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Questions

Questions are how Mention captures and answers the recurring questions an Audience is likely to face. Each Question is a single, immutable text question the admin writes; Mention generates a Markdown answer grounded in the organization's sources.

What a Question is

A Question is a short, plain-English question scoped to a single Audience. For example, in a Customer Support audience, an admin might add Questions like:

  • "What is our refund policy?"
  • "How do I escalate a customer to legal?"
  • "Which inboxes do we monitor on weekends?"

Each Question belongs to exactly one Audience. The Question text is immutable — to change the wording, an admin deletes the Question and creates a new one. Two questions with the same text in the same Audience are treated as duplicates.

Lifecycle

  1. Created — An admin writes the Question text in the Audience's Questions tab
  2. Pending — Mention fetches the relevant context from the organization's knowledge base
  3. Writing — Mention generates a Markdown answer grounded in the fetched context. An answer may include at most one small interactive widget (a stepper, flip cards, or a tabbed view) when interaction genuinely helps explain it; clients that can't render the widget show a labeled placeholder card instead
  4. Completed — The Question's answer is available to every member of the Audience and to agents granted to the Audience

If the fetched context does not actually cover the Question, Mention does not fabricate an answer — the Question is marked No answer found rather than Completed, and (like Failed) it stays hidden from members until a future refresh or regeneration produces a real answer. This outcome is also emitted as an event, so the platform can track which Questions the knowledge base can't yet answer.

If the answer cannot be generated at all (for example, the organization has exhausted its credits, or the model is unavailable), the Question is marked as Failed and will retry on the next daily refresh. No answer found is distinct from Failed: the generation succeeded, but the sources simply didn't contain the answer.

Regeneration

A daily background job revisits every Completed Question across every organization. For each one, Mention asks: has anything in the underlying context changed enough that the answer should be rewritten?

  • If the relevant context has not changed, the existing answer is kept.
  • If the context has changed but the regenerated answer would say the same thing in substance, the existing answer is kept.
  • If the context has changed and the regenerated answer differs meaningfully, the new answer replaces the old. A widget being added, removed, or materially changed counts as a meaningful difference.

An admin can also fire an immediate regeneration from the Questions tab without waiting for the daily job.

Differences from Articles and SOPs

Article SOP Question
Created by derived from a Concept derived from a Process written directly by an admin
Scoping per-member (personalized) per-member (personalized) shared across the whole Audience
Structure sections + knowledge check tasks + workflow graph + knowledge check a single Markdown answer
Knowledge check yes yes no
Wikifies to Glossary concepts yes yes no