Made 14 years of files searchable in plain English – new hires productive in weeks, not months.

The story

After 14 years and hundreds of public-sector, private and NGO engagements, Tregaskis Brown had accumulated an enormous body of genuinely valuable thinking: precedent, frameworks, ILM material and hard-won approaches to thorny machinery-of-government and capability problems. The trouble was that all of it sat buried across years of project folders and SharePoint, organised by client and date rather than by idea, so finding the right prior piece of work depended almost entirely on remembering it existed and knowing who to ask. For a Wellington professional-services firm whose product is its expertise, that meant the firm's best asset was effectively locked inside the memories of its busiest people. The practical cost showed up everywhere. Consultants leaned on tribal memory to track down relevant prior work, and even then often came up short, so strong frameworks were quietly rebuilt from scratch on a new engagement. New hires faced a steep, slow climb, spending months simply learning who had done what before they could contribute with confidence in front of a client. Tregaskis Brown wanted a production-ready way for anyone, from a first-week analyst to a senior partner, to ask a plain-English question and surface the right precedent in minutes, with the firm's strict confidentiality and access controls fully respected.

What we built

1. 01

   Indexed years of project files across SharePoint and Microsoft 365 with existing permissions preserved end to end, so every consultant only ever sees material they are genuinely cleared to access

2. 02

   Built plain-English semantic search that understands intent, policy language and machinery-of-government terminology rather than relying on exact keyword matches

3. 03

   Returned grounded, citation-backed answers that link straight to the source document and its project context, so consultants can verify and trust what they read

4. 04

   Ran short onboarding sessions and refined ranking against real consultant queries through a pilot cohort before opening it to the wider firm

5. 05

   Tuned retrieval against the firm's own precedent and frameworks so the strongest prior work, not just the most recent, rises to the top

6. 06

   Put guardrails around the assistant so it answers from Tregaskis Brown's material with sources attached rather than inventing plausible-sounding precedent

“We have a fourteen years of thinking sitting in our files, and until now most of it was only accessible if you happened to remember it existed. The difference is that a new consultant can ask a plain-English question and surface exactly the right precedent in minutes, with the source document attached, instead of asking around the office for a fortnight. It respects who can see what, so we get all the speed without ever compromising client confidentiality.”

Results at a glance

• New hires now find relevant precedent and frameworks in minutes, reaching billable confidence far sooner than the old months-long ramp allowed
• Senior consultants spend noticeably less time fielding 'has anyone done this before?' and far more on the client work only they can do
• Institutional knowledge from past engagements is being reused and built on instead of quietly reinvented at cost
• The firm's fourteen years of thinking now feels like a living, searchable asset rather than an archive nobody has time to dig through