A buyer’s checklist for document access, retrieval quality, citations and maintenance.
Define the question the assistant should answer
A knowledge assistant should solve a bounded information problem. Decide who uses it, which questions matter and which approved sources contain the answers. An internal policy assistant, for example, needs different access rules from a public product help tool. Start with an inventory of the content, its owners and how frequently it changes.
Retrieval is an application design problem
A retrieval-augmented application finds relevant material and supplies it as context to a model. Splitting documents into passages, preserving useful metadata and choosing relevant results are engineering decisions. A larger document collection does not automatically produce better answers. Duplicate, obsolete and contradictory material can make retrieval less useful.
Carry permissions through the entire request
If a person cannot read a source in the original system, the assistant should not reveal its contents. Apply access controls at retrieval time and test with users in different roles. Include logs, exports and cached responses in the review. A citation link must not become a route around document permissions.
Evaluate the answer and its evidence
Ask representative users to prepare questions with known answers. Check whether the correct source is retrieved, whether the response is supported and whether a citation actually leads to relevant evidence. Include questions whose answers are absent. A clear statement that information was not found is often more useful than a confident guess.
Give the content an owner
Agree how updates, deleted documents and new versions reach the assistant. Define who handles incorrect answers and how corrections become test cases. The system needs a maintenance process as much as it needs a model.
Further reading
Prepared with AI assistance; technical references checked against the documentation linked above. These are planning considerations, not a guarantee of project results.
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