The stuck work
Operators waited on a supervisor for a spec they had already been trained on. Copilot on the public web was the wrong door, the answers had to come from their SOPs, with a name on the source.
Process manufacturing · Centre-du-Québec · Custom AI · 2026
Answers from the binder, not from the hallway.
Procedures lived in SharePoint, in a binder, and in the head of the person on vacation. The unofficial AI person was tired.
- Cited
- Every answer points at the SOP it came from
What we built
An internal copilot, grounded on the plant’s procedures, with permissions and a citation. Local model for the documents that should not leave the site. Copilot Studio where Microsoft 365 was already the desk. A human gate on anything that writes back.
What changed
First-line questions stop at the copilot. Supervisors keep the exceptions. The plant did not get a chatbot. It got a procedure that finally answers.