An internal knowledge base that cites its sources

AED 30,000 to AED 180,000 covers most of what we are asked to build. The number moves on how many source systems and documents, how complex the permission model is, how many languages, and whether the document audit and consolidation is in scope. Model and hosting costs are separate and ongoing. Anything quoted before those are known is a guess. We scope first, then price, and the scope document is yours whether or not you proceed. These are market ranges rather than a fixed rate card — the proposal carries the real figure.

No, and it is worth explaining. That first page is entirely software and guides to choosing software, because most people searching it are shopping for a tool. If a product fits your situation, buying it is usually cheaper than building and we will say so. This page is for companies whose documents are spread across several systems with a real permission model, where an off-the-shelf tool does not cover it.

Frequently yes. If your documents live in one place, your permission model is simple and your questions are ordinary, an existing product will serve you well and cost far less. Custom work earns its cost when documents are scattered across systems, permissions genuinely matter, or you need it embedded somewhere a product does not go.

Audience and risk. A customer bot answers from public content to people outside the company. This answers from internal content to staff, which makes permissions the central engineering problem rather than an afterthought. The retrieval technology overlaps; the governance does not.

Then the document work is the project and the assistant is the easy part. We would rather tell you that at the quoting stage than build over contradictory sources and hand you something confidently wrong. The audit frequently delivers value on its own, before anything is built.

That is a decision made during tool selection and it should be written down. We assess data residency, retention and whether a provider trains on submitted content, and we select accordingly. For clients with strict requirements there are options that keep processing within defined boundaries, at higher cost.

Not if it is built properly, and this is the question to press hardest on any vendor. Retrieval must filter by the asking user's actual entitlements, tested with real accounts at different levels. A demonstration that indexes everything and promises to filter later is not the same thing.

Eight to sixteen weeks, and the document audit usually determines it rather than the build. Companies that have already consolidated their documentation move much faster.

A named owner per document area and a review rhythm, plus the gap report telling you what to write next. Without an owner it degrades quietly, which is worse than visibly breaking.

Usage, the proportion of questions answered without escalation, spot-checked accuracy, and time saved against the baseline of how people found this information before. The gap report is also an output worth having on its own.

Yes, and we would recommend it. One department, one document set, a limited group of users. It proves the permission model and the citation behaviour on real questions before anyone commits to a company-wide index.

Usually whichever one answers the same questions repeatedly for other departments. HR and finance are common — policy questions, expense rules, leave entitlements — because the answers exist in documents and the questions repeat endlessly. Operations teams with detailed procedures are the other reliable case.

It can, and it needs care. Historical tickets contain answers that were correct at the time and are not now, plus a lot of individual circumstance. Indexing them alongside current policy tends to produce confident answers built from a case that does not apply. We would index the resolved knowledge articles rather than the raw tickets.

It will synthesise across both unless you resolve it, which is why the audit matters more than the build. Where a genuine conflict cannot be resolved before launch, the safe behaviour is to surface both with citations and let the person decide rather than silently choosing.

Volume is rarely the problem; contradiction and staleness are. A well-maintained set of two hundred current documents produces better answers than four thousand of mixed vintage. The audit usually retires more than anyone expected.

Time people currently spend asking colleagues, and time those colleagues spend answering. That second cost is invisible on any system and it is usually the larger one. We baseline it by asking a sample of staff how often they interrupt someone to find something.