Company knowledge

Company knowledge roughly falls into two forms: explicit knowledge that exists in documented form – in contracts, proposals, process descriptions, or project files – and implicit knowledge that lives only in the heads of experienced employees. In practice, both are scattered across many systems: file storage such as Google Drive, OneDrive, or SharePoint, CRM systems, email inboxes, and chat threads. This fragmentation is the main reason knowledge is hard to find in daily work, even though the company already has it.

In everyday business, how a company handles its knowledge determines how much time teams spend searching. Typical symptoms of poor knowledge access are recurring questions directed at the same few colleagues, outdated document versions in circulation, and knowledge that disappears when employees leave. This risk is especially high in small and medium-sized businesses, where individual people often own entire subject areas on their own – structured access to existing knowledge counters it directly.

Chifty makes company knowledge usable for AI without overriding existing access rights. Chifty Knowledge connects existing sources such as Google Drive, OneDrive, SharePoint, and HubSpot into a searchable knowledge base; Chifty Chat and Chifty Office draw on it to answer questions and prepare email drafts. The governing principle is that the AI must not bypass permissions: answers rely only on sources shared with the asking person, and display the sources they used.

With AI assistants entering daily work, the term carries extra weight: a language model without access to a company's own knowledge can only answer in generalities. Only the combination of a model and company-specific content – for example via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) – turns a generic AI into a tool that can answer concrete questions about your own business.