The challenge
A member on a rest day working out what a schedule change does to next month’s pay. A local representative taking the same question from thirty people in a week, on an agreement he never sat at the table for. A staff officer at head office who knows all of them and can answer any of them, for one person at a time.
Every employer group bargains its own terms, so the answer that is correct for one member is wrong for the member sitting next to her. One assistant trained on all of the agreements would be worse than no assistant at all, because it would sound certain. The union’s problem was never a shortage of expertise. It was that the expertise lived in a few people’s heads and in documents nobody reads end to end.
The solution
- One agreement per assistant, isolated from the rest. Each bargaining unit has its own, grounded in that unit’s contract and nothing else. Narrow scope is an accuracy decision before it is a design decision.
- The member reaches it where they already are. Inside the member site, behind the sign-on they already use, on the page they already visit. A separate destination is a destination nobody goes to.
- Cite the exact clause, and know when to escalate. Routine questions get answered. The hard ones get pointed at the clause and handed to a person. A union that answers everything will be wrong in public.
- Representatives trust it before members see it. Each unit set an accuracy bar on its own agreement and had to clear it before the assistant was switched on for members.
- Agreements change, and nobody rebuilds. Amendments, side letters and new terms land constantly, so source documents sync from the union’s own document store.
The capability that made it possible
In a union, accuracy depends on who is asking. The same words about pay are correct for one member and a grievance for the member sitting next to her, and no amount of general intelligence resolves that, because the model has no way to know which contract governs the person typing.
Scoping each assistant to a single agreement removes the wrong answer from reach entirely. Putting the right assistant in front of the right member, using the access rules the union already runs on its own site, does the other half. That is why there are 28.
The results
| Measure | To Date |
| Grounded assistants in production | 28 |
| Questions asked | 8,707 |
| Questions in the busiest month | 1,991 |
| Growth, latest six months on the six before | 4.9× |
| Satisfied answer rate, latest quarter | 95.7% |
| Longest unbroken run of daily use | 71 days |
The number to read first is 4.9. Questions across the latest six months ran 4.9 times the six months before them, on an estate that was already live and already working. The busiest month on record is the most recent complete one.
Three quarters of questions arrive through assistants embedded in the union’s own member pages. Nobody had to be sent somewhere new.
The run of 71 straight days with at least one question is still going, which is what it looks like once representatives stop treating something as a trial.
Why it worked
- Data isolation sits at the assistant level. Each one is grounded in a single agreement, so the answer that would be wrong for this member is not reachable at all.
- It lives inside the member site. Behind the union’s own sign-on, with page rules deciding who sees what.
- Short source libraries. Every assistant is held to the few documents that decide the answer, which did more for accuracy than adding material would have.
- The difficult document became our problem. One employer’s contract arrived in a layout nothing could parse. We fixed it on the platform, and every customer has that fix now.