A stat floated by this week: roughly three-quarters of workers are asking an AI chatbot questions instead of asking a coworker. My first reaction wasn't horror. It was: of course they are. Asking the AI is faster, it doesn't sigh at you, and it doesn't remember that you asked the same thing last month. If your team is doing this, the AI isn't the probelm. Your internal knowledge is.
Ask yourself honestly: where does a new hire at your shop go to find out how you handle a refund over $500? Where's the current price list? Who approves PTO in August when the manager is out? If the answer is "ask Karen" or "it's in an email somewhere," your team is going to ask the chatbot instead. It's not disloyalty. It's friction. Every question routed through a human costs someone 3-10 minutes of interruption, and the asker feels like they're bothering people. The AI has zero social cost. So the moment a general-purpose bot is good enough, it wins by default, even when it's wrong. And in a 15-person company, "good enough and confidently wrong" is a real risk. Wrong refund policy. Wrong tax handling. Wrong quote to a customer.
The fix is not to ban AI. That ship left port. The fix is to give your team a single place where the real answers live, and then let AI read from that place instead of from the open internet. Practically, that means picking one tool and moving your operational knowledge into it this quarter. Notion, Confluence, and Google Sites all work fine for a company your size. I'd pick Notion for most 10-20 person shops because the learning curve is a weekend, not a month. What goes in it:
Then turn on the built-in AI search. Notion AI, Glean, Copilot in M365, Gemini in Workspace — they all do roughly the same thing: answer questions using your documents instead of the whole internet. Now when someone asks "what's our return window on custom orders," they get your answer, not a hallucinated average of every e-commerce blog since 2019.
Don't spend three months planning the perfect knowledge base. Open a blank Notion workspace, dump in the ten most-asked questions with real answers, share the link in Slack, and tell people to add to it when they answer the same question twice. That's the whole MVP. It'll be ugly. It'll have gaps. It will still be better than the current situation, which is "ask the internet AI and hope." Iterate weekly. In two months you'll have something worth pointing an internal AI at.
If your team is quietly outsourcing your operating procedures to a public chatbot and you'd rather they didn't, this is the kind of cleanup we help small offices stand up in a couple of weeks. Send us a note.
— Alexander @ SBATC
