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Why this matters

An answer you can’t trace is an answer you can’t trust. The thing that separates Chief from a generic chatbot is that nearly every claim it makes about your data comes with a citation — a clickable link back to the exact passage in the exact file it drew from. That means you can verify anything in one click instead of taking the model’s word for it, which is what makes Chief safe to use for board pre-reads, customer briefs, and anything that has to be right.

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How it actually works

Chief retrieval - a knowledge base citation showing the source file and excerpt
When you ask a question, Chief doesn’t re-read every file end to end. During ingestion it breaks each document into passages and indexes them so it can retrieve only the parts that are relevant to your question. At answer time, the Librarian reasons across that index, pulls the passages that match, and grounds its response in them — then attaches a citation to each claim. Chief keeps internal and external evidence visually distinct, so you always know where a fact came from:
  • Knowledge base citations point to your uploaded files. They show the source filename and the excerpt, with the number of lines the passage spans.
  • Web citations point to external sources the Explorer found on the open web.
  • Artifact citations point back to outputs Chief itself produced earlier in your workspace.
A “unified” view brings these together when an answer blends internal and external evidence — for example, when the Researcher compares your numbers to the market.
ℹ️ Important: Citations only point to content Chief actually retrieved. If a file never finished processing, lives outside the Project you’re chatting in, or wasn’t relevant to the question, Chief can’t cite it — and shouldn’t. A claim with no citation is your cue to verify it before relying on it.

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A worked example

Chief retrieval - a grounded answer with a clickable citation
You ask, “What did the customer say about onboarding in the March QBR?” Chief retrieves the matching passages from that transcript and answers with a sentence like “They flagged that setup took over a week” — followed by a citation reading “Excerpt from March-QBR.txt · 4 lines.” Click it and you land on the exact four lines, so you can confirm the quote is accurate and in context before you paste it into a deck.

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FAQ

Usually one of three reasons: the relevant file hadn’t finished processing when you asked, it isn’t part of the Project you’re chatting in, or the question was general knowledge rather than something grounded in your files. When a claim about your data lacks a citation, treat it as unverified and confirm it directly.
Retrieval matches passages by relevance, not by reading every word of every file. Vague questions retrieve broadly. Naming the document, the time period, or the specific term you care about helps Chief retrieve the precise passage you have in mind.
Yes. Web citations and knowledge base citations are rendered separately so you can always tell external sources apart from your own documents.