Cloud-Free Question Answering from Internal Knowledge Bases: Building an AI for Drilling Applications

Geoscientists and engineers often need quick, reliable answers from confidential or internal documents. Generic cloud-based chatbots struggle to provide accurate, industry-specific information. Moreover, they are not allowed to access internal knowledge bases. To solve this, we developed a local, self-hosted chatbot that uses a local Large Language Model (LLM) combined with an AI-based search system fine-tuned to offshore drilling data. Our setup ensures reliable domain-relevant responses without sending information to external servers and limiting false information generation called ‘hallucination’. By keeping all data in-house and enhancing retrieval accuracy, this methodology offers a practical way to build secure, specialised chatbots for other subsurface applications. We provide open-source code and a setup guide to facilitate reproducibility and adoption.