SME Coach Agent: A Reference Architecture for Traceable Enterprise Knowledge Delivery

In most enterprises, critical operational knowledge lives in the heads of a handful of subject-matter experts. When these individuals move on, institutional memory walks out the door with them-projects stall, architectural context evaporates, and teams find themselves solving problems that were already solved years ago. The SME Coach Agent is a reference architecture designed to address this problem: domain-specific AI agents that deliver enterprise knowledge with full traceability back to source artifacts. The architecture pairs retrieval-augmented generation over curated documents with structured knowledge graph queries for ownership, lineage, and impact analysis. Three principles guide the design: every response claim must cite its sources with provenance metadata; semantic search and graphbased reasoning work together rather than in isolation; and governance controls-access filtering, redaction, audit loggingare enforced at retrieval time, not bolted on afterward. This paper specifies the knowledge graph schema, defines the artifact categories that form the knowledge substrate, and details the security controls necessary for enterprise deployment.