Build an internal knowledge base

Build an internal knowledge base

“Am I allowed to use my personal device for work?”

Questions like this land in inboxes, Slack channels, and hallway conversations every day. The answer usually exists — it’s buried in a policy PDF somewhere — but finding it, quoting it correctly, and trusting that it’s current takes time most people don’t have.

This walkthrough shows how to turn your approved company documents into a knowledge base your whole team can ask in plain English. You upload the documents once, ask questions in everyday language, and get short answers backed by citations to the exact source — so you can trust the answer and click through to the original when you need the full text.

We’ll use a running example: an IT Policies knowledge base that can answer the personal-device question above. The same flow works for HR policies, finance procedures, security standards, onboarding guides — any body of documents your team needs to consult.

Who this is for

Anyone who fields repeat questions from a fixed set of rules: HR, IT, compliance, operations, facilities, and the managers who get asked. Set it up once; your whole team benefits.

What you’ll end up with

By the end of this walkthrough you will have:

• A Knowledge Collection holding your approved IT policy documents.
• Answers grounded in those documents, with inline citations back to the exact source and section.
• A clear signal when something isn’t covered, so you can close the gap instead of guessing.
• A knowledge base your team can use, with viewers who can read but not change what’s in it.

Before you start

A few minutes of prep makes the whole flow faster and the answers more trustworthy.

You’ll need	Why it matters
Your approved policy documents	A knowledge base is only as good as its sources — use the current, sanctioned versions
A sense of who should access it	Just you to start, or shared with your team — you can change this later
Permission to share (if you want a team-wide base)	Anyone can create a personal Collection; sharing tenant-wide may depend on your role

---

Step 1 — Create the IT Policies Collection

A Knowledge Collection is a curated set of documents Chat reads from and cites when it answers. Grounding answers in a Collection — rather than the model’s general knowledge — is what makes them accurate to your organization and traceable to your documents.

1. Open Knowledge from the sidebar and create a new Collection.
2. Name it for the job, for example “IT Policies.” A clear name helps everyone pick the right knowledge base later.

That’s the container. Next, fill it.

Step 2 — Add your approved policy documents

You can build the Collection from files you upload, from public web pages you crawl, or both.

Upload files

1. In the Collection, choose Upload (or drag files straight onto it).
2. Add your policy documents — your acceptable-use policy, BYOD (bring-your-own-device) policy, security standards, and so on.

Chat reads a wide range of formats, including:

Category	Formats
Documents	PDF, Word (DOC/DOCX), Excel (XLS/XLSX), PowerPoint (PPT/PPTX), CSV, plain text (TXT)
Structured / web	Markdown (MD), HTML, JSON, XML, YAML

Each file can be up to 100 MB. After upload, Chat indexes each document so it can find the right passage for any question — there’s nothing else to configure.

Note

Upload the approved version of each document. Whatever is in the Collection is what your team’s answers will be based on, so treat it as the source of truth.

(Optional) Crawl a web page

If a relevant policy lives on an internal wiki page or a public site, add it as a web source: choose Add Source → Web Crawl and paste the URL. Chat fetches the page (and, if you ask, linked pages) into the Collection and keeps it as a citable source alongside your files.

Caution

Web Crawl only reaches pages Chat can open. Private or internal-only addresses are blocked by design, so they never get pulled into a knowledge base.

For the full mechanics of bringing documents in, see Upload a file to work with and Search the web.

Step 3 — Decide who can use it

A new Collection is private to you by default. To turn it into a shared resource, open the Collection’s access settings and choose how widely to share:

• Just you — keep it personal while you build and test it.
• A specific person or group — share with a teammate or a team.
• Your whole organization (Tenant) — make it available to every member of your workspace.

When you share, you also choose what people can do. Most members get read access: they can ask questions and see citations, but they can’t add, remove, or change the documents. Curating the knowledge base stays with you and other editors — so the answers everyone relies on don’t drift.

Two ways to put a Collection to work

You can attach a Collection directly to an Assistant — a reusable configuration with its own instructions and knowledge — so anyone who uses that Assistant automatically gets answers from it. Or share the Collection and let people select it per question. Use an Assistant for a standing “IT help desk” experience; use per-question selection for ad-hoc lookups. See Choosing an assistant.

---

Step 4 — Ask your question

Now the payoff. Open a conversation and point it at your knowledge base.

1. In the composer, open the Knowledge selector and choose IT Policies. (If you linked the Collection to an Assistant, just select that Assistant instead — its knowledge comes along automatically.)

2. Ask in plain English:

   Am I allowed to use my personal device for work?

Chat searches the IT Policies Collection for the relevant passages, reads them, and answers from what it finds. You’ll briefly see it work through the question — understanding your intent, gathering information, composing the response — before the answer appears.

Step 5 — Read the answer and check the citations

The answer comes back with numbered citation markers (like [1]) woven into the text, and a Sources Used card listing where each part came from.

• Click a citation to open a card showing the document title, the exact snippet the answer drew from, and how confident the match is. From there you can open the original document for the full context.
• If a question lands outside your documents, Chat tells you — for example, “Answering from general knowledge” when the Collection had nothing to offer. That honest signal is the whole point: you instantly know whether the answer is backed by your policies or not, so you can add the missing policy instead of acting on a guess.

Why this is trustworthy

Because every claim points back to a real document and section, you don’t have to take the answer on faith — you can verify it in one click. And when something genuinely isn’t written down, Chat says so rather than inventing a confident-sounding answer.

Step 6 — Drill in with follow-ups

Most real questions have a second part. Keep going in the same conversation — Chat remembers the context and the Collection it’s drawing from.

What counts as a “personal device” — does that include a tablet?

Do I need to install anything before I connect mine?

Two one-click shortcuts sit under each answer to help you go deeper without retyping:

• Explain more — asks Chat to expand the previous answer in more detail.
• Refine this — asks Chat to tighten and improve its previous response.

If an answer offers lettered or numbered options, you’ll also see them as one-click choice buttons — tap one to continue down that path.

Step 7 — Save or share the answer

When you’ve got an answer worth keeping or passing on:

• Copy it straight to your clipboard with the copy icon under the message.
• Export the conversation as PDF, Markdown, or plain text from the conversation menu — handy for attaching to a ticket, dropping into a wiki, or sending to whoever asked.

See Export a conversation for the full options.

---

What you’ve built

You now have a living knowledge base. Anyone you’ve shared it with can ask the personal-device question — and a hundred others — and get a short, cited answer from your approved documents, with a clear flag whenever a topic isn’t covered yet. Editors keep the documents current; everyone else just asks.

As policies change, update the documents in the Collection and the answers update with them. The gaps you spot — the moments Chat falls back to general knowledge — become your to-do list for what to write next.

Where to go next

• Upload a file to work with — the full guide to bringing documents into Chat.
• Choosing an assistant — turn your Collection into a standing “help desk” Assistant.
• Write and update policies — when a gap turns up, draft the missing policy from your own sources and add it back to the Collection.
• Export a conversation — save and share answers as PDF, Markdown, or text.