From Cleanlab’s early customer pilots, we have observed that many AI systems in production provide answers that users find unhelpful. Sometimes the AI responds incorrectly. Other times it simply says “I don’t know” (an IDK answer). Or even when the AI is technically correct, the answer may still be unhelpful, such as being too vague, poorly worded, or missing the detail the user needs.
In all these cases, users lose trust and turn back to human channels, driving up support costs and slowing resolution time. The good news is that these problems are also the best opportunity for subject-matter experts (SMEs) to directly improve your AI system.
Introducing Expert Answers
Cleanlab’s Expert Answers feature turns SME input into an SME-verified cache of responses your AI agents can instantly rely on. Think of it as a cache for your AI: an SME provides the correct answer once, and that answer is instantly reused across all matching queries in production.
SMEs can add or modify Expert Answers inside Cleanlab. By publishing the answer once, the AI is guaranteed to return the exact SME-approved response for all future matching queries.
This is fundamentally different from workarounds like retraining or prompt changes, which are slow, brittle, and risk regressions. With Expert Answers, SMEs can fix specific problems in real time without needing help from engineers.
How It Works
- Failed questions are clustered: Cleanlab automatically groups similar failed responses together, whether they are wrong answers, IDK answers, or correct-but-unhelpful answers flagged as low-confidence, non-compliant, or untrustworthy.
- SMEs prioritize and respond once: Subject-matter experts see the highest-impact clusters, provide the authoritative answer once, and mark it as resolved. This ensures your team only spends time on the highest impact cases (common queries where your AI is consistently failing).
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Answers are instantly reusable: That SME-provided answer is stored in the Expert Answers cache and applied automatically to any matching future queries. Semantic matching is done via hybrid vector/keyword search with a re-ranker. For conversational AI apps, Cleanlab also includes a query rewriter where appropriate to improve semantic matching. For example, if a user asks “What’s the daily withdrawal limit?” vs. “How much cash can I take out in one day?”, both queries are rewritten and matched to the same SME-provided Expert Answer so the AI always gives the consistent, correct response.
For example, if your CEO emails you at 10pm about a bad AI response, an SME or PM can patch it instantly without risky prompt changes or retraining.
Use Cases for Expert Answers
Expert Answers are applied by the people closest to the domain, SMEs who already know the right answers:
- Customer Support AI
- SMEs: Support reps or documentation writers
- Example: A customer asks whether a refund applies after 30 days. A support rep adds the official refund policy once, and every future customer gets the same authoritative response instantly.
- AI Embedded in Your Product
- SMEs: Product managers
- Example: A user asks how to enable a beta feature. A PM adds the correct step-by-step process once, and the AI product assistant provides the right guidance every time without waiting for a product update or retraining cycle.
- Compliance Workflows
- SMEs: Compliance officers
- Example: A customer asks about a new financial regulation. A compliance officer adds the SME-approved legal text verbatim, so the AI always delivers the exact wording required by law.
With Expert Answers, these SMEs make their expertise reusable at scale, ensuring AI agents give consistent, authoritative responses without adding engineering overhead.
The Easiest Way to Improve Your AI
From Cleanlab’s early pilots, Expert Answers reduced abstentions by about 10x while improving customer trust.
Results from over 1,000 interactions with a RAG-powered customer support AI at a major financial institution.
The main value of Expert Answers comes from two areas:
- Empowering SMEs: Nontechnical experts can directly control AI behavior, instantly and continuously improving it without engineers.
- Fixing unhelpful answers: Corrects both wrong and IDK responses, making your AI more reliable and useful for end users.
Cleanlab is the only solution that combines real-time detection with Expert Answers, giving you both the ability to catch untrustworthy responses and instantly patch them with SME knowledge.
You cannot eliminate unpredictability in AI systems, but you can contain it. Expert Answers transform oversight into an SME-verified cache of knowledge that compounds over time, making your AI safer, more reliable, and continuously improving.
Learn more in the Expert Answers tutorial.