A Knowledge Base that admits what it does not know

A Knowledge Base entry is one piece of HR knowledge your Workspace holds: the wifi password, the vacation policy, working hours. Each is stored with an embedding, so an Employee reaches it by asking in their own words instead of guessing what it was filed under.

The other half is what you upload. A Knowledge File is split into Passages — stretches of its text that can be retrieved on their own, each carrying the heading it sat under, so an answer can point at where in the file it came from. Your Workspace keeps the text, never the original file. Both kinds are searched together on every question, and where both have something to say, the written entries are offered first: one was written to answer the question, the other merely happens to contain it. Today the upload has to be plain text or markdown — PDF and Word are not accepted yet. Spreadsheets never will be, and that is a decision rather than a gap: a leave tracker is data the bot should be querying, not prose it should be quoting.

An HR Head builds the Knowledge Base in Slack, in ordinary conversation — ask the bot to save an entry, list what it knows, correct an answer, or drop one. Only an HR Head can: the bot turns anyone else down rather than quietly obliging.

Faced with a factual question about your company, the bot is asked to search your entries before it answers, and told to say plainly when nothing matches. It has no browsing tool of any kind, so there is no open web for it to reach for instead.

A search that comes back empty is logged as a Knowledge Gap, and unless much the same question already came up that day, the bot opens a fresh direct message to your HR Head asking them to fill it. Fresh, rather than a reply in a thread already underway, so the answer is not bent by whatever else was being discussed there. Reply with the answer and it becomes a Knowledge Base entry; dismiss it and the gap closes unanswered. Either way, the handbook grows out of the questions people actually asked.