Custom GPTs with RAG for specialist consulting

🧠 Challenge

Many companies have extensive knowledge hidden in unstructured sources such as PDFs, intranets or websites. Classic access via menus, search fields or documents is inefficient, especially for new employees, applicants or external stakeholders.

In addition, expectations for 24/7 availability are rising — especially in customer service, HR, sales, member or partner management.

🚀 Solution

A CustomGPT with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) accesses your own data sources directly (for example PDFs, websites, internal FAQs) and gives context-specific answers — without using external knowledge. Unlike classic chatbots or LLMs, the answers can be controlled very precisely, and only the knowledge you provide is used.

Use cases:

• HR bot: explains working hours rules, benefits or processes — e.g. in multiple languages.

• Customer bot: answers product and service questions based on your own content.

• Applicant bot: explains the process, requirements and culture.

• Member bot (e.g. association): supports with courses, events or policies.

• Sales bot: helps internally with arguments, pricing or specifications.

🧩 Needed data & content

The good news: unstructured knowledge can be learned very easily and made accessible to users.

• Website content, PDFs, manuals, internal FAQs

• Data from intranet, CRM, ERP via API or directly via Google Drive, SharePoint documents or sites, Confluence, Notion

🔐 Data protection & security

• No data sharing with other systems

• SOC 2 Type II compliant

• GDPR-ready (check hosting location)

• Only authorised access (for example via intranet or login)

• Encryption at rest and in transit

🧪 Examples from practice

• Lehigh University: The student campus magazine makes more than 100 years of article archive available as an interactive knowledge system with a GPT-based bot — ideal for students, researchers and media professionals interested in the topic.

• Ontop: A CustomGPT supports the sales team with instant AI-generated answers to customer questions — halving response times and significantly increasing conversion rates in sales.

• Overture Partners: An internal GPT coach reduced onboarding time for new recruiters from 13 to 2 weeks — through AI-supported answers to process, tool and market questions.

💬 Coming soon here: our own case from banking, MedTech and politics

💡 Business value

• Reduction of repetitive enquiries by up to 90%

• Higher satisfaction among employees and customers

• Multilingual availability

• Access to internal knowledge without silos

• Relief for teams in HR, support, sales and administration

⚠️ Risks & limitations

• Quality depends heavily on the data structure

• Data must be kept up to date and should not contradict itself

• Prompt testing, fine-tuning and monitoring are needed (for example to avoid hallucinations)

• Interfaces to internal systems must be technically secured

• Legal review recommended, especially for HR and customer data, and legally binding statements in sales