A privacy-first RAG knowledge system for The Lighting Outlet — staff search, agent copilot, and (eventually) customer chat. Running on hardware they own.
Eight years of customer support answers, product knowledge, policy decisions and workarounds — all locked inside a help-desk tool and the heads of a handful of senior agents.
Every new starter spent weeks repeating questions their colleagues had already solved a hundred times. Customers waited longer than they should for answers to things the team already knew cold. A "proper" chatbot was tempting, but the off-the-shelf options all wanted the data in someone else's cloud — a non-starter for a business that values its customer data.
We built an on-premise RAG system: tickets, product data, website content and policy docs extracted into a structured knowledge base, served to staff through a streaming AI search tool and, progressively, a Gorgias copilot and customer chat widget.
No model fine-tuning, no cloud vendor holding the data. PII is scrubbed at ingest and again on output. Every answer is grounded in real records with confidence scores and a review queue when the model isn't sure. When the engagement ends, TLO keeps the hardware, the data, and the code.
Every part of the system runs on a small server inside TLO's office. Customer data, support history, product information — none of it leaves the building. No per-seat SaaS fees, no vendor holding the crown jewels hostage, no surprise price rises at renewal.
The AI is grounded in real records. Every answer cites the ticket, article or policy it came from. When the system isn't confident, it flags the question for a human rather than guessing. When policies change, the knowledge updates instantly — no retraining cycle.
A plain-English search tool for the support team. Type a question, get an answer in seconds — grounded in real tickets, policies and product info. Every response cites where it came from, so staff can verify before acting.
The AI works inside the tools agents already use. A sidebar inside Gorgias drafts responses based on the open ticket; a Slack bot answers questions without leaving chat. Low-confidence answers go to a manager review channel before anything goes out.
The internal knowledge tool, deployed and in use by the support team. Trains nobody, helps everybody — new starters answer like veterans from day one.
AI drafts the reply inside Gorgias; the agent reviews and sends. Keeps the human in charge, takes the repetitive drafting off their plate.
A customer-facing chat — only switched on once confidence and guardrails are proven across thousands of internal answers first.
"Eight years of answers are finally searchable — and none of it sits in someone else's cloud."
If your team's knowledge lives in a help desk, a shared inbox, or the heads of your best agents — we'd like to hear about it. Initial conversations are free.
Start a conversation →