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An AI knowledge base for shared service centers
Short answer
An AI knowledge base in a shared service centre joins the shared procedure with the annex of the unit being served into one answer that tells the employee what to prepare. It first establishes the unit, because the language of the question does not reveal it. Requests stop coming back incomplete. At Syntalith the app costs from €3,000 net. At 1,500 requests a month with 5 minutes of checking each, it pays back in 0.8 months.
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
Service centres and AI: statistics 2026
0.8 mo.
payback of a €3,000 app at 1,500 SSC requests a month: €4,362 of checking procedures today, €673 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 answer from two documents
A shared service centre handles supplier data requests for two units in different countries. Both use the shared request form from the procedure. The current annex for one of them also requires a project code and a handover of the request to the project coordinator.
The employee asks in Polish, so the assistant first establishes which unit they serve. The requirements of both units are the company's internal arrangements, so the source of truth is the approved annex that the process owner maintains. Two links without the content joined would leave the employee comparing documents at every request.
Why finding the general procedure is not enough
When an SSC takes on more units, the shared procedure does not cover every arrangement. An experienced colleague remembers the annex, while a new employee follows the main instruction and the gap shows up at the recipient's end.
- 01Process ownerNames the approved material and how the annex relates to the unit.
- 02ChangeWhen the coordinator stops checking requests, the owner updates the annex.
- 03ConflictTwo documents describe a task differently, so the assistant shows both passages.
- 04QuestionThe employee sends the case to the process owner.
What an SSC knowledge base costs and when it pays back
- Today
- 1,500 requests × 5 min = 125 h (€4,362)
- With the system, a person checks the output in 15% of the time
- €654
- Model, 1 call per case, Claude Sonnet 5.5
- €19
- Cost of one case
- €2.91 today, €0.45 with the system
- Saving
- €3,689 a month
Payback of €3,000
0.8 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: 5,000 input tokens and 400 output tokens per call at Anthropic's rates, converted at the ECB rate of 1.1205 USD per euro on 22 October 2026.
Every request that comes back to be completed means opening the case a second time on both sides. That is why the trial counts the preparation time and the number of requests sent back by the recipient, before the rollout and after it. Employees judge whether the answer let them prepare the request without asking their team lead.
What your current tools can provide
First check whether the form already shows the unit's requirements and whether the procedure page leads to the right annex. Microsoft describes SharePoint knowledge sources in Copilot Studio, which respect existing permissions. The assistant does not automatically search documents reached through links, so an annex kept as a separate file has to be added to the sources.
The form shows the unit's requirements
better access to the explanations
no new app
The procedure leads to the annex
a tidied procedure page
configuration
The answer is built from documents in different places
an AI app that joins the sources
from €3,000
Retrieval decides the quality of the answer: according to Anthropic (2024), contextual embeddings with BM25 cut failed retrievals by 49% (Contextual Retrieval). When employees find the answer but struggle to pass it to colleagues in another language, training for multilingual shared services teams will help. The first scope is answers from documents for a few units in one process. For the call, bring a case that came back because a unit's requirement was missed, and the name of the library that holds the procedures.
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 →
