An internal knowledge assistant for a professional services organisation

Client context

A professional services organisation holds policies, methodologies and delivery standards across an intranet, a document management library and several team sites. Employees ask internal teams the same questions repeatedly because finding the current version is unreliable.

The challenge

The content estate contains duplicates and superseded material with no clear ownership. Grounding an assistant on it directly would produce confident answers from obsolete documents. Some content is restricted, so the assistant must respect existing permissions exactly.

Objectives

• Answer common internal questions from approved, current content
• Respect existing Microsoft 365 permissions without a parallel permission model
• Cite the source document for every answer
• Identify content gaps from real questions
• Establish ownership so the content estate does not decay again

The solution

Content preparation runs first: an audit of the scenarios in scope, retirement of superseded material, ownership assignment and review scheduling. A Copilot Studio agent is then grounded on the curated set, inheriting Microsoft 365 permissions so each user only receives answers from content they can already open. Every answer cites its source. Questions the agent cannot answer confidently route to the owning team and are logged, so the content backlog is driven by real demand. The agent is surfaced in Microsoft Teams rather than as a separate destination.

Architecture

• Curated SharePoint Online grounding set with assigned owners and review dates
• Copilot Studio agent with permission-trimmed retrieval over the curated set
• Microsoft Teams as the delivery surface for the agent
• Microsoft Entra ID group-based access aligned to existing content permissions
• Evaluation set of representative questions with agreed correct answers, run before each change
• Usage and gap logging to Dataverse, feeding a content improvement backlog