementationTarget and fixed price in the contract; 50% at signing
- 04Acceptance50% once the agreed target is met
- net per application, fixed price before contract
- from €3,000
- from signing the contract to acceptance
- 4–10 weeks
- free prototype on your documents
- €0
We belong to the OpenAI and Anthropic partner programmes and learn through their official courses. What this means ↓
Author: Syntalith · 3 min read
Statistics
AI knowledge bases: statistics 2026
1.0 mo.
payback of a €3,000 app at 600 questions from sites a month: €3,490 of searching today, €533 with the app. Scenario.
20.0%
According to Eurostat (2025), 20.0% of EU companies with at least 10 employees used AI.
Source: Eurostat, 20% of EU enterprises use AI technologies (2025) ↗
55.0%
According to Eurostat (2025), 55.0% of large EU enterprises with 250 or more employees used AI.
49%
According to Anthropic (2024), combining contextual embeddings with BM25 search cut failed retrievals by 49%, and by 67% with reranking.
90%
According to the European Commission (2026), 90% of companies using AI say that people take the decisions, and 2% of decisions are fully automated.
Source: European Commission, Flash Eurobarometer 578 (2026) ↗
Figures checked: 22 October 2026
One campaign, different scopes
Head office sends a campaign instruction valid from Monday to the end of the month. Site A has an approved exception on packaging and sales reporting. Site B's folder also holds an archived document from the previous campaign. The manager asks: „Which instruction do I use this week and what do I report?”. The site and the date decide the right document, and the title only helps the search.
- Examples approved by the owner of the procedures: site, date, document, exception
- A site opening and closing
- An instruction update and an exception expiring
- A role removed from an employee
- A question about an exception whose record is missing
A search that picks the file with the newest modification date would miss these differences, which is why the test rests on pairs of site and date. When the user has no access to an exception, the answer does not reveal its content. After launch, measure how many questions need a manual check and whether they reach the right knowledge owner.
What a franchise knowledge base costs and when it pays back
- Today
- 600 questions from sites × 10 min = 100 h (€3,490)
- With the system, a person checks the output in 15% of the time
- €524
- Model, 1 call per case, Claude Sonnet 5.5
- €9.18
- Cost of one case
- €5.82 today, €0.89 with the system
- Saving
- €2,957 a month
Payback of €3,000
1.0 months
The volume, the time and the checking share are the scenario's assumptions. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat. Model: 6,000 input tokens and 500 output tokens per call at Anthropic's rates, converted at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
The model is a small item here. The result depends on the time that searching and asking around take today, and on how much of it is left for checking the answer.
Before we quote a build, we run a test on 20 to 100 questions the team has already asked: we compare the app's answer with what an employee found by hand and measure the time from the question to the source. The test takes 5 working days and costs €0.
Intranet, platform agent or your own assistant
When the current instructions sit in one intranet and exceptions are rare, a catalogue with an owner, a status and an effective date is enough. The documentation of SharePoint agents separates access to the agent from the user's permissions to the sources, but access to data does not set the rule „this site, this week”. Your own assistant joins the document system with the register of sites and the list of exceptions.
Instructions in one intranet, rare exceptions
a catalogue with effective dates
no new app
Sources and roles in one platform
an agent in the current platform
vendor licence
Documents, site register and exceptions kept apart
your own assistant that joins the sources
from €3,000
Agreeing the scope with a provider
For the call, prepare an instruction with an effective date, an anonymised exception, a list of the systems holding site data and someone from head office who will confirm the result. Head office approves the content and the period, the site administrator the site assignment, and the manager reports differences. A related case is described in the post about multi-brand technical service.
Worked example · Scenario
How we count the payback: answers from company documents
We run the same count for your documents in the free analysis.
€3,723
a month for finding answers to 800 questions in documents
Payback: 1 mo.
Our assumptions are 8 minutes to find an answer in documents or ask a colleague, and checking in 15% of the old time. €34.90 an hour is the EU average hourly labour cost for 2025 according to Eurostat, for companies with 10 or more employees. Model cost: Claude Sonnet 5.5, about 6,000 + 500 tokens per answer from documents, at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
See the full calculation →
