Case 01 · AI agent
Product Compliance Agent
The agent answers questions about regulatory requirements, and it takes every answer from real documents. Right now the document set covers the laws of Spain, Italy and Germany, plus an EU-wide layer on data minimisation.
Every answer comes with a link to the exact version of the document and the exact section. If the database has nothing for a particular country and situation, the agent says "this is not in the document set" instead of writing a believable answer. This is built into its rules, and it cannot get around them.
What business problem this solves
Take a guest data management system for hotels. One of its features is legal compliance: collect guest data and send it to the police. "Collect and send" means something different in every country. One country asks for one set of fields, another asks for a different set. Some require an electronic signature, some do not.
The most expensive part is proving why. The police come to a hotel and issue a fine: you collected too much data, the passport number is enough, you do not need to ask for citizenship. The hotel goes to the software provider. Someone there sits down and collects the paragraphs: another part of the same law says you must not collect data on the country's own citizens, only on foreign guests — and to find out whether a guest is foreign, you have to ask for citizenship. Everyone calms down. The next day the same thing happens with another hotel and another country.
Each case like this costs hours of work from a person who keeps the whole picture in their head. And it is the same person for the whole company.
The other half of the problem is sales and support. The product is large: features, integrations, specifications, the laws of several countries. Even when all the documentation is written and available to everyone, colleagues still go to that one expert, because a person finds the right paragraph faster. In a client meeting the company pays for this with its reputation: the client asks about the integration with service X, and the salesperson asks what that is.
The same kind of bot could work here, built on the same principle but with a different document set: product documentation, specifications, integration descriptions, pricing and release history instead of legislation. The rule about sources stays the same — the answer says which document it came from, and when there is nothing in the document set, the bot says so. Sales people need this most of all: a confident wrong answer to a client costs more than "let me check and come back to you". Two main scenarios:
- I am getting ready for a client meeting: collect what could be relevant for this client and explain those services.
- A request came in from a client: check whether we cover this or not.
What could be improved
A database built and maintained by professionals, instead of a web search. Even the most expensive models with web search build an answer out of random pages from the search results, and for regulatory work that is not good enough. What is needed is a document set with document versions and the dates they came into force, with a real lawyer responsible for the content.
Query logs. If you save what people ask about, after a month you can see what is unclear to users, where they get stuck again and again, and which parts of the documentation are missing. On top of the main product this gives you a second one: analytics for the person who is responsible for sales training and for the documentation itself.
I did something similar in the early days of GPT assistants — a sales assistant chatbot for online shops. It worked, but the token costs were too high, so we did not launch it. Since then the economics have changed and the problem is still there. I would like to keep working on tasks that sit between business goals, content and AI.