The man behind the box files
Pak Mat has been about to retire for six years.
He works at Jabatan Perancangan Negeri, a fictional state agency. He is 59, has served for 34 years, and sits behind box files stacked so high that new staff sometimes cannot find him.
Pak Mat knows everything. Not in a showy way. In a quiet, terrifying way. Ask him about land approval rules from 2007 and he will say, "Ah, that one was amended in 2011, but the 2011 amendment was partly reversed in 2014, except for projects above five acres. Box 23, the blue one." And he will be right.
New officers learn quickly that there are two ways to find a document in the department. The first is to use the official filing system. The second is to ask Pak Mat. The second is faster, more accurate, and comes with a short story about the officer who wrote the document, usually involving a wedding or a broken photocopier.
Pak Mat does not use a computer if he can avoid it. He believes that a document you cannot hold is a document you cannot trust. His drawer contains a fountain pen, a stapler older than most of his colleagues, and a packet of sweets he offers to anyone who looks stressed.
Every time he submits his retirement letter, the director asks him to stay "just one more year". Everyone knows why. If Pak Mat leaves, the department's memory leaves with him.
The question from the minister's office
One Thursday afternoon, an urgent query arrives. A developer claims that under an old circular, their project is exempt from a new requirement. The minister's office needs an answer by 10am tomorrow.
The officer handling it is Aina, 27, sharp and two years into the service. She searches the shared drive for "pengecualian" and gets 1,400 results. Many are scanned PDFs the search cannot even read. The intranet has a search box that seems designed as a form of meditation.
At 4:45pm she walks to Pak Mat's desk. Pak Mat is on leave, at his grandson's sports day in Kuantan, cheering for the 100-metre race. His phone goes to voicemail.
Aina stays until 11pm. She finds three circulars that might be relevant and is not sure which is current. She sends a cautious answer with "subject to verification" in bold, and does not sleep well.
Why normal search fails, and public AI is risky
The department does not lack information. It has too much: twenty years of circulars, minutes and amendments in Malay and English, some typed, some scanned, many contradicting each other because the rules changed.
Keyword search matches words, not meaning. Searching "exemption" will not find a document that says "tidak tertakluk kepada".
Public AI chatbots are tempting but risky. Uploading official documents to a public service may breach data policy. General chatbots sometimes give confident answers that are simply invented. And they cannot tell a 2009 circular from the one that replaced it unless someone shows them both.
The department needed AI that answers from its own documents, shows its sources, stays under its control and knows who may see what.
Enter iKB
The department's digital lead, Encik Faris, attended a briefing on iKB, an enterprise AI knowledge platform offered through Astiostech. The idea was easy to explain:
- Feed it your own documents, including scanned ones.
- Ask in plain language, the way you would ask a colleague.
- Get an answer with receipts: every answer cites the documents and passages it came from.
- Keep control: iKB can run in a private cloud, on-premise or even air-gapped.
- Respect access rules: officers only get answers from documents they are allowed to see.
Before answering, the AI looks up the relevant pages in the library, writes the answer from those pages, and shows which pages it used. Less know-it-all, more very fast librarian.
The pilot: testing the librarian
The pilot used one division's files. Pak Mat became its hero rather than its casualty. For three weeks he tested iKB with the hardest questions he had answered in 34 years, many with traps in them.
When iKB was right, Pak Mat nodded slowly, which from Pak Mat is a standing ovation. When it missed, he explained why. Usually a newer circular had replaced an old one, but nobody had marked the old one as superseded. Once the team fixed that, iKB preferred the current rule and mentioned the history only when relevant.
Then came the question that stopped the pilot for a day.
Pak Mat asked why the 2014 reversal applied only to projects above five acres. iKB replied that it could not find a document explaining the reason, and listed the two circulars it had checked.
Encik Faris was disappointed. Pak Mat was delighted. "Good," he said. "It is telling the truth. There is no document. The reason was decided in a meeting in 2014, and the minutes were never filed. I know because I was the one taking notes, and the notes are in my drawer."
That was the limit nobody had thought about. iKB could only know what had been written down and loaded into the library. Some of Pak Mat's most valuable knowledge had never been written down at all.
So for his last six months, Pak Mat did something he had avoided for 34 years. Every Friday afternoon, he sat with Aina and dictated the stories behind the rules: why a decision was made, who made it, and which box held the evidence. Aina typed. The notes were reviewed, approved and added to the library as official background documents.
The same question, three months later
Three months after launch, another urgent query arrived, with the same 10am deadline.
Aina typed: "Is a mixed development above five acres exempt from the new drainage assessment under any previous circular?"
Before her teh had cooled, iKB answered no, explained that an older circular had once exempted smaller projects, noted that this was later revoked, and cited both documents with the relevant paragraphs. It also cited one of Pak Mat's Friday notes explaining why.
Aina opened all three sources and checked them herself, because good officers always verify. iKB was right. She sent the reply before 5:30pm and went home before the rain.
Pak Mat's farewell
Pak Mat finally retired the next year. This time, the director did not ask him to stay.
At the farewell lunch, there was nasi beriani, a slideshow and a plaque. Aina gave a short speech. "We will miss Pak Mat's patience and his terrible jokes about box files. But we will not lose what he taught us, because this time he wrote it down. Or rather, I typed and he complained."
Pak Mat laughed and handed Aina one last thing from his drawer: the fountain pen. "For the things the computer still does not know," he said, and drove to Kuantan for another sports day.
What this means for your organisation
- Search by meaning, not just keywords. An AI knowledge platform can find a relevant passage even when it uses different words, including across Malay and English documents.
- Insist on citations. Answers that cite their sources let officers verify before they act.
- Mark what is current. Superseded documents should be labelled so the AI prefers the rule in force.
- Capture unwritten knowledge. AI can only answer from what is in the library. Interview long-serving staff and add their knowledge as reviewed documents before they leave.
- Keep control of sensitive documents. Choose a deployment, such as private cloud, on-premise or air-gapped, that fits your data policy.
Frequently asked questions
What is iKB? iKB is an enterprise AI knowledge platform, developed by a Malaysian consortium including Astiostech, ThoughtsMachine and Orencloud. It answers questions from an organisation's own documents with cited sources. Learn more at kbmy.ai.
Where can iKB be deployed? iKB can run in a private cloud, on-premise or in an air-gapped environment, depending on the organisation's data policy.
What is retrieval-augmented generation? It is a technique where the AI first retrieves the relevant passages from your documents, then writes an answer from those passages and shows which ones it used.
What happens when iKB cannot find an answer? It should say that it could not find a supporting document rather than guess. Those gaps often show which knowledge needs to be written down.
Who can deploy iKB in Malaysia? Astiostech, as part of the iKB consortium, deploys iKB for government agencies, regulators and enterprises. Learn more on the Astiostech AI solutions page.
Book a 20-minute iKB briefing
See how iKB could help your staff find the right document, with its source. Book a 20-minute iKB briefing.
Pak Mat, Aina and Jabatan Perancangan Negeri are fictional. Box 4, however, is in every government office in Malaysia.