Closed knowledge base

A closed knowledge base is the document corpus, approved by the business owner, that an AI agent relies on to answer: price lists, service areas, hours, warranties, FAQs. "Closed" is the key word: the agent may not invent beyond that corpus, unlike a generalist chatbot connected to the whole web. This is also called grounding — anchoring every answer in a source.

For a local business, it's the structural cure for hallucination: the AI cannot quote a fictional price if the price isn't in the base. The trade-off is update discipline — changing a price must mean updating the base, or the agent will confidently cite stale information. And when information is missing, a good agent says so and escalates to a human instead of filling the gap.