Building an AI Chatbot for Internal Docs: What Worked (and What Didn't)

A few months ago, my team hit a wall: our internal documentation had grown into a chaotic jungle of Confluence pages, Google Docs, and Slack threads. New hires took weeks just to find basic answers. I thought, "Let's build an AI chatbot." Simple, right? Spoiler: It took two months of trial and error. But I learned a ton about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) - and what actually makes it work in production. The Problem We needed a system where a user could ask "How do I reset my VPN password?" and get a concise answer with a citation.