From Firehose to Flow
How we built Ask A&G, our AI-powered internal knowledgebase that makes company knowledge faster, clearer, and more human.
The Challenge
At most organizations, new employees are greeted with an overwhelming deluge of information. At Allen & Gerritsen, it felt like a firehose – a flood of operational frameworks, cultural values, hybrid work policies, anti-discrimination guidelines, benefits, and dozens of tools from Asana to Google Workspace.
Despite our best efforts to organize this knowledge – first in onboarding decks, then on intranet pages, and later in shared drives – employees still struggled to surface the right answers at the right time. Search was clunky, organization inconsistent, and the human burden of “remembering where it lived” grew heavier.
The Solution
That’s why we built Ask A&G, our living knowledge base powered by a large language model. The point wasn’t to showcase technology; it was to solve a people problem: how do we reduce friction between our employees and the knowledge they need to do their best work?
Five Practical Tips
- Start with pain points, not technology. Ask where your employees get stuck today.
- Design for trust. Keep your answers accurate, consistent, and aligned with leadership’s voice.
- Use it to clean up your knowledge. The process of building will reveal duplication, gaps, and inconsistencies.
- Pilot with real employee questions. Build the system on lived use cases, not hypotheticals.
- Treat it as a living document. Update continuously as policies, tools, and culture evolve.
For us, the journey from firehose to flow wasn’t about building an AI. It was about making knowledge human again.
