AI Assistant for your Workforce

We helped Sonae Sierra move beyond per-user AI tools with a secure, flexible and usage-based AI Assistant.

Gen-OS

FMCG

Sonae Sierra needed to simplify daily work by providing all employees with a conversational workspace without being locked into expensive, per-user licences from consumer platforms. We deployed one of our Gen-OS products, GenAssistant, an AI chat platform that unifies multiple LLMs in a single interface, avoids vendor lock-in, and enables best-model-per-use-case selection.

Implementation time:

1 month

messages exchanged

30k

active users

500

reduction in per user cost compared to ChatGPT / CoPilot

80%

Data measured within the first 1 month

The Opportunity

The client was facing various difficulties

Fragmented Enterprise Search

Information lived across SharePoint, CRMs, ERPs, emails and internal systems, forcing employees to constantly switch tools.

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Security and control concerns

‍Relying on consumer AI platforms limited visibility, flexibility and control over data, models and usage.

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Rising costs per user

AI access was tied to per-user licences, making it expensive and hard to scale from hundreds to thousands of employees.

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The Solution

We implemented GenAssistant, a central conversational interface designed for enterprise productivity.

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Instead of navigating multiple systems, employees ask questions, analyse documents, draft content, or retrieve system data from a single workspace. By doing this, employees are standardizing access to company knowledge through a governed approach.

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GenAssistant is powered by conversational agents that understand intent, fetch the right information and trigger automation when needed. It integrates human-in-the-loop controls, enterprise search, document summarisation, content generation and web search, all within a secure environment.

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The platform was deployed under our Gen-OS product suite of tools, fully customised with Sonae’s Sierra branding, Microsoft authentication and internal policies. Most importantly, it follows a usage-based pricing model, allowing thousands of employees to share a common message pool rather than paying per licence. The system is model-agnostic, meaning our client is not locked into a single provider and can switch or combine models as needs evolve.

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Sonae Sierra required a secure-by-design solution, ensuring that all data stayed within its infrastructure to meet GDPR and governance requirements. GenAssistant addresses this by operating entirely within the customer environment, with controlled access, auditability, and no data leakage to external platforms.

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Meet the team of this project

Artur Simões

Data Engineer

Isabel Labarca

Data Scientist

Sofia Ribeiro

Project Manager

The Impact

In just the first phase of adoption, GenAssistant showed strong traction across the organisation. Employees quickly embraced the platform as a daily workspace, exchanging ~30k messages and registering ~500 active users without any forced rollout. The usage of the product ranged from HR, Finance, Legal to Commercial departments.

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More importantly, Gen-Assistant proved that enterprise AI should scale with real usage and platform interaction. By shifting from per-user pricing to a shared, usage-based model, the company unlocked access for far more employees at a fraction of the projected cost, while maintaining full control over data, security and observability.

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Gen-Assistant now serves as Sonae Sierra’s entry point into a broader AI ecosystem, reducing friction, lowering costs and laying the groundwork for a growing network of specialised AI agents across teams.

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