Private Equity/Engineer · Operate

One AI assistant. Every acquired company's HR knowledge. One place to ask.

A PE-backed study abroad provider had acquired multiple companies, each with its own HR systems, policies, and tribal knowledge. We consolidated everything into SharePoint and built a generative AI assistant that answers people ops questions across the entire enterprise.

Client: PE-Backed Enterprise
Engagement: Ongoing
Focus: RAG + AI Assistant
Compliance: Enterprise data governance

Enterprise generative AI for people operations across a PE roll-up

The work

One of the nation's largest private equity-backed study abroad program providers, formed through serial acquisition. Multiple companies operating under one umbrella, each with its own systems, policies, and institutional knowledge.

What was getting in the way

Every acquisition brought its own HR systems, policy documents, and SOPs. Nothing was consolidated.
Employees had no single place to find answers. They had to know which legacy system from which acquired company held the information.
Every new deal compounded the problem. More systems, more doc formats, more policies that may or may not align.
Finding basic HR information meant knowing who to ask, not where to look. Institutional memory was the search engine.
The people ops function couldn't scale with the acquisition pace. Each integration was manual discovery and reconciliation.

What changed

Consolidate everything. Then put AI on top.

We started by mapping the people operations landscape across every acquired entity. Where documentation lived, what formats it was in, what questions employees were actually asking, and which sources they were using or failing to find.

What we built

We deployed an enterprise SharePoint system as the single repository, organized by function and policy area. All people ops documentation from every acquired company — SOPs, benefits, policies, procedures — migrated, structured, and indexed for AI retrieval.

Then we built the generative AI assistant on top of it. Employees ask natural language questions about HR, benefits, policies, or procedures and get answers grounded in the company's actual documentation. Not generic responses. Sourced, verifiable answers from indexed content. And when the next acquisition closes, their docs get added to the same knowledge layer.

AI AgentsRAG PipelinesSharePoint ArchitectureKnowledge Management

How it works

All people ops documentation consolidated from multiple acquired companies into one enterprise SharePoint repository
Generative AI assistant deployed enterprise-wide for natural language HR queries
Answers grounded in actual company documentation, not generic AI responses
Repeatable onboarding process for new acquisitions — add their docs, they're searchable
HR teams fielding fewer basic information requests. Employees finding answers on their own.
First enterprise AI deployment for the company, with architecture designed to expand beyond people ops

Business impact

of employees: 100%; of employees; AI assistant deployed across every acquired company
knowledge layer: 1; knowledge layer; Consolidated from scattered systems across multiple acquisitions
rebuild per deal: 0; rebuild per deal; New acquisitions onboarded into the same knowledge layer

“We had HR information scattered across every company we'd acquired. Now any employee can ask a question and get the right answer, sourced from the actual policy. It scales every time we do another deal.”

Ryan Sylvester, CIO, CEA CAPA

What’s next

Turn acquisition sprawl into AI-powered access

If your portfolio companies have fragmented knowledge across systems and acquisitions, we've built the playbook to consolidate and deploy AI on top.

Talk to an AI engineer More work

Team

Justin TannenbaumSolutions Architect
Lukasz ChmielewskiLead Engineer
Cesar BustamanteEngineering
Taylor LarsonProduct Manager
Ernesto QuispeProduct Design

Stack

.NET · Azure · SharePoint · M365 · Semantic Kernel · MAF

More work

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All work