Course contents · Get better answers from your AI assistant

Lesson 4 of 5

Teach it your business.

"Training it on our business" usually means giving it the right documents at the moment it answers: a short list, an owner for each, written to stand on its own.

Joe LeungCTO and co-founder, LaunchLemonade9 minReading time

You don't teach a new colleague your business by rewiring their brain. You hand them the handbook, point to the folder that's up to date, and tell them who to ask. Teaching an assistant your business works the same way.

Retrieval, not retraining

When people ask how to train an AI on their business, they usually mean: how do I make it know our stuff? The answer is rarely retraining the model. It's giving it the right documents at the moment it answers.

That's retrieval, the RAG from course one. The assistant looks up the relevant passages, then answers from them. When a policy changes, you swap the document. Nothing to retrain.

Instructions: Change how it behaves: the job, the tone, the rules. The system prompt from lesson two.
Retrieval: Changes what it knows at the moment it answers. Best for policies, prices, processes and anything that changes.
Fine-tuning: Changes the model's learned habits. Suits a narrow task repeated many times, with lots of good examples. A poor place to keep facts that change.

For most small businesses, instructions plus retrieval cover it. A big pile of documents is usually a tidying problem, not a reason to fine-tune.

A short list, with owners

Don't give it the whole shared drive. An assistant can't settle a disagreement your business hasn't settled, and every out-of-date file is a wrong answer waiting to happen.

Start with a short list of current, approved documents, and give each one an owner: the person who keeps it up to date and says when it changes.

Tenant guide: Owner: Sam. In.
Repairs process: Owner: the repairs lead. In.
Moving-out checklist: Owner: Sam. In.
Fees sheet: Owner: Sam. Out: the helper never quotes fees, so it doesn't need it.
Old tenant guide: Replaced by the new one. Out.
Sales deck from 2023: Nobody owns it. Out.

What stays out

Drafts and anything not yet approved.
Old versions of documents you've replaced.
Passwords, keys and logins.
Personal details the job doesn't need.
Anything some of the people using the assistant shouldn't see.

Write each section to stand on its own

Retrieval doesn't read your document cover to cover. It pulls out the passages that look relevant. A passage that only makes sense with the page before it will be pulled out without that page.

WeakExample

For boiler problems, follow the usual process.

StrongExample

Boiler repairs: log the repair with the repairs team the same day, and tell the tenant the repairs team will call them to book a time. Don't give the tenant a date.

Clear headings help too. A heading like "Boiler repairs" is what makes the right passage easy to find.

A prompt is not a security control

Writing "don't share landlord details" in the instructions doesn't make landlord details safe. Instructions guide behaviour. They don't control access, and a determined or confused question can get round them.

If someone using the assistant shouldn't see a document, keep that document out of the assistant's reach. Separate assistants with separate knowledge is simpler and safer than one assistant with rules about what not to say.

When it can't find the answer

Tell it to say so, and to point to a person. "I couldn't find an approved answer to this. Sam can help" is more honest than "there is no policy", which may simply be wrong.

Keep a note of the questions it couldn't answer. They tell you which document is missing.

Running example

The running job

Chasing last month's unpaid invoices, one lesson at a time.

Sam's first instinct was to connect the whole shared drive. Instead, the tenant helper gets three documents: the tenant guide, the repairs process and the moving-out checklist, each with an owner.

Sam rewrites two sections of the tenant guide that said "see above", adds clear headings, and leaves landlord contracts out entirely. When the moving-out process changes in spring, Sam swaps one file. Nothing else changes.

Practice

Try it yourself

About five minutes, in any AI chat app

Make a five-line knowledge list

List the documents an assistant would need to answer one kind of question in your business.
For each, write its owner and whether it's current. Cross out anything with no owner or that's out of date.
Find one passage that says "as above" or "the usual process" and rewrite it to stand on its own.
In any AI tool, give it that rewritten passage alone and ask the question it should answer.

What to look for

The rewritten passage should be enough on its own for a correct answer. If it isn't, it's still leaning on something elsewhere.

Common mistakes

Uploading the whole drive so it "knows everything".
Start with a short list of current, approved documents, each with an owner.
Relying on instructions to keep private documents private.
Keep anything people shouldn't see out of the assistant's reach.
Fine-tuning to teach facts.
Use retrieval for facts that change, so updating means swapping a document.

Quick check

3 questions to see what stuck. Nothing is scored or saved.

1. Your fees change every year. Where should they live?
2. Why does a passage saying "follow the usual process" cause trouble?
3. Which keeps a private document private?

Remember

Teach it with retrieval, not retraining: a short list of current documents, each with an owner, every section able to stand on its own.

Sources and further reading

1.The blog post this lesson grew out of: How to train an AI agent on your business knowledge

Optional

Try it in LaunchLemonade

Start with your short list of current documents, each with an owner, and leave the rest of the drive out. Everything above works in any AI tool.

Add documents

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