Preparing Your Documents for an AI Knowledge Assistant

1. Take inventory

List where knowledge lives: shared drives, email attachments, chat messages, websites, spreadsheets and people’s heads. For each source note what it contains, who owns it and how current it is.

2. Remove the clutter

• Delete or archive outdated versions.
• Resolve contradictions, such as two different return policies.
• Merge duplicates into one authoritative document.
• Exclude drafts and anything not meant to be shared.

3. Improve structure

Assistants find passages more reliably when documents are well organised.

• Use clear headings that describe what follows.
• Keep one topic per section.
• Write full sentences instead of cryptic notes.
• Spell out abbreviations the first time you use them.
• Put the answer first, then the explanation.

4. Handle tables, forms and images

• Provide text versions of key information shown only in images.
• Keep tables simple and give them a title and column descriptions.
• For scanned documents, use text recognition and check the output.
• Replace PDFs made from photos with the original files where possible.

5. Add context

State the document’s purpose, audience, date and product or region it applies to at the top. “Warranty terms, retail customers, India” helps the assistant choose the right passage.

6. Write the missing answers

Review real questions from customers and staff. Wherever the answer is not in your documents, write it. A short FAQ based on actual questions often improves results more than adding hundreds of pages.

7. Set ownership and review dates

Each document needs an owner, a last-reviewed date and a schedule to review it. An assistant that quotes a policy from three years ago will damage trust.

8. Decide on access

Group documents by sensitivity: public, internal, restricted. Decide which people or roles may ask about each group. Remove personal data that the assistant does not need.

9. Create a test set

Write twenty to fifty questions with the correct answers and their source documents. Use them before launch and after every content change to confirm quality has not slipped.

Our Custom AI Assistant & Knowledge Base packages include document preparation and evaluation. Pair them with an AI usage policy for your team.