Enterprise Knowledge Assistant Giving Consultants Their Time Back
An 800-person strategy consulting firm was burning 30% of billable time on knowledge search. Consultants hunted manually through SharePoint, email, and Notion for past deliverables and methodologies. We built a RAG-powered knowledge assistant connected to all internal repositories. Consultants now search in plain language and get cited, source-linked answers. Average search time dropped from 47 minutes to 9 minutes.
The firm advises Fortune 500 companies on strategy, operations, and digital transformation. Their advantage is institutional knowledge: 6 years of client deliverables, proprietary frameworks, competitive analyses, and methodology documentation. That knowledge was practically unreachable — spread across 12,000 SharePoint folders, 3 million emails, and three generations of Notion workspaces.
Knowledge search had become a hidden tax on productivity. Partners estimated junior consultants spent 2–3 hours a day looking for past work. Senior consultants spent 45 minutes a day answering questions that had been answered before. A KM team of two maintained a manual index that was always six months out of date. The firm had tried three previous KM tools. None were adopted.
Consultants spending 30% of billable time on knowledge search — $3.2M in annual revenue impact
12,000 SharePoint folders, 3M+ emails, and three Notion workspaces with no unified search
KM team of 2 maintaining a manual index that was 6 months out of date
Three previous KM tool failures — adoption was the central challenge, not technology
No citation or attribution in search results — consultants couldn't verify the source or context of retrieved content
We built a hybrid RAG system. Claude 3 handles generation. Pinecone stores the vectors. A custom ingestion pipeline pulled content from SharePoint, email (with permission controls), and Notion into one unified knowledge base. Every response includes mandatory source citations — each answer links directly to the originating document, slide, or email thread.
Knowledge audit: cataloged all 12,000 SharePoint folders, prioritized by access frequency and recency — reduced ingestion scope to the highest-value 40%
Ingestion pipeline built for SharePoint, Notion, and email with metadata preservation and permission inheritance
Hybrid retrieval: dense embedding (text-embedding-3-large) + BM25 sparse retrieval + cross-encoder reranker
Claude 3 Opus as generation model — chosen for citation accuracy and instruction-following on source attribution
Permission-aware retrieval — consultants can only see documents their role entitles them to
Slack integration — consultants query the assistant in the tool they already use
Six months after launch, 87% of the firm's 800 consultants were active users. Average search time dropped from 47 minutes to 9 minutes. Partners said junior consultants were delivering better first drafts. They were building on past work instead of starting from zero.
Knowledge retrieval time: 47 min → 9 min (81% reduction)
87% consultant adoption within 6 months
Estimated $2.8M annual revenue benefit from reclaimed billable time
Senior consultant interruptions for knowledge questions: down 73%
First-draft quality scores (internal peer review): up 24 percentile points
“It's like having the institutional knowledge of our entire firm available on demand. Junior consultants now produce work that used to take twice as long. The ROI was immediate and obvious.”
Caroline Hughes
Managing Partner, Strategy Consulting Firm
Client identity is withheld under NDA. The figures reported here were verified against the client's own internal reporting at project close.
Mandatory citation in every response was the one feature that drove adoption. Consultants trusted a system that showed its work.
Permission-aware retrieval was non-negotiable for a firm handling client-confidential data. It had to be right from day one.
Slack integration outperformed a standalone web app 3:1 on daily active usage. Meet users where they already are.
Key Results
Technology Stack
Facing a Similar Challenge?
Let's discuss your specific context and what results are realistic for your organisation.
Get in touch