A knowledge assistant is only as good as its citations
Retrieval over company documents is the most useful thing most organisations can do with language models today — provided every answer shows its source.
The request is always the same: "we have thousands of documents and nobody can find anything". The temptation is to point a model at the pile and call it done. The result is confident answers with no way to check them.
Sources first, fluency second
Design the system to return the passage before it returns the prose. An answer a person can verify in ten seconds is worth more than a perfect paragraph they have to take on trust.
Permissions are part of retrieval
The assistant must see exactly what the asking person is allowed to see — no more. Access control belongs inside the retrieval layer, not in a disclaimer.
Curate the corpus
Obsolete policies and duplicate drafts poison answers. Deciding what the assistant should not read is half the project.