80%: Retrieval Time Reduced
Time spent searching fell from 2.1 hours to 25 mins daily.
3 weeks: Consultant Onboarding
Reduced from 3+ months to reach full productivity.
15 hours: Saved per month
Time recovered per consultant from unproductive search.

Client Background

The client is a UK-based professional services firm with 200 consultants and support staff, operating across three UK offices. The firm provides advisory services in a specialist regulatory domain — the kind of work where the quality of advice depends directly on rapid access to accurate, up-to-date internal knowledge: past engagement records, regulatory guidance documents, client-specific frameworks, methodology libraries, and internal subject matter expertise.

Over 10 years of consulting work, the firm had accumulated a substantial knowledge base. The problem was that it lived in three different places — SharePoint, Confluence, and a network file share — with no consistent naming convention, inconsistent tagging, and no unified search capability. Finding the right document, the right past engagement record, or the right internal expert for a given question had become a significant daily friction for every consultant in the business.

The firm had grown from 80 to 200 people over 5 years. The knowledge management approach that had worked for 80 people — informal networks, "just ask Sarah" — had not scaled with the headcount.

The Challenge: Knowledge Fragmentation and Onboarding Bottlenecks

Three core challenges were identified during the initial Discovery Workshop:

Time Lost to Search: Consultants spent an average of 2.1 hours per day searching for internal information, representing £3.3M in annual opportunity cost.

The Onboarding Problem: New consultants took 3+ months to reach productivity due to unfamiliarity with the firm's internal knowledge base, costing ~£144,000 annually.

Compliance and Precedent Risk: Advisory inconsistencies created professional liability risks, requiring costly remedial work.

Architecture & Design

The Solution: Custom AI Knowledge Assistant

A single conversational interface built on a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) architecture.

Retrieval Layer
Documents from SharePoint, Confluence, and the file share indexed into Azure AI Search vector store, updating automatically.
Azure AI SearchVector Store
AI Synthesis
Azure OpenAI GPT-4o synthesises responses with direct source citations, ensuring verifiable answers in under 5 seconds.
GPT-4oRAG
Secure Access Control
Document-level permissions from source systems are respected, preventing unauthorized data access or cross-client leakage.
Azure Active Directory
Internal Hosting
All components deployed within the firm's Azure tenant to respect strict data governance requirements.
Azure Private Tenant

What the Tool Does in Practice

A consultant working on a regulatory advisory project can ask the Knowledge Assistant:

What is our established position on regulatory question X and what engagements have referenced it ?
Who has the most experience with specific regulatory area and what documents have they produced ?
What templates do we have for type of engagement and what is the most recently updated version ?
Summarise how we approached similar past situation and what the outcome was.

The system returns an answer drawn from actual firm documents, with citations, in under 5 seconds.

Change Management and Adoption

Techseria delivered a structured onboarding programme for all 200 staff, including a self-service training library, "prompt starter" cards, and a 30-day feedback loop for fine-tuning. Adoption reached 75% of active users within 4 weeks of go-live.

Our Process

How We Deployed the Solution in 7 Weeks

Following Techseria's standard 3-phase delivery model.

Phase 1

Discovery (2 weeks)

Stakeholder workshops, process mapping, and data audit of SharePoint/Confluence. Defined 5 primary use cases and fixed-price delivery proposal.

Phase 2

Build (5 weeks)

Infrastructure setup on Azure, document indexing pipeline, vector store build, custom UI design, access control integration, and user acceptance testing.

Phase 3

Measure & Optimise (ongoing)

30-day usage analysis, retrieval quality tuning, adoption reporting, and quarterly optimization reviews under support retainer.

Reclaim Unproductive Search Time in Your Organisation

If your consultants are spending hours searching for internal precedent, or if onboarding new hires is taking months, we can help. Schedule a 30-minute call with a Techseria principal.

Schedule a Discovery Call

At a Glance Metrics