THEIR CHALLENGE
Tackling AI integration complexity with MongoDB Atlas
TeamSystem is a leading provider of digital management solutions, trusted by over 2.5 million customers across Europe, from freelancers to major corporations and across diverse industries. Based in Italy, with a portfolio of more than 300 products, a workforce of 4,800+, and expansion into markets such as Spain, France, Turkey, and Denmark, TeamSystem is driving digital transformation across European business.
In 2024, TeamSystem launched a five-year R&D plan to embed AI deeply into its product ecosystem, focusing on real user needs. “There’s a lot of hype around AI, we wanted to be more pragmatic,” says Gianluca Genga, AI & Platform Engineering Manager, TeamSystem. “The difficulties users were having in moving through regulated fiscal environments is where we first saw the opportunity for AI to add value.”Their goal was to integrate AI seamlessly across all solutions, enabling intuitive access to business content—documents, images, videos—via natural conversations with an AI assistant. However, with such a vast and expanding product catalog, silos of data and fragmented workflows made maximizing AI’s benefits challenging. To embed AI individually in every product was simply unsustainable, therefore the team created a center of AI excellence within the platform, unlocking reusable services for faster innovation and development.
To meet these ambitions, TeamSystem needed a robust multi-tenant system ensuring strict data isolation and security for each customer; a must when applying AI models to sensitive data. The team also wanted to delegate infrastructure concerns like security and scalability so product teams could focus on delivering business value.
A long-time partner of TeamSystem, MongoDB emerged as the ideal choice, powering the company’s evolution from fragmented data silos to a unified, AI-enabled business platform. “We chose MongoDB Atlas because it’s not just a database,” Genga explains. “And we didn’t just need a database. We needed a whole plethora of adjacent services.”
OUR SOLUTION
Building a scalable high-performance AI platform
TeamSystem tackled its AI-powered search challenges with a clever hybrid search approach, combining precise traditional full-text and metadata searches with semantic vector search. This smart blend allowed the team to respect data governance through meticulous metadata management—significantly narrowing user context, reducing data volumes sent to AI models, and limiting the risk of hallucinations.
The company implemented the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solution, to work in two phases. First, an offline document ingestion stage splits documents into chunks based on their nature. These fragments are vectorized and stored in MongoDB Atlas alongside document metadata. Next, the online phase happens when users query the system, their input is semantically embedded and matched against the relevant document vectors to deliver precise, context-aware results.
With TeamSystem operating in such sensitive domains like accounting, tax, and HR, security and compliance were non-negotiable. Delegating these responsibilities confidently to MongoDB Atlas proved invaluable, providing peace of mind without overburdening internal resources.
Taking a practical "start small, fail fast" approach, TeamSystem rolled out features in waves—starting with pilot customers, refining based on feedback, then expanding quickly. This phased release uncovered challenges mainly around data quality and observability—critical for diagnosing why AI agents didn’t respond as expected—and addressed them early, ensuring successful wider adoption.
Crucially, TeamSystem’s engagement with MongoDB went beyond the traditional vendor-client relationship. The company built a true partnership with MongoDB early on, collaborating closely on data modeling, infrastructure sizing, and cost planning. “It was a joint creation,” says Genga. “A joint conceptualizing of the solution.” This close collaboration was fundamental in transforming TeamSystem’s complex AI ambitions into practical, reliable solutions to power its business future.
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