Wil-Bot: Celonis and the Technical University of Munich build an AI virtual expert

Wil-Bot takes a question through chat or voice by a video avatar, retrieves precise fragments from a closed domain of verified knowledge, and validates the answer for confidence and provenance before returning it with sources attached. Its knowledge base combines authoritative conceptual sources - including on the one side Wil's books, papers and lectures on the other, real case studies showing how those ideas play out in actual industry projects, backed by supplementary research and verified Celonis customer stories. Everything is chunked and tagged with metadata including source authority, knowledge type, topic, version and audience relevance. It doesn't browse. It can't wander.

The part that differentiates it is the Bot Constitution - a trust layer that defines what Wil-Bot is allowed to say, and how. It must disclose that it's an AI. Every answer must cite a verifiable source and proactively asks for showing the whole source. It holds no opinions. When the knowledge base doesn't cover a question, it's required to say "I don't know" rather than generate something plausible.

That refusal turned out to matter. Through internal testing - including retrieval tests, adversarial prompts and iterations of the system's refusal behaviour - we found that clear, honest refusals inspired more trust than hedged or partially relevant answers. The same lesson has echoed in other AI systems we have developed for brands.

The simple way I express this is that trust is not a linear function of scale: an AI that attempts to answer everything is not necessarily an AI you trust.

The Bot Constitution is crucial in defining the sovereignty of the system: the rules that preserve control over what an AI system can and cannot say in someone (or something) name. As agents increasingly speak on behalf of companies, a bot constitution or something similar becomes a form of brand governance.