Gap Analysis: Proactive vs Reactive
Choose whether Valmar drives discovery or acts as a runtime fallback.
Valmar can be used in two complementary ways. Most teams end up using both, but it helps to understand them separately before you mix them.
How the two modes differ
| Topic | Proactive | Reactive |
|---|---|---|
| Who initiates | Valmar (or a gap-analysis flow you build with it) probes a chatbot or knowledge base. | Your existing chatbot or assistant decides when it needs help. |
| When Valmar is invoked | Before the end user asks, during an audit, evaluation, or analysis run. | During a live conversation when the current tools still cannot answer. |
| Required surface | A knowledge base or chatbot that can be analyzed or probed. | A working assistant runtime with its own tools or data sources. |
| Best fit | Documentation audits, pre-production analysis, and knowledge-gap discovery. | Production assistants, copilots, and chat apps that need a narrow fallback. |
Proactive: discover gaps before users hit them
In proactive mode, you point Valmar at an existing chatbot, knowledge base, or set of documents. Valmar probes it with realistic questions, identifies where the answers are missing or wrong, ranks those gaps, and turns the most important ones into knowledge requests routed to the right people. The output is a prioritized list of things your team should document or clarify.
Reactive: fall back to a person at runtime
In reactive mode, your live assistant searches its own tools and sources first, then calls Valmar only when the answer is still missing. Valmar either returns an existing reusable answer (via search) or opens a new knowledge request (via gather) and a real person responds. The same answers become reusable knowledge for the next time.
Choose proactive when
- You want to audit a chatbot or knowledge base before wider rollout.
- You need a ranked list of missing knowledge areas.
- You are doing documentation or knowledge-base gap discovery.
Choose reactive when
- You already have an assistant, copilot, or chat app in production.
- That assistant already has its own tools and sources.
- You only want Valmar to handle the cases where the live system still cannot answer.