Turning a summer of know-how into an AI knowledge bank
The answers a Pre-College assistant needs were spread across handbooks, FAQs, templates and forms guides, and some of them disagreed. I combined them into one knowledge bank an AI assistant can answer from safely.
The problem
As a Graduate Assistant, I am the first contact for parents, students and residential staff. Parents who write in are usually worried, and a wrong phone number or deadline makes things worse.
The answers lived in many documents: the official GA handbook, parent FAQs from different years, email templates, a forms guide and the student handbooks. Some dates and rules didn't match.
What I did
- 01
Keep a living handbook
During the summer I kept a versioned GA handbook and my own playbook, so each answer was written once and reused.
- 02
Merge the sources
After the summer, I used AI to combine every source into one knowledge bank: contacts, daily rhythm, step-by-step workflows, policies, an FAQ answer bank and a routing table of who owns what.
- 03
Label every fact
Each fact is marked verified, verify first, or internal only, so nothing internal reaches a parent by accident.
- 04
List the conflicts
Where sources disagree, the bank names the conflict and tells the assistant not to answer until a supervisor confirms.
- 05
Set hard rules
The assistant never invents a contact, link, deadline or price, and it escalates money, safety, legal and conduct questions to a person.
- 06
Plan for next year
A maintenance section lists what to re-check every year and how to add new answers, so the next assistant starts where I stopped.
What happened
The result is one written source of truth plus a system prompt that turns it into an assistant, built to draft replies, route questions, look up policy and write escalation notes in the office's voice.
- An AI assistant is only as safe as its sources. Clean them first.
- Tell the AI what it doesn't know and when to ask a person.