Case · a Dutch trade union
For a Dutch trade union, Stiekema Studio built an AI knowledge assistant over a large collection of collective labour agreements (cao's). The system is in production and in daily use. This is the story behind it.
The reason
A cao is a legal document that often runs to hundreds of pages, and a union works with hundreds of them at once. Staff who deal with members have to answer questions about salary, leave, allowances and travel expenses quickly and correctly - arranged slightly differently in every sector. In practice that meant: searching through PDFs, paging around, and leaning on the few colleagues who know a cao by heart.
The task
A wrong answer about somebody's salary or leave does more damage than no answer. The bar was therefore higher than for an ordinary chatbot: every answer has to be grounded in the documents themselves, verifiable through a source reference, and the system has to say plainly when the answer is not in the collection. That starting point has driven every design decision.
The approach
The visible part - the chat - is the tip of the system. Underneath it the full chain was built: automatic intake of new and revised documents, a processing line that copes with scans as well and leaves tables intact, a searchable knowledge base, and admin screens for quality, cost and access.
It was built iteratively, with real user questions as the test: first a working core, then extended and sharpened in short rounds. A suite of over a thousand automated tests watches the behaviour on every change.
[1] from document to searchable fragment, fully automatic
The result
[2] the daily picture: question, answer, sources
And for you
The approach is not tied to cao's. Wherever an organisation leans on a large collection of documents - schemes, policy, handbooks, procedures, contracts - the same principle works: process the documents properly, search them well, and give answers that account for themselves with sources.
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