Permission-Aware AI
An AI that answers from your company documents has to answer each person only from what that person is allowed to see. The filter belongs where the documents are fetched, before the AI reads anything.
An AI that answers from your company’s documents has to know who is asking. A support agent who asks “what was our revenue last quarter?” should not get the answer the CEO gets.
Why the demo version is a liability
The usual demo is simple: load your documents, ask a question, get an answer. It impresses in a boardroom because everyone in the demo is the same person.
Give that tool every file in the company (HR records, financial reports, client contracts, legal memos) and any employee can ask about any of it. Your drives have permissions for a reason, and an AI that reads everything on everyone’s behalf removes them.
How the filter works
A person asks
Signed in, so the system knows who is asking
Look up their groups
From the access groups you already manage
Search only what they may see
The database filters by group before any passage is fetched
Write the answer
From the permitted passages only
Cite the sources
Links to documents the person can already open
The filter is part of the database query that finds the relevant passages (for your IT team: the permission check is a join inside the same SQL statement). Documents the person may not see are never fetched, so there is nothing in front of the AI for a clever question to reach.
AskBase, our knowledge engine, works this way and is available now. Every answer also reports how many matches the asker’s permissions removed.
How the AI says no
A careless refusal does more damage than no AI at all.
"I don't know." This suggests the information does not exist. The person leaves with a false picture of what the firm knows, and may stop trusting the tool or assume the documentation is missing.
"I can't answer that from the documents you have access to. Someone with the right access can help." This is honest about the boundary, suggests the information exists, and tells the person what to do next.
AskBase keeps the cases apart: an answer, nothing relevant found, an empty knowledge base and a permission refusal each get their own response, and when it finds nothing it says what it searched.
One question, four people
Why it matters to the business
Privacy law and audit standards such as GDPR and SOC 2 expect you to show who can see personal and sensitive data. An AI that answers questions is one more way to see it, and needs the same control, documented and tested. If an employee reads salary data or client pricing through an AI tool without authorization, the liability is yours.
Without permission-aware search, an AI tool over company documents has two settings: locked down to what everyone may see, which is safe and of little use, or open to everything, which is useful and dangerous. Filtering at search time is what lets it be both safe and useful.
Which of your documents should only some of your people see?
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