Begin with the question people need to answer
A knowledge programme should begin with a small set of important employee questions. Identify where the authoritative answer lives, who maintains it and which users may access it. That exercise exposes source conflicts and missing content before they become an assistant problem.
Make ownership and freshness visible
A document title is not evidence that the content is current. Establish an owner, a review expectation and a publication decision. Keep those controls meaningful: recording Published should reflect a real decision, and overdue reviews should produce an actionable queue.
Preserve the source boundary
Search and AI retrieval need an explicit access design. A SharePoint sign-in does not automatically make a custom backend permission-aware. The service must establish what the caller may retrieve and test restricted-content scenarios.
Measure the evidence behind the answer
Evaluate whether the system found the right sources, represented them faithfully and handled missing evidence appropriately. Keep the original links usable so staff can inspect the underlying material. A polished answer without a reliable source is an unresolved design issue.