How Grand Traverse County gave 600 employees instant, grounded access to HR policies, contracts, procedures, and board policies — through a hybrid vector search AI agent running entirely within Microsoft GCC.
Every county organization accumulates institutional knowledge — HR policies, personnel handbooks, vendor contracts, board resolutions, mutual aid agreements, grant documents, operational procedures. The challenge isn't that this information doesn't exist. It's that it lives in SharePoint folders, email attachments, filing cabinets, and the memories of people who've been there for twenty years.
When an employee needs to know what the PTO accrual policy says, or wants to find the terms of a specific vendor contract, or needs to understand the county's CDBG citizen participation requirements, the answer exists somewhere. Finding it is the problem. And every minute spent searching is a minute not spent on the work that actually matters.
CORA Insight was built to solve the knowledge retrieval problem — not by replacing the documents, but by making all of them instantly searchable and answerable through a single, authenticated, GCC-compliant AI interface.
"The answer exists somewhere. Finding it is the problem. CORA Insight makes every official county document instantly answerable — with the source cited every time."
CORA Insight Design Principle — Grand Traverse County ITCORA Insight uses a hybrid retrieval architecture — combining BM25 keyword search with high-dimensional vector similarity search — to surface the most relevant document chunks for any employee query. The system uses Azure OpenAI's text-embedding-3-large model at 3,072 dimensions, providing exceptionally precise semantic matching even for complex policy and contract language.
A distinctive feature of CORA Insight's ingestion pipeline is the structured Markdown + JSON sidecar approach. Every document ingested into the knowledge base is converted to Markdown with YAML front matter containing authoritative metadata — title, document type, vendor name, effective and expiration dates, department, source URL, and tags. A matching JSON sidecar file ensures this metadata propagates to every chunk in the search index, enabling filtered retrieval by department, contract type, or date range.
CORA Insight's knowledge base spans the full range of county operational documents — organized by department and document type, with pre-ingestion review required before any document enters the index.
Each document category has a designated content owner and update cadence. New or renewed contracts are ingested within five business days of execution. HR policies are updated as they change, with strict version control enforced. BOC policies enter the knowledge base upon board adoption.
The single most impactful architectural decision was requiring source URLs and metadata to be embedded in both YAML and JSON sidecar at document creation time. Attempting to stamp metadata after ingestion is significantly more complex. Build it in from the start.
County documents blend precise terminology (contract clause references, policy section numbers) with natural language. Hybrid BM25 + vector search handles both modes far better than either approach alone — especially for the complex language found in legal agreements and HR policies.
Several Copilot Studio features available in commercial environments — including certain Power Automate triggers and UI components — are unavailable in GCC. The Export to Word feature, for example, required an HTTP-triggered Power Automate flow with a SAS-signed URL instead of native connector. Document these workarounds; they're institutional knowledge too.
CORA Insight and CORA Connect share a platform but operate on entirely separate, isolated indices. Internal HR policies, vendor contracts, and operational documents never surface in the public agent. This separation is an architectural guarantee, not a configuration setting — it was designed in, not bolted on.
We built CORA Insight for Grand Traverse County's 600 employees across 27 departments. The implementation runbook, governance framework, and ingestion pipeline patterns are available to peer counties.
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