Context
A 60-consultant firm with offices in Casablanca and Paris and ten years of deliverables, proposals and research spread across SharePoint, Drive and e-mail. New consultants spent their first weeks asking colleagues where things were.
The problem
Finding a precedent took hours, and often the answer was "ask Youssef, he worked on it". Knowledge left with people. Confidentiality rules per client made a shared search tool risky.
What we built
We built a retrieval-augmented assistant over 40,000 documents. Every answer cites the documents it came from, with page references. Access rights mirror the existing client permissions, so a consultant only sees what they are allowed to see.
A training programme for all consultants, plus a small team of "knowledge champions", ensured adoption. The partners review usage and quality monthly.
What we learned
Sourcing is what builds trust. Consultants did not adopt the tool because it was clever; they adopted it because every answer pointed to the document they could open and check.