From four search bars to one — and a 95% drop in time-to-answer.

A year ago, the average employee at Northwind Capital opened four search bars to answer one question. Slack had its own. Notion had its own. Drive had its own. Salesforce had its own. None of them talked to each other, and none of them returned anything resembling an answer. They returned lists of links, sorted by recency, and prayed.

This is the story of what happened when they replaced all four with one — and what they got wrong.

Background

Northwind is 600 seats spread across New York, London and Singapore. They're a regulated business, which means their knowledge isn't just sprawling — it's audit-bound. Every answer the team gives a customer can end up in front of a regulator. Where did that number come from? is not a rhetorical question.

Before askthegenie, the answer was usually: “I don't know, but I'll get back to you in an hour.” An hour that, on a good day, became three.

The 90-day rollout

Northwind didn't do a town hall. They did the opposite. They picked the loudest, most skeptical team — RevOps — and gave them a 30-day private beta. No mandate. No training video. Just a Slack channel and a promise: if you find a wrong answer, we'll buy you lunch.

By week two, RevOps stopped opening Salesforce search. By week four, they were forwarding answers to their CEO with a single sentence: “this took 4 seconds, here are the sources.” That was the rollout.

By the numbers

A year in, the numbers Northwind tracks tell the story. These come from their internal analytics and a quarterly user survey — not from a vendor pitch.

• Average time-to-answer dropped from 14 minutes to 38 seconds across the support team.
• “Does anyone know” Slack messages dropped 71% in the channels Northwind tracked.
• Customer-facing response time improved by 2.4× on tickets that required cross-tool research.
• Quarterly audit prep — previously a two-week sprint — became a two-day pass.
• Citation click-through reached 62%: most users verify at least one source before acting on an answer.

Three things they'd do differently

1. Run the access review on day zero, not week one. An AI that reads everything in your Drive will surface everything in your Drive. Northwind locked down 412 docs that should have been private — better to do that before the AI ever sees them.
2. Pick a champion, not a committee. A 12-person rollout committee slowed Northwind down by six weeks. The actual progress came from one RevOps lead who used the product daily.
3. Train the answer, not the user. Northwind wrote prompt-engineering docs that nobody read. What worked was tuning retrieval until the bad version of any question still got a usable answer.

What's next

Northwind is piloting agents next. Same citation-first surface, but with the ability to actually do things — file a Jira, draft a renewal email, update an opportunity. The bar is the same: nothing ships that can't be audited.