A company-grounded AI assistant that answers policy and procedure questions and turns messy Excel reports into consolidated management accounts.
Modernise Apps with Azure AI
Microsoft
Delivery partner
Practice
African Alliance wanted to move beyond the usual data-aggregation and reporting tools and see what emerging AI could do for them. The classic problem was Excel in, Excel out: pulling numbers together from different report formats by hand, then losing time to the manual work instead of the analysis.
We worked with African Alliance’s AI Centre of Excellence to find a use case worth backing, then deployed a company-grounded assistant in about two months using our template-based RAG framework on Azure AI Services. It does two jobs. It answers questions on company policy and procedure, and it takes existing Excel reports in different formats and rebuilds them into consolidated accounts against the group standard, all through natural language. Everything runs in African Alliance’s own Azure tenant, with Entra ID handling authentication. An intent-routing layer in an Azure-hosted Web API picks the right tool or model from the Azure AI Foundry catalogue, retrieves from the knowledge base with Azure AI Search, and stores conversation history in Cosmos DB.
As an early adopter of generative AI, African Alliance is driving real efficiencies. People get quick, grounded answers from the knowledge the company already holds, and the Excel-in, Excel-out grind becomes a natural-language request instead of a manual chore. It also sets up future work, such as querying live market data, pricing and customer records.
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