AI Data Assistant

AI Assistant for Operational Data Access

Enabling self-serve insight inside a national resource transportation company

Customer Success Partner

I identified the opportunity, pitched the solution, and owned the end-to-end discovery and design of the AI assistant.

Principal Investigator

I led an R&D team through proof-of-concept development, validated the approach with stakeholders, and directed UX, UI, and conversation design of the production application. The system is now live within the client’s operational platform.

Strategic Intervention

This engagement began as a vague desire to “use AI with data.” I reframed it into a concrete product opportunity: removing structural barriers between people and the information they needed to make decisions.

Challenge

Technical

  • Operational data could only be accessed through IT service tickets

  • Data extraction was manual, slow, and difficult to scale

  • Outputs lacked context and were rarely shaped for decision-making

  • Security and infrastructure constraints limited experimentation

Business

  • Leaders often made time-sensitive decisions without data

  • Front-line and operational teams could not explore data independently

  • Access delays reduced trust in analytics and discouraged use

  • The organization’s data maturity was constrained by process, not availability

Goals

Remove

bottlenecks for routine data access

Enable

non-technical users to ask and answer their own questions

Improve

decision speed and confidence across leadership and operations

Introduce AI

that meets enterprise security and governance standards

Why This Approach Was Different:

Rather than starting with dashboards or predefined reports, the work focused on how people naturally ask questions.

I anchored discovery in real operational queries, then designed a conversational system that translated intent into structured data access. Architecture, conversation design, and security were developed in parallel, ensuring the solution was both usable and deployable inside a tightly controlled enterprise environment.

This avoided the common failure mode of AI pilots: impressive demos that cannot survive production constraints.

Solution

Conversational Data Access

  • Natural-language querying of operational data

  • Clear confirmations and explanations to support trust and accuracy

  • Responses designed to surface insight, not raw tables

Modular AI Architecture

  • Specialized agents for query interpretation, validation, execution, and visualization

  • Guardrails to prevent unsafe, ambiguous, or misleading outputs

  • Structured handling of uncertainty and incomplete data

Hybrid Deployment Model

  • On-premises frontend embedded in the existing transportation management system

  • Cloud-based AI services for scalable processing and analytics

  • Secure data flow through a controlled proxy layer with strict access controls

Outcomes

Production AI assistant

embedded directly into daily operational workflows

Reduced reliance on IT

for routine data questions

Faster access to information

for leadership and operational teams

Improved confidence

in data as a decision-making tool across the organization

Established

a practical foundation for future AI-enabled capabilities

Tangible progress

toward higher data and digital maturity

About

  • National resource & infrastructure organisation

  • 2025

A secure, embedded AI assistant that allows operational and leadership teams to query live business data using natural language—without relying on IT intermediaries.

Impact at a Glance

  • AI assistant embedded directly within the client’s operational platform

  • Self-serve access to operational data without IT intervention

  • Faster, more confident data-driven decision making

  • Reduced friction between questions and answers across leadership and operations

  • Secure hybrid deployment meeting enterprise governance requirements

  • Foundation established for future AI-enabled capabilities