Design 9: Enterprise knowledge assistant

Overview

• A permission-aware assistant over many organizational sources and users.
• It requires identity-linked document access, freshness, and trustworthy source references.

Why this matters

Employees cannot manually search every wiki, drive, and internal manual efficiently.

An everyday example

An enterprise librarian knows which archives each employee may read.

A technical example

Sync documents and permissions, retrieve only eligible active versions, and recheck access on source open.

How it works

1. Connect approved sources
2. Sync content/ACLs
3. Index
4. Authenticate query
5. Filter/retrieve
6. Cite
7. Monitor/revoke.

Architecture and flow

Enterprise sources + ACLs → versioned index → identity-aware retrieval → grounded answer.

The insurance assistant example

Claims staff access internal process manuals while customers only access permitted policy sources.

When to use it

Multiple private knowledge sources with maintained permission mappings.

When to avoid it

Do not index everything into one shared corpus without revocation and deletion propagation.

Interview answer

“Enterprise RAG is as much an identity and content-lifecycle system as a generation system.”

Benefits, trade-offs, and production considerations

• Measure ACL sync lag, index freshness, failed connectors, source availability, and unknown answers.
• A fast, relevant answer is still a failure if the source was unauthorized.