Co-Building a Generative AI Chatbot for Katholiek Onderwijs

As the umbrella organization for Catholic education in Flanders, Katholiek Onderwijs Vlaanderen coordinates and helps school directors, boards, and teachers on everything from complex leave regulations to specific curriculum details. 

They provide all necessary information on their website, but people couldn’t seem to find it. In fact, some of them bypassed the website and emailed an expert directly. This turned high-level policy advisors into a glorified helpdesk, leaving less time for their actual work. 

They had already tried to fix this with an intelligent search bar, which helped a little, but wasn't enough. Their users didn't want to search through a list of documents. They wanted a direct answer.

We developed an initial version of this solution during a one-week hackathon. Together with the business and IT teams of Katholiek Onderwijs Vlaanderen, we built a working prototype in just five days. We even invited school directors to test it on the spot. The feedback was clear: they preferred chatting over searching.

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Once we were sure that a chatbot was the right way to go, we started working on a production-ready version. But we didn't retreat to our own offices to build by ourselves. We set up a mixed team, where we took the lead on development and AI architecture, while they managed the infrastructure and knowledge base. As they built up expertise, Katholiek Onderwijs Vlaanderen gradually took more ownership and really made the solution their own.

The result of this co-creation process is an intuitive chatbot that lives on the PRO. website for professionals. Instead of just matching keywords to the right webpage or source document like the search bar, it combs through thousands of pages (from daily news articles to dense 50-page curriculum plans) and synthesizes them into clear answers. It’s smart enough to prioritize recent updates over old news, and strict enough to handle conversations with the necessary professional guardrails.

Thanks to the new chatbot, the knowledge management of Katholiek Onderwijs Vlaanderen has been streamlined significantly for both visitors and their own experts.

• Because many questions are answered automatically, experts have time to focus on complex policy work instead of repetitive emails.
• School directors, teachers and other visitors get instant answers, even on weekends or during school holidays when the office is closed.
• Users don’t have to wade through multiple pages and files anymore, because the botextracts exactly what is needed to answer their question.

During the hackathon and development phase for the production version, we used Microsoft Copilot Studio for the general orchestration. It also enforces specific guardrails, like generating a polite refusal if a user tries to swear. 

In the background, we co-built a custom index in Azure AI Search to prioritize up-to-date info, so the bot knows the current regulations instead of pulling data from old articles. The overall system uses Azure OpenAI to generate natural, accurate responses based strictly on the provided content.