Most knowledge bases are graveyards. Someone, usually the most diligent person in the department, spends months documenting every procedure, policy, and guideline. They write it all down carefully. They organize it logically. And then nobody reads it.
This is the cruel irony of institutional knowledge. The reward for documenting everything is that everyone just asks you directly instead. You've already written the answer. It's right there in the docs. But they're asking you anyway.
Why nobody reads the docs
The conventional response is to blame the askers. They're lazy. They should just read the documentation.
But that diagnosis is wrong. The real barrier is retrieval cost: reading documentation in advance requires guessing what you'll need to know later. No one has time to study every policy on the chance that some piece becomes relevant. When a question comes up, people need an answer now. Asking is faster than searching.
In legal departments, this plays out constantly. Lawyers get sidetracked answering routine questions that could be answered by the carefully prepared policies. But business teams want answers, usually right now. So they ask. And the lawyer answers. Again.
More documentation doesn't fix this. Better documentation doesn't either. The problem is that people don't read the docs.
Meeting people where they are
So we went the other direction. Users ask their question in Slack, Teams, or a chat window. The AI answers. No portal. No search. No reading.
This isn't new. Other companies do versions of it. But it only solves the retrieval problem. The harder problem is keeping the knowledge base current without creating more work.
Automatic capture
When our AI can't answer a question, it routes the question to a human expert. But it also listens. When the expert responds, our AI captures that answer and adds it to the knowledge base immediately. No manual entry. No documentation task.
The next time that question comes up, the AI handles it.
No one will ever have to answer the same question twice.
Our AI doesn't just retrieve what you originally gave it. It listens to every conversation, captures every answer, and builds the knowledge base as your team works. The documentation that one diligent person started continues to grow, without anyone writing it.
For legal teams, the payoff is concrete: senior people stop getting sidetracked by routine questions. And any time they do answer something new, their answer has a lasting return.