How Meridian Works made its own knowledge easy to find

Meridian Works is a professional services firm with a growing team and a knowledge base that had outpaced its ability to manage it. It already had policies, processes and guides. What it did not have was a way for people to find them at the moment they needed them.

A typical question went like this. An employee asks a colleague, who is busy. They search a shared drive, and the results are unhelpful. They send a WhatsApp message to a group and wait. By the time the answer arrives, they have lost 20 minutes and interrupted two other people.

The same pattern showed up in three places. New hires struggled to get up to speed on policies. Managers spent time answering the same questions again and again. HR fielded requests that were already answered in documents nobody could find.

To protect Meridian Works' internal documents, the version of Kora shown here runs on a representative set of documents. The engineering, the infrastructure and the AI are identical to what runs in the firm today.

The finding was that this was not a documentation problem. The information existed, but the route to it did not. The fix therefore had to be about access, and not about writing more documents.

We built Kora, an internal assistant that lives inside the organisation. An employee asks a question in plain English. Kora searches the firm's documents, finds the most relevant sections and returns a clear answer in seconds, with a link to the source so the employee can check it and read further.

• It answers only from the firm's own documents, and not from general knowledge.

• Every answer includes a citation.

• When it does not have enough information to answer confidently, it says so and points the employee to the right person or team.

Employees need no training, because they ask Kora the way they would ask a colleague. The Refactrd team manages it through an admin panel, where documents can be added, updated or removed.

• 14documents indexed across HR, compliance, operations and onboarding
• 111searchable sections available for retrieval
• Under 2 secondsaverage response time

After several weeks, Kora showed something nobody had asked it to find. A meaningful share of questions landed in the 'uncertain' category, and not because Kora was failing. Employees were asking about topics the documents did not cover. That log became a live list of what the team needs to know and has not written down yet.

For Meridian Works, it pointed to gaps in documentation around expense reimbursement timelines, the process for requesting equipment, and escalation procedures for client complaints. None of those documents existed. They do now.

If your business has more than 15 people and at least a handful of internal documents, you have enough to start. Kora does not need a complete knowledge base, because it works with what you have and the uncertain-answer log shows you what to add next.

A system like this typically takes two to four weeks to build, from the first document to a live assistant, depending on how your documents are structured and how many tools it needs to connect to. Day-to-day upkeep is light, because adding a document takes under a minute and re-ingesting it is one click.

Knowledge is one of the places where work gets stuck. The Business Immersion follows your work from first enquiry to final payment and shows you which problem is worth fixing first.