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AI engineering · Governance, board and leadership advisory

CHAIRS Global

Ask the knowledge base anything, and it never exposes a Chair.

CHAIRS Global works with Chairs and governance leaders on complex board, leadership and organisational questions, backed by a knowledge base of proprietary research, interviews and case studies. We built AskCHAIRS, the agent that answers governance questions from that knowledge, names its public sources, and draws on confidential interviews without ever identifying an individual Chair.

At a glance

Status
Live in production, as AskCHAIRS
What we built
A governance AI agent on CHAIRS Global’s knowledge base
Knowledge
Research, interviews, case studies and public sources
Environment
Deployed on AWS, in an account they own

What changed

What changed

Before

Knowing the answer meant knowing where it lived, or who to ask.

Now

Ask a governance question in plain words, and get an answer grounded in CHAIRS Global’s own material.

Public sources are named, and confidential insight is used safely.

Chair personas stress tested
7
Knowledge tiers, public and confidential
2
Individual Chairs identified
0
AskCHAIRS, in production
Live

The ask

CHAIRS Global had a substantial body of governance knowledge spread across research, interviews, case studies and public sources. The requirement was never a generic question and answer chatbot. AskCHAIRS had to use CHAIRS Global’s own knowledge, not generic AI knowledge alone, attribute public sources clearly, use confidential interview material without naming individual Chairs, and hold a consistent voice across very different users.

A generic assistant would not know which sources should inform an answer, how to attribute them, how to use sensitive interview material safely, or when to answer directly rather than ask a clarifying question first. That called for a knowledge and behaviour layer built around CHAIRS Global, not a chatbot pointed at a folder.

The hard part

Two kinds of knowledge, and one had to stay anonymous

  • Public gets named, people do not

    Public sources are attributed by name, so a user can see where an answer came from. But interviews and case studies carry sensitive insight tied to real people. Anything drawn from that material is attributed to the CHAIRS Global research and interview process, never to a named Chair.

  • Grounded, and dependable across sessions

    During testing the same kind of question could behave differently from one session to the next. We tightened the instructions and retrieval so answers stayed dependable, and taught the agent when to answer directly and when to ask a clarifying question first.

What we built

  • Grounded answers

    Questions are answered from CHAIRS Global’s own research, interviews and case studies, not from generic AI knowledge alone.

  • Public sources, named

    When an answer uses a public document, the agent names the source, so the origin of the information is clear to the user.

  • Confidential insight, no names

    Interview and case study knowledge is used and attributed to the research process, without exposing the identity of any individual Chair.

  • One consistent voice

    Tone, structure and brevity were calibrated to CHAIRS Global’s own approach, with tables and checklists where they help and less unnecessary hedging.

  • Answers, or asks

    The agent judges whether it has enough context to answer, or whether it should ask one clarifying question first, so users neither restate themselves nor get a confident guess.

  • A structured knowledge base

    Documents were ingested with their metadata and organised into partitions, including a dedicated public data set, so the agent retrieves from the right material.

The method

How it was hardened

CHAIRS Global did not treat the first working version as finished. They tested it as seven different Chairs, then fed back on tone, hedging, source attribution, clarification timing and formatting, and we iterated on each round. They have since asked for more worked examples to be added to the knowledge base.

Tested as seven Chairs

  • The Aspiring Chair
  • The New Chair
  • The Established Chair
  • The Senior Chair

And the harder rooms

  • The Chair Under External Pressure
  • The Chair in Complex Terrain
  • The CEO Succession Focused Chair

Beyond this client

The job transfers

The same problem turns up well beyond this one client. These are the teams it fits.

Anyone with knowledge worth protecting

  • Professional and membership bodies
  • Research and policy institutions
  • Advisory and consulting firms

Anyone mixing public and confidential

  • Firms with interview or client material
  • Teams holding sensitive case studies
  • Any knowledge base with a confidentiality line

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