TVS Supply Chain Solutions UK builds in-house RAG assistant TVS Sidekick in Microsoft Teams under an ISO/IEC 42001 AI management system

Overview

TVS SCS UK, a third-party logistics provider, built TVS Sidekick with its in-house AI team: a retrieval-augmented assistant delivered through a Microsoft Teams extension that answers queries from SharePoint, Azure DevOps, code repositories and the company website. The paper describes the ingestion and RAG pipeline, alignment with ISO/IEC 42001 and the EU AI Act, and usage monitoring over March-June 2025 (over 500 prompts in the first two months and 250 in the following two), plus 24 staff feedback interviews.

The challenge

TVS SCS UK, a third-party logistics provider, is leveraging LLMs to create a competitive advantage and enhance its internal operational efficiency, while navigating a complex legal and regulatory landscape including the EU AI Act and ISO/IEC 42001.

The solution

TVS SCS UK decided not to use third-party software integrators or product vendors and instead built TVS Sidekick with an in-house AI team. Sidekick uses retrieval augmented generation: company data from SharePoint, Azure DevOps, code repositories and the TVS website is vectorised, a router splits each user query into tasks, and an LLM answers using the top-10 similar chunks. Users interact through a Microsoft Teams extension.

Reported business value

The paper reports adoption statistics rather than productivity or cost outcomes: usage exceeded 500 prompts in the first two months and 250 in the following two months (March-June 2025). In 24 interviews with IT department staff, 16 mentioned enhanced retrieval, with users finding SharePoint-related tasks faster than a manual search. The authors describe this as an initial phase of evaluation.