1. Choose one clear task
Decide what users are trying to accomplish: find a product answer, understand a service, locate a policy, summarise approved documents or prepare a support request. Keep the first version narrow enough to evaluate.
2. Establish a source of truth
List the documents and systems the assistant may use, assign an owner to keep them accurate, and identify information it must never disclose. An answer based on stale or unapproved content can be worse than no answer.
3. Define boundaries and escalation
Specify when the assistant should say it does not know, ask a follow-up question or route a request to a person. Do not let it invent prices, delivery dates, legal promises, company credentials or customer-specific facts.
4. Design security and privacy early
Keep provider keys on a backend, minimise the personal information collected, validate inputs, rate-limit requests and define retention. Restrict system access to what the use case truly needs.
5. Test real-world behaviour
Build a test set that includes ordinary questions, incomplete requests, contradictory information, unsupported questions and attempts to make the assistant reveal protected details. Measure useful task completion and safe fallback—not just how natural the responses sound.
Quick checklist
- One clearly defined task
- Approved knowledge sources and content owner
- Known unsupported questions
- Human handoff or fallback
- Server-side secrets and request controls
- Test cases, monitoring and review process