HR Assistant overview

Important This content is part of the Sage HR Assistant Early Adopter release. If we haven't contacted you to be part of this program, refer to future release information.

We write documents for human readers and for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) AI systems like Sage People HR Assistant to serve different purposes. We consume them in fundamentally different ways.

Humans typically read documents linearly. We apply judgment, context, and prior meaning. We do this to interpret meaning, resolve ambiguity, and infer intent. By contrast, a RAG system doesn't read holistically. It retrieves small fragments of content based on semantic similarity. The system then attempts to answer questions using only what the fragments explicitly state.

This difference means content clear enough to a human reader can perform poorly when AI uses it. AI misses implied rules, loses context, blends terminology and becomes ambiguous or incorrect with answers. To avoid this, documents for RAG need to be explicit, well-structured, consistently labeled and self-contained.

We've prepared information that explains:

How RAG systems consume content
How that differs from human reading
What this means for document structure, language, and presentation
How you can check if a document is genuinely AI_ready
A practical checklist for authors to apply before publishing content into an AI-powered knowledge base