“Yes, Chef!” — Syndio’s Recipe for Expert AI

| March 4, 2025 | 4 min read
Imagery of Syndi, Syndio's expert AI

Artificial intelligence has advanced significantly, evolving from basic chatbot applications to highly specialized, AI-powered expert systems. Syndi is a domain-specific expert AI designed to support pay reporting compliance by providing real-time, context-aware insights.

Think of Syndi like a Michelin-starred chef — curating and refining knowledge with precision. Just as a top kitchen orchestrates every ingredient to deliver a flawless dish, Syndi integrates retrieval, response generation, verification, and monitoring to ensure efficient, data-driven decision making.

Syndi acts as a knowledge navigator, guiding users through Syndio’s global pay reporting processes by leveraging metadata to streamline workflows, enhance discoverability, and provide rapid access to compliance-related insights.

Iterative, organized development: the evolution of Syndi

“Listen, if it’s not organized, it’s chaos.” — Carmy Berzatto, The Bear

Syndi was born from an iterative development cycle, much like a high-pressure kitchen refining recipes through continuous testing and improvement. The challenge was to design a system capable of handling nuanced regulatory and compliance inquiries while maintaining precision and accuracy, even as requirements change. The result is a structured, scalable knowledge engine that strikes the balance between automated intelligence and human oversight, making Syndi an expert AI in the complex world of pay reporting and compliance.

Learn about Syndio’s approach to responsible AI in Expert AI for Pay Reporting Compliance: Syndio’s Responsible, Trusted Approach

Core architecture: the multi-layer RAG system

“If you don’t control the ingredients, you can’t control the flavor.” — Chef Alain Ducasse

Syndi employs a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, ensuring that responses are grounded in verified sources rather than purely generated from an AI model. This architecture consists of multiple interdependent layers optimized for accuracy, scalability, and knowledge retention.

Retrieval-augmented processing: intelligent retrieval and response refinement

Retrieval layer: finding the right ingredients

Syndi starts its process by converting your question into a vector embedding — a numerical representation of its meaning.

Think of this like a flavor profile for a dish: when you describe a meal as “savory and spicy with a hint of sweetness,” a chef immediately knows you might be talking about a curry or barbecue sauce. Similarly, vector embeddings capture the essence of a question so Syndi can efficiently match it with relevant documents.

To improve this retrieval process, Syndi uses:

  • Hybrid search techniques: A combination of vector search (understanding meaning) and traditional keyword-based search (looking at metadata like keywords, dates, and categories). This ensures the best results by considering multiple factors.
  • Intelligent caching: If a question has been answered before, Syndi remembers the response, delivering it instantly without unnecessary recomputation.
  • Important note on data privacy: any user interactions that contribute to model improvements are stripped of identifiable or confidential information before being used for quality enhancement​.

Prioritization of retrieved documents: serving the best dishes first

Finding relevant information isn’t enough — Syndi also prioritizes the most useful results:

  • It ranks documents based on how well they match the question.
  • It references the user’s current conversation, ensuring that follow-up questions build on prior context for a more seamless user experience.

Enhanced contextual querying: cooking with precision

Syndi optimizes question answering using meticulously crafted prompts, integrating user queries, retrieved information, and historical interactions.

It uses Google’s Gemini Large Language Model (LLM) to generate responses, tuned with settings like temperature (controlling randomness) and top-p (prioritizing the most likely words). These settings optimize for technical accuracy and ensure the content is easy to understand, much like a chef adjusting seasoning to achieve the perfect dish.

Safety first: protecting our users

To maintain accuracy and security, Syndi has multiple safeguards in place:

  • Personal information filtering: Before processing, Syndi automatically removes any personally identifiable information (PII) to ensure compliance and privacy.
  • Bouncer system: This acts like a security guard at a club, screening responses for toxicity, bias, or inappropriate content before they reach the user.
  • Lucidity check: This is Syndi’s “fact-checker,” verifying responses against authoritative sources to prevent misinformation or AI hallucinations.

Expert in the loop: human verification, oversight, and content evolution

The best AI is built on and continuously improved with human expertise. Syndi integrates “expert-in-the-loop” verification for complex, ambiguous, or high-risk queries.

How it works

  • Help detection: Syndi recognizes when a user needs expert assistance from a human and routes the query accordingly.
  • Confidence-based routing: If there is not high confidence that a question can be answered with high accuracy, Syndi does not send it to the user. Instead, it gets routed to our human experts for review.
  • Knowledge gaps identification: Experts are alerted to make updates if additional information is needed.

Human verification workflow

  • Domain expert collaboration: Data Science teams assess flagged responses, while Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) validate or refine them.
  • Continuous learning: Expert-verified answers are incorporated into Syndi’s training data to improve future responses.
  • Periodic random sampling: A subset of Syndi’s responses is continuously reviewed for accuracy, clarity, bias, and adherence to responsible guidelines.

Observability and continuous monitoring

“Every second counts! You waste time, you kill the whole rhythm!” — Carmy Berzatto, The Bear

Syndi operates within a rigorous observability and monitoring framework to ensure peak performance:

  • Logging and performance metrics: Tracks execution time, retrieval accuracy, and response verification.
  • Observability integration: Provides real-time monitoring and alerting for performance anomalies.
  • Validation analytics: Monitors rejection rates from lucidity checks, bouncer interventions, and expert escalations, feeding insights back into the system for continuous improvement.

AI-enhanced compliance with human expertise

“Perfection is lots of little things done well.” — Chef Marco Pierre White

Syndi represents the next generation of expert AI, seamlessly blending automation with expert oversight. By employing a multi-layered retrieval pipeline, expert-in-the-loop verification, and a continuous learning framework, Syndi ensures responses are authoritative, precise, and actionable. Syndi delivers:

  • Instant expertise: Provides on-demand compliance insights for in-the-moment support, plus facilitates escalation to human domain experts if further assistance is needed.
  • Enhanced efficiency: Facilitates rapid discovery of key compliance information within Syndio’s Global Pay Reports solution.
  • Deeper understanding: Breaks down complex regulations into digestible, structured explanations.
    Data-driven decision making: Empowers users to make informed choices based on the latest compliance standards and best practices.
  • Continuous learning: Evolves through real-time feedback loops, expert validation, and iterative model tuning.

Through a synergy of carefully curated content, retrieval-augmented generation, comprehensive risk management, expert oversight, and adaptive AI learning, Syndi delivers a seamless knowledge experience. This ensures users have the guidance, support, and insights they need to navigate pay transparency and compliance with confidence — just like a well-run kitchen ensures every dish is executed to perfection.

 

 

The information provided herein does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal advice. All information, content, and materials are provided for general informational purposes only. The links to third-party or government websites are offered for the convenience of the reader; Syndio is not responsible for the contents on linked pages.

 

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