Golden Horizons
CAPABILITY · OPS & BACK-OFFICE
Knowledge Onboarding
New hires ask questions in plain English and get cited answers from your own SOPs.
$5,000–$8,000 build · $2,000–3,500/mo
Talk to us about a Knowledge Onboarding build →What it does
Indexes your SOPs, Drive, Notion, and Slack into a vector store. New hires ask questions in plain English and get cited answers. Ramp goes from months to weeks.
The six-to-eight week ramp problem is almost always a documentation problem wearing a training costume. New hires aren't slow because they lack aptitude — they're slow because the answers to their daily questions live in three places: the head of whoever's been there longest, a folder of SOPs nobody's touched since 2021, and a Slack archive that requires knowing what to search before you can search it. The tenured person becomes a walking helpdesk. The new hire interrupts them ten times a day. Both of them lose time they don't have.
The agent we build ingests what you actually have — SOPs in Google Drive, process docs in Notion, onboarding Slack threads, policy PDFs, training recordings with transcripts — and indexes everything into a vector store purpose-built for retrieval. A new hire types a plain-English question: "What's the process for escalating a billing dispute?" The agent retrieves the relevant SOP sections, summarizes the answer in plain language, and cites the source documents with links. No hallucinated policy. No guessing. If the answer isn't in the indexed knowledge base, it says so — which is itself useful signal.
The secondary output is a gap report. Every question the agent can't answer confidently gets logged. After the first thirty days, you have a ranked list of the documentation that's missing or out of date — the exact knowledge gaps that have been silently costing you every time someone new joins. Most owners have never seen that list before. It turns an invisible problem into a fixable one.
This isn't a chatbot bolted onto a folder. The retrieval is tuned to your document structure. The citation format matches how your team actually references procedures. And when your SOPs update — which they should — the index re-syncs on a schedule you set, so the agent's answers stay current without manual intervention. The tenured staff member goes back to doing the work only they can do. The new hire gets answers at 9pm when nobody's around to ask.
Use cases
- A law firm associate starting week one asks the agent how to open a new matter in the practice management system. The agent returns the firm's intake SOP, the conflict-check checklist, and the billing code reference — cited by document and section — without pulling a paralegal off a deadline.
- A dental practice's front-desk hire needs to know the protocol for handling a patient who requests records before their next appointment. The agent returns the practice's HIPAA release procedure with the correct form name and submission path, no manager required.
- A marketing agency's new account coordinator asks how to set up a client's first monthly reporting package. The agent retrieves the agency's reporting template SOP, the naming convention guide, and the most recent example report from the client folder index — all in one response.
- A government contractor's IT engineer onboarding to a classified-adjacent project asks the agent which security controls apply to their workstation configuration. The agent surfaces the relevant NIST 800-53 control references from the firm's compliance binder and the project-specific system.
- A property management company's new leasing agent asks what to do when a prospective tenant's income doesn't meet the standard threshold. The agent returns the qualifying criteria, the exceptions approval workflow, and the documentation required — pulled from the current leasing policy.
- A physical therapy clinic's front-office hire asks how to handle a patient whose insurance auth has lapsed mid-plan-of-care. The agent retrieves the authorization renewal SOP, the payer-specific contact list, and the visit-hold protocol — reducing a stressful first encounter with the billing.
What’s included
- Fixed scope with written acceptance criteria before any build starts
- Customization layer for your brand voice and business rules
- Clean handover with documented runbook and live training
- Monthly ROI report for three months post-delivery
- Source code delivered to your GitHub on handover
What’s NOT included
- Third-party API subscription costs (billed to your accounts)
- Data migration from legacy systems
- Ongoing infrastructure costs after handover
Retainer
Monthly retainer covers monitoring, prompt tuning, config refinement, and minor integration additions. Range: $2,000–3,500/mo.
How clients use this
Fixed-scope build with clean handover, then an optional monthly retainer covering maintenance, monitoring, and minor changes. Most clients move to retainer within 60 days of delivery.
Part of
Used in: Law Firms , real-estate-agents , construction-firms , Dental Practices
Questions Knowledge Onboarding clients ask
Which document types and sources can the agent actually index?
PDFs, Google Docs, Notion pages, Word files, plain-text SOPs, and Slack channel archives with transcripts. If a document lives somewhere with an API or export path — Drive, Notion, SharePoint, Confluence, a shared network folder — we can pull it in. We don't index images or scanned PDFs without text extraction, and we don't index content you haven't explicitly scoped in. The first step of every engagement is a document audit: you see exactly what goes in before anything goes live. Audio recordings and video training content can be indexed if you have transcripts; we can generate those from recordings as a pre-step if needed.
How do you prevent the agent from making up a policy that doesn't exist?
Retrieval-augmented generation means the agent only answers from what's in your indexed knowledge base — it doesn't draw on general internet knowledge for policy questions. When a question doesn't match anything in the index with sufficient confidence, the agent returns a defined fallback: it tells the user the answer isn't in the current documentation and suggests who to ask or where to look. We set that confidence threshold during calibration, and we tune it against your actual documents before go-live. No system eliminates all errors, and we tell every owner that — the agent should be treated as a first-pass reference, not a replacement for human judgment on high-stakes calls. But for the 80% of onboarding questions that are procedural and well-documented, retrieval accuracy is high.
What happens when our SOPs or policies change?
The index re-syncs on a schedule we configure with you — typically nightly for active Drive or Notion folders, with a manual re-trigger available if something changes mid-day and you need the agent to reflect it immediately. When a document is updated, the old version's chunks are replaced. When a document is removed, it drops from the index on the next sync. You don't need to tell the agent which documents changed — it scans the source for modifications automatically. On the retainer, we handle configuration changes when your folder structure shifts or a new integration needs to be added. Without the retainer, we document the re-sync process and hand it off so your team can manage it independently.
Is this only useful during onboarding, or does it help current staff too?
Both, and most owners end up using it more for current staff than they expected. The onboarding use case is the clearest — new hires have the most questions, the least context, and the highest interruption cost. But tenured staff use it differently: they don't ask how to do something, they ask where the current version of a thing lives. 'What's our current fee schedule for commercial properties?' 'Which form does a patient sign for out-of-network billing?' 'What's the updated process since we switched billing platforms?' These are questions that eat five minutes apiece when someone has to go hunting. The agent returns the answer in thirty seconds with a citation, which is faster than Slack-searching for it. The gap-reporting function benefits everyone too — if a tenured employee's question comes back with no confident answer, that's a documentation gap the whole team shares.
How do we measure whether this is actually working?
We instrument three things from day one. First, query volume — how many questions the agent fields per week, which tells you how much it's actually being used. Second, answer confidence distribution — what share of queries return a high-confidence answer versus a fallback, which tells you where the documentation is solid and where gaps remain. Third, gap-log growth — the running list of unanswered or low-confidence queries, which becomes your documentation backlog. Golden Horizons provides a simple monthly summary of these three metrics in the retainer. We don't promise a specific ramp-time reduction because every team's baseline is different, but owners who look at query volume after thirty days almost always have a clear sense of whether the agent is carrying weight. The gap log alone tends to be the most valuable output in the first ninety days — it's the first time most operators have a concrete, prioritized list of what their documentation is actually missing.