How to Train an AI on Your Company’s Knowledge Base
You are not training a model — you are building the library it reads from. This is the practical method: what to write, how to structure it, what breaks retrieval, and how to keep it current.
The phrase “train the AI on our data” is misleading, and the misunderstanding causes most bad deployments. You are not adjusting a model’s weights. You are building a knowledge base that the assistant searches at the moment a customer asks something.
What belongs in the knowledge base
Products live in the catalogue. The knowledge base is everything else your team explains repeatedly. Start with these documents — they cover the large majority of non-product questions for almost every business.
- Delivery. Methods, costs, timeframes by region, what happens if something is delayed.
- Returns and exchanges. Window, condition requirements, who pays shipping, exact process.
- Warranty and after-sales. What is covered, for how long, how a claim is made.
- Ordering. How to place one, minimum order, order changes and cancellation.
- About the business. Hours, locations, contact routes, languages, what you specialise in.
The catalogue is half the knowledge base
Write descriptions that include the things customers care about: what it is for, who it suits, materials, care, what it pairs with, why someone would choose it over the alternative. Two extra sentences per product changes recommendation quality more than any other single change.
Mistakes that quietly ruin retrieval
- Contradicting yourself across documents. Two documents with different return windows produce an unpredictable answer. Deduplicate before uploading.
- Documenting the ideal process instead of the real one. If your actual dispatch time is 5 days and the document says 2, you have automated a complaint generator.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to retrain anything when I update a document?
No. The document is re-indexed and the change is live for the next message. There is no training run and no waiting period.
How much content do I need to start?
A handful of short documents covering delivery, returns, warranty, ordering and business details — plus your catalogue. That is enough to launch.
What if two documents disagree?
The assistant may retrieve either one, so the answer becomes unpredictable. Resolve contradictions in your source material — this is the single most common cause of inconsistent answers.
The takeaway
Training an AI on your knowledge base is not a machine-learning task. It is a writing task, and the skill it needs is the ability to state what your business actually does, plainly.
Businesses that do this well end up with something valuable beyond the assistant: documentation their own team uses. Continue with how MARREK uses this, or look at what is included.
