FDEExpert

FDE: 50,000 Document Assistant

A customer wants to deploy an internal AI assistant across 50,000 internal policy, procedure and support documents for 12,000 employees. Design the solution.

Symptoms

12,000 employees, 50,000 documents
Mixed content: policies (PDF), procedures (Confluence), support tickets (CSV)
Strict access control — not all docs visible to all employees
Budget conscious — they pushed back on per-query cost

Evidence

Customer constraints

- 12k users, peak 200 concurrent
- Access control: 40 permission groups
- SLA: < 2s P95 answer latency
- Cost ceiling: $0.05 per query
- Audit: every query + answer logged for 2 years

Document sample

Policy PDFs (avg 30 pages, tables, headers)
Confluence pages (HTML, links, attachments)
Support tickets (CSV, 50k rows, text fields)

Tasks

1Design the ingestion pipeline
2Design the retrieval strategy
3Design access control
4Design cost controls
5Design observability
6Design rollout

Your diagnosis