Knowledge base

Whether a deployment works is decided almost entirely here, and almost never in the choice of model. Your catalogue, prices, prerequisites, exclusions, delivery terms and the eleven edge cases everybody knows verbally — either they exist in a form something can retrieve, or the system has nothing to be right about. In most companies they exist in a senior person's head, a spreadsheet nobody else opens, and four years of chat history.

Which makes the first month of one of these projects an extraction problem rather than an engineering one, and it is worth pricing it as such. The uncomfortable part is that writing down the exclusions forces decisions the business has been avoiding: what the price actually is, who is not a customer, what happens when the thing arrives late.

It also has to stay current, and currency is a process rather than a delivery. A knowledge base with last quarter's prices is worse than no system at all, because it produces confident wrong commitments at scale rather than an absence somebody would have escalated.

Pointing it at the website and calling it done

A crawl of your own marketing pages produces a system fluent in your positioning and ignorant of your business. It will answer questions about values and improvise about lead times, which is the exact inversion of what a buyer needs. The material worth retrieving is the operational material, and most of it has never been written down.

A definition sits still. This does not.

The term is a reading taken at a point in a sequence that is already running. These are the sequences, with the place each of them jams.

From a customer’s question to an answer the business can stand behind

One question arriving at an automated agent, and everything that has to hold for the reply to be something the company would have said itself. 7 steps, buying the model and treating the material as content work is the arrangement that fails while looking reasonable.

Somebody will quote this number at you.

Knowing the definition is not the same as being able to check the figure. These are the procedures that do the second thing.

Accepting an automated agent

“The agent is trained on your data and ready to go live.” · 45 minutes, 6 questions.

Somebody is accountable for this number.

A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.

The reply that arrives tonight

An agent that will not say "I do not know" is not a sales asset. It is a liability with a fast response time.

RAG

Look the answer up first, then have the model phrase it — an architecture that turns a question about the model into a question about your material.

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Grounding

Every sentence the system produces is traceable to a passage it retrieved — which means an answer can be checked without asking the model to explain itself.

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Refusal path

The route the system takes when it has nothing — designed, tested, and the single most valuable thing in a deployment.

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Conversation

One exchange between a person and the system, from their first message to the point it is over — and where that point is decides every rate computed below it.

All ninety-six termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.