Stop answering the same internal question every week

Your handbook is complete, well written, and nobody reads it. They ask in the channel instead, and someone senior answers the same thing for the ninth time.

Start free Read the Slack guide

No credit card. Nothing published.

#people-ops

Priya

how much notice do I need to give for leave?

HandbookApp

Two weeks for up to five days, and a month for anything longer. Your line manager approves it.

Employee handbook — Leave & absence

One answer, every time: Not nine remembered versions of the same policy.
Cites the document: So the reader can open the policy and check the detail.
Uploads, not just crawls: Internal material never has to be made public.
Finds the unwritten: The processes that exist only in someone's head.

A thick ring-bound handbook standing unopened on an office shelf, a shaft of blind-striped sunlight across its dusty spine.

Institutional knowledge lives in interruptions

The answer exists in a document nobody can locate, so it travels by direct message instead. The cost falls on whoever is most helpful, and none of it is written down anywhere new joiners can reach.

The same policy question appears in the team channel every few weeks
New joiners ask a colleague rather than search the handbook
Answers vary depending on who happened to reply
Your most senior people spend real time on lookup, not judgement

Getting institutional knowledge out of interruptions

Questions that could be looked up get asked in a channel instead, because asking is faster than searching. The people who answer are the ones who can least afford the interruption.

Answers from your handbook

Policies, processes and where-do-I-find-it questions, answered from the documents you already maintain.

A link to the source

Every answer cites the document, so the reader can verify the detail rather than trust a paraphrase.

Nothing published

Uploaded documents are indexed without being put on the public web.

Refuses on the uncertain

A wrong answer about leave or expenses is worse than no answer, so it declines instead of improvising.

Where the team already talks

On Growth and above, answers reach Slack rather than a destination nobody remembers to open.

The unwritten list

A ranked report of what your organisation has never actually documented.

One answer, cited, every time

Point it at your internal material and the answer stops depending on who is online. Everyone gets the same reply with the same link to the same source document.

Consistent across the team: The reply does not change with who happened to be online when it was asked.
Cites the document: Every answer names the file it came from, so a paraphrase can always be checked.
Uploads, not just crawls: PDF, Word, Markdown or plain text, indexed straight from the file.
Refuses rather than improvises: On anything the documents do not settle, it declines and says so.

The add-source row with the upload-file tab selected, offering PDF, Word, Markdown or plain text up to ten megabytes. — A handbook goes in as a file. It is indexed and answerable without being published anywhere.

Where your team already talks

An internal tool only works if it lives where the question would have been asked. On Growth and above, the bot answers @-mentions and DMs in Slack, so nobody has to go anywhere new to ask.

The Add to Slack panel on the install page, listing the four setup steps, the per-bot request URL, and fields for a bot token and signing secret. — The same bot, answering @-mentions and DMs. Setup is a Slack app you create yourself, not a one-click button.

Find out what the handbook never covered

Applied internally, the gap report is a ranked list of what your organisation has never actually written down — the processes that were only ever explained out loud.

The decision that matters

Use a separate bot, not a separate answer

The failure mode here is not a bad answer — it is a good answer given to the wrong person. An internal assistant and a public one should never share an index, because retrieval has no idea who is asking; it only knows what it was allowed to read.

One bot for the public site, another for internal material
Uploaded documents are indexed without being published anywhere
The domain allow-list decides where it may answer at all
It declines on the uncertain — wrong policy is worse than no policy

Uploads are snapshots rather than links, so a policy that changes has to be uploaded again. That is the one piece of upkeep this does not remove for you.

Two colleagues at a glass partition wall, one balancing a laptop on his forearm mid-explanation while a newer colleague listens.

Public bot

Your crawled website

answers on yourcompany.com

Separate index

Internal bot

Your uploaded handbook

answers on intranet only

Standing one up for a team

The important decision is not technical. It is making sure internal material can only be reached from an internal surface.

1
Use a separate bot
Never mix internal documents into the bot serving your public site. Different audience, different knowledge base.
2
Upload the handbook
Process docs, policies, the onboarding guide. Uploads are snapshots, so replace them when the document changes.
3
Lock it to internal origins
The domain allow-list is what enforces where an internal assistant is allowed to answer at all.
4
Write down what it could not answer
The gap report is unusually blunt internally — most teams find two or three load-bearing processes nobody ever wrote up.

An allowed domains list restricting where the widget may run, with a warning when a chat is seen from a domain not on the list. — For an internal assistant this is the control that matters most.

What operations people ask

Short answers. If yours is not here, the assistant on this page will try it — and tell you honestly if it cannot.

Can it read documents that are not published on a public site?

Yes. Uploaded documents sit alongside crawled pages, so internal handbooks, process docs, and policy files can be indexed without publishing them anywhere.

Who can see the answers?

Access follows where you deploy it. A bot serving internal material should be placed on an internal surface and domain-locked to it, rather than embedded on your public marketing site.

Does this replace our handbook?

No, it makes it reachable. The handbook stays the source of truth, which is exactly why every answer links back to it rather than restating it from memory.

All solutions