🧪 AI Assistant — Search Improvements (In Testing)
Status Date: Thursday, September 24, 2026 Team: CCG Platform Status: 🧪 In Testing — not yet the default Owner: Syamala
A vector (hybrid) search index is being validated for the AI Assistant, alongside the existing keyword/semantic index it uses today. It is not yet the default — this announcement is a heads-up for engineers who may see it in use during testing, not a completed rollout notice.
Same audience as the AI Assistant itself: CCG Platform Engineers, not exposed on the merchant-facing site.
📋 What's Changing?
Today's search (wallet-docs-index-v3) is keyword/BM25 search reranked by Azure's semantic layer — it can fail on genuine vocabulary mismatch, where a question shares almost no wording with the one doc that actually answers it, even though that doc is fully indexed. A real example: "how to initiate a session with split tender" never surfaced the Widget Modes doc that explains it, despite that doc being indexed and easily found by a query that happened to share its own wording.
A new index (wallet-docs-vector-index-v1) adds embedding-based similarity search on top of keyword/semantic search — far more forgiving of exactly this kind of mismatch. It's being built and validated as a separate index, not by modifying the one serving traffic today, so there's zero risk to current answers while this is tested.
💡 Why Are We Doing This?
| Reason | Detail |
|---|---|
| Vocabulary-mismatch failures are real | Confirmed live cases where the right doc exists, is indexed, but never surfaces for a differently-worded question |
| Zero risk to current behavior | New index, new endpoint (/api/index/vector) — a bug here can't touch what's serving real traffic |
| Reversible by design | Cutover (if/when it happens) is a single config flip (AZURE_SEARCH_INDEX), with the current index kept unmodified as an instant rollback path |
✅ What You Need To Do Now
- Nothing required — this isn't live for general use yet.
- If you're helping validate: results may look different depending on which index a given request targeted (visible server-side in logs, or via the
index_namefield on/api/ccg/chatrequests). That's expected during this testing period. - Report anything that looks wrong via the usual feedback channel — same as any other AI Assistant issue.
📚 Resources
| Resource | Link |
|---|---|
| Design & rollout plan | wallet-ai-service's docs/ccg_ai_assistant/12-vector-search-plan.md |
| Indexing internals (updated with the new endpoint) | AI Assistant — Indexing Internals |
| Original "AI Assistant is Up" announcement | AI Assistant is Up |
🏁 Bottom Line
Search quality improvements are being tested, not yet live by default. No action needed; this is a heads-up, not a completed rollout.
Having trouble with the Assistant? Use the feedback link on any page or contact your integration support representative.