79% of questions answered with citations - and 438 hours a month back

RESULTS

Measured over the 30 days either side of launch.

79.4% answered with citations
In under a minute, against an 18-minute round trip through search and a colleague.
438 hours a month returned
About 2.7 full-time equivalents. The saving lands on both the person asking and the person who would have stopped work to answer.
"Does anyone know" posts down 64%
Across the six busiest channels.
Security coverage: 48.6% -> 91%
It was the worst-covered subject at launch. Writing the five pages the gap report named fixed it inside a month.
New joiners shipped 31% sooner
Time from start date to first merged change, mostly by not needing to find the person who knows.

The problem

The documents existed. Finding them cost more than writing them had.

18 minutes a question
Not typing - the round trip. Search returns nothing useful, you ask in a channel, you wait for whoever knows to be free.
The cost lands twice
Every question interrupts somebody who was doing something else, and the more someone knows the more they are interrupted.
Nobody could see what was missing
When an answer did not exist, the question was asked again the following week by somebody else, and no one had a list.

What we shipped

Answers a reader can check in one glance.

Retrieval across five systems
SharePoint, Confluence, Notion, Drive and Zendesk - 170 documents and 14,000 retrievable passages.
Every answer carries its sources
With the passage highlighted in the document beside it.
A refusal when there is nothing to cite
Rather than an answer assembled from adjacent documents.
Permissions inherited from the source
A document you cannot open is a document that cannot be cited to you.
A gap report
Ranking the questions that come back empty by how many people hit them - a writing backlog nobody had before.

391 questions a month still come back empty. That is the design - no citation, no answer - and an honest blank is what makes the other 79% worth trusting. Five months from first call to go-live; the engagement is ongoing.

Everything the company knew was written down somewhere, which is not the same as anyone being able to find it. We built retrieval over their contracts, SOPs, wikis, past projects and support history that answers in under a minute and shows the passage it came from. 79.4% of questions now come back with at least two citations, and the 20% that come back empty turned into a writing backlog nobody had before.