Riedel Internal Assistant

The challenge

Company knowledge lived across SharePoint, policy documents, training material, process guides. Finding anything meant knowing where to look or whom to ask, and most people knew neither. The cost was invisible but constant: hours lost to searching and asking, every week.

How I approached it

• 01Started with use-case collection across departments; instant access to internal knowledge surfaced as the most universal pain and the lowest-risk first bet.
• 02Used it as the platform test for the company: Copilot Studio inside M365 against a standalone stack, judged on security, data residency, and how fast a first product could reach users. The decision set the pattern for what came after.
• 03Scoped it deliberately small in the PRD: public internal SharePoint knowledge only, no sensitive data, so governance stayed light and shipping stayed fast.
• 04Grounded the assistant on policies, SOPs and training docs so every answer points to its source.
• 05Shipped in three months. Its adoption, and the PRD format, delivery process and governance path built for it, became the foundation the next products reused.

Impact

• ✦'Ask around and wait' became a ten-second conversation.
• ✦Answers arrive with the source document, not just the claim.
• ✦First GenAI product in production, and the foundation the portfolio was built on.
• ✦Zero new tools to learn: it lives where employees already work.