Begin with a bounded use case
Choose one workflow where better access to approved knowledge has clear value: product Q&A, after-sales support, internal policy lookup or sales enablement. Define what the assistant must refuse or escalate.
Prepare knowledge for retrieval
Documents need owners, versions, clean structure and access rules. Chunking alone is not a knowledge strategy. Important claims should remain traceable to their approved source.
Add tools only when necessary
Retrieval answers questions about existing information. Actions such as checking an order, creating a ticket or updating a record require explicit tools, authentication and confirmation boundaries.
Evaluate before scaling
Build a test set from real questions. Measure groundedness, usefulness, refusal behavior and latency whenever the knowledge, prompt, model or tools change.