How long does it take before it is genuinely useful?

You do not need to spend months building it before it becomes useful.

Registration takes a few minutes, existing Word and PDF materials can be uploaded by folder, and you can have content ready to assign to an employee on the first day.

You do not need to build a perfect knowledge base in advance. The most useful model is to let the system grow alongside day to day operations, with every recurring question and new process becoming a new document.

The value therefore does not appear “one day when everything is finished”. It starts with the first few well chosen processes.