Overview
When Starlims, a leading provider of laboratory information management systems (LIMS), sought to enhance user support for their suite of products—including Life Sciences, Quality Manufacturing, Forensics, and Environmental Sciences—we collaborated as Tribe.AI architect contractors to design an intelligent in-product chat agent.
Starting from concept, and in collaboration with Starlims engineering, we delivered a complete MVP solution that integrates seamlessly into the Starlims client, leveraging retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to provide instant, accurate answers from vast documentation and knowledge bases.
The result? A transformative tool that not only slashed support resolution times but also empowered internal teams to test and iterate, paving the way for broader customer rollout and future enhancements like API integrations.
AI-powered chat agent embedded in Starlims products, turning manual documentation searches into instant, context-aware support.
The Challenge
Starlims faced growing demands from their global user base for faster resolution of technical queries across complex lab workflows. With documentation scattered across product manuals, installation guides, and Zendesk knowledge bases, support engineers spent hours manually searching for answers—leading to delays in issue resolution and increased operational costs. As a mature enterprise with many customer installations and potentially hundreds of users per site, they needed a scalable, embedded solution to provide real-time assistance without disrupting existing systems, while maintaining low infrastructure costs and high accuracy in a regulated scientific environment.
The Solution
We designed an end-to-end AI chat agent that embeds directly into the Starlims client via iframes, delivering multi-turn conversations with over 95% RAG accuracy. Our solution automates knowledge retrieval from static indices and Zendesk articles, reducing query resolution from minutes to seconds while supporting product-specific contexts. Deployed on AWS, the platform handles high-throughput searches efficiently, enabling Starlims to accelerate support for internal teams and prepare for customer expansion—ultimately creating a competitive edge in lab informatics by making expertise instantly accessible.
Key Capabilities That Drive Results
Our chat agent delivers production-ready performance with features optimized for lab informatics support:
- Seamless Knowledge Integration: Automatically ingests and indexes Zendesk articles, product manuals, and installation guides via Airbyte ETL—ensuring comprehensive coverage without manual updates.
- Intelligent Semantic Search: RAG pipeline with Pinecone vector database retrieves relevant snippets with hybrid semantic and keyword matching, supporting multi-turn queries for complex troubleshooting.
- Embedded User Experience: Iframe-based integration into Starlims clients provides in-context help, with license key authentication for secure access across dev and prod environments.
- Robust Evaluation Framework: Offline and online assessments using Ragas measure accuracy, completeness, and cost—achieving 95%+ on ground truth datasets to ensure reliable responses.
Platform Architecture That Scales
Our solution combines proven technologies to deliver reliable performance for lab environments:
Real-Time Knowledge Pipeline That Keeps Pace with Science
Automated Indexing That Stays Current: Our ETL engine syncs Zendesk knowledge bases to S3 every 7 days, with custom chunking for optimal embedding:
- Document Processing: Handles manuals, guides, and articles in real-time, excluding duplicates and attachments for clean indices.
- Vector Storage: Pinecone hosts embeddings for fast retrieval, supporting customer-specific indices without performance degradation.
Proven Scalability: The system supports 50+ installations with hundreds of users, using parallel dev/prod AWS accounts—ensuring low-latency responses even during peak lab operations.
Enterprise-Ready Technology Stack
Built for Regulated Lab Requirements: Our architecture ensures security, compliance, and ease of maintenance:
- AWS Infrastructure: ECS/EC2 for containerized chat servers, S3 for raw knowledge storage, and Terraform for IaC—providing HIPAA/GDPR compliance with reproducible deployments.
- MongoDB: Flexible database for AI portal and evaluation traces, enabling quick iteration on chat performance.
- Next.js & FastAPI: High-performance chat server and eval interfaces, with TypeScript for type-safe development.
- Pinecone: Serverless vector DB for semantic search, integrated via AWS Marketplace for seamless scaling.
- Airbyte: Open-source ETL for Zendesk integration, with alternatives like Fivetran reviewed for future flexibility.
AI That Delivers Accurate Lab Insights
Production-Ready Chat Agent: The chat engine uses OpenAI/OpenRouter LLMs with domain-specific prompting to provide grounded answers:
- 95%+ Retrieval Accuracy: Semantic search returns precise chunks from documentation, evaluated offline for completeness and online via conversation traces.
- Multi-Product Support: Handles queries across Starlims products (LS, QM, FR, ES) with per-product indices planned for V1.
- Continuous Improvement: AI portal dashboards track metrics, with user feedback loops for model refinement without downtime. AI portal is based on our open source project, SigAgent.AI (https://github.com/analytiq-hub/sig-agent)
Seamless Client Integration: Iframe embedding with mock servers for testing, supporting future V1 features like query rewrite and hybrid search.
Transformational Business Results
100% MVP Readiness: The chatbot achieved internal rollout to support and product teams, with all pilots demonstrating high accuracy and user satisfaction—validating the solution for broader adoption.
Exponential Efficiency Gains: The platform will enable Starlims to:
- Significantly reduce support query resolution time, freeing engineers for higher-value tasks.
- Scale to all customer sites without proportional infrastructure costs, thanks to efficient AWS consumption.
- Position for monetization through usage-based pricing in next version
Future-Proof Foundation: The modular design allows rapid expansion into advanced features like agentic integrations and monitoring dashboards—creating a sustainable advantage in the $10B+ lab informatics market.
Industry Recognition: By embedding AI directly into their products, Starlims establishes itself as an innovator in lab support, opening doors to new partnerships and enhanced customer retention.