Company knowledge with sources: how the workflow works

The same company, two people, different access

An employee looks for the current leave procedure. The folder holds two versions, and some documents belong to HR alone. A manager from HR and a specialist from the warehouse ask the same question and should get different answers, each with sources that person can open.

The most common mistake when building such a search is hiding the citation only on screen. By then the model has read the closed document, and its content could shape the answer even if the link never appeared. The check has to run before the answer is generated, and the refusal has to read the same whether the closed document exists or not.

What it costs and when it pays back

The model is a small item here. The result depends on the time that searching and asking around takes today, and on how much of it remains 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 application's answer with what an employee found by hand, and we count the time from question to source. The test takes 5 working days and costs €0.

What our demonstrator showed

In the demonstrator, with 600 test documents and five fictional accounts, we checked 750 question and identity pairs: no answer or source went outside the asker's permissions. A separate test measured accuracy. Questions worded differently from the document found the right source at a rate of 0.511 across 45 pairs, because simple ranking recognises synonyms poorly. The lesson for a rollout: access control and search quality are two different tests, and the second needs a good embedding model chosen for the company's vocabulary. The mechanism is described in the PostgreSQL documentation: once RLS is on, a table with no policy returns no rows, but the table owner and roles with the BYPASSRLS attribute skip the rules. So the application connects to the database through a separate role without those rights.

Where to start

Before a pilot, prepare documents with their owners and versions, the employees' groups and permissions, and a few dozen questions with the correct sources. Also check whether removing a permission changes the result from the very next question, as described in the article on a knowledge base after permission changes. The demonstrator's screens are on the page about company memory with permissions, and we run the build as part of AI applications.

For the first call, one question that keeps coming back to colleagues and a note on where the team looks for the answer are enough. You do not need to send confidential documents, and you get a written plan within 2 working days.