AI & LLM Engineering for .NET Architects

Case Study: Designing a Global Enterprise AI Knowledge Assistant

1 Views Updated 5/4/2026

Case Study: Enterprise AI knowledge

How do you build an AI that can answer questions about 100,000 internal confluence pages, 50,000 PDFs, and 10 million SQL rows across 20 global regions?

1. Architecture: The Router Pattern

Don't send every question to the Vector DB. Use a **Semantic Router**.

  • If user asks about 'Salary', route to the HR SQL Database.
  • If user asks about 'Deployment', route to the Confluence Vector Index.
  • If user asks 'Who are you?', route to a fixed "About" prompt.
This ensures the AI is always looking in the right place, reducing noise and cost.

2. Security: Document Level RBAC

The AI must not leak the CEO's salary to a junior developer. We store the **ACL (Access Control List)** in our Vector Database metadata. When a user searches, we add a filter: `where access_groups contains 'Developer'`. The AI only 'Retrieves' what the user is legally allowed to see.

4. Interview Mastery

Q: "How do you measure 'Success' for an Enterprise AI assistant?"

Architect Answer: "We use the **RAG Triad**: 1) **Context Relevance:** Did we retrieve the right docs? 2) **Groundedness:** Is the AI's answer backed by the docs? 3) **Answer Relevance:** Does the answer actually help the user? We use a secondary 'Judge' LLM to score these three metrics for every session. If Groundedness falls below 0.8, we automatically flag the session for human review to prevent hallucinations."

AI & LLM Engineering for .NET Architects
1. AI Foundations & Prompt Engineering
The LLM Landscape: Transformers, Attention, and Tokens Advanced Prompt Engineering: Few-shot, Chain-of-Thought, and ReAct Prompt Versioning & Management in Production LLM Cost Estimation: Token accounting and budget strategies
2. Semantic Kernel & Integration
Introduction to Microsoft Semantic Kernel (SK) Skills & Plugins: Extending the LLM with native C# functions Planner & Orchestration: Automating complex multi-step AI tasks Connectors: Switching between OpenAI, Azure OpenAI, and HuggingFace
3. Vector Databases & RAG
The RAG Pattern: Solving the 'Static Knowledge' problem Embeddings Deep Dive: Converting text to math Vector DBs: Azure AI Search vs Pinecode vs Milvus Hybrid Search: Combining Keyword and Semantic search for accuracy
4. Advanced RAG Techniques
Document Chunking Strategies: Overlap, Slidewindow, and Semantic splitting Recursive Document Processing for massive knowledge bases Context Window Management: Summarization vs Truncation Citations & Grounding: Ensuring the AI doesn't hallucinate
5. AI Safety & Guardrails
Content Moderation: Azure AI Content Safety integration Prompt Injection: Defending against adversarial attacks Punitiveness & Bias: Evaluating and mitigating model behavior Self-Correction Patterns: Letting the AI check its own work
6. Small Language Models (SLMs) & Local AI
The rise of SLMs: Phi-3, Llama-3-8B, and Mistral Running AI Locally with ONNX and LocalLLM Quantization: Running 70B models on 16GB RAM Edge AI: Deploying models to local devices and private clouds
7. Multimodal & Agentic AI
Multimodal AI: Processing Images, PDFs, and Audio in C# Agentic Workflows: Multi-agent collaboration with AutoGen Function Calling: Letting the LLM use your SQL and API tools Memory Management: Ephemeral vs Long-term Semantic memory
8. FAANG AI Engineer Interview
Case Study: Designing a Global Enterprise AI Knowledge Assistant Case Study: Building an Autonomous AI Agent for Software Dev