Private AI · a service from Understood Solutions
AI that only knows your business.
An assistant for your organisation, under your name, that answers only from your own material and tells you where every answer came from. Hosted under EU law. Never used to train anyone's model.
How should my name be written on the trust documents?
The programme's naming convention gives the given names first, hyphenated where there is more than one, then a colon, then the family name. Written that way, yours is: Walter: Test Member. Check it before you use it.
What it is
Your people ask questions in plain English and get answers drawn from your documents, your procedures and their own notes. Nothing else. If your material does not say it, the assistant says so, instead of guessing.
Every answer names the documents it read. It can also make a Word file, a PDF or a spreadsheet from what it found, in seconds.
It carries your name and your look, not ours. One members' association calls theirs The Oracle.
How it works
- 01Your material goes in.Your Google Drive shared drives, a shared folder, a knowledge base, a members' library. You choose what it may read. Nothing is copied anywhere else.
- 02Each person gets a login.Their own questions, their own notes, their own private space. Nobody sees anyone else's.
- 03They ask, it answers, it cites.Sources listed under every answer: your documents on one side, their notes on the other.
Only your sources. Nothing invented.
The one rule the whole system is built around: your organisation's material, and each person's own notes if you want them. Never the model's own ideas. It is tested every night: questions with known answers are put to it, and anything made up fails the test.
Against ChatGPT or Claude
| ChatGPT / Claude | Your Private AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Answers from | The whole internet, plus your file if you remember to attach it | Your material only |
| When it does not know | Produces something plausible | Says the material does not state it |
| Shows its sources | Sometimes, loosely | Every answer, by document name |
| Where your data goes | A US company's servers, under US law | One server in the EU that you can point at |
| Used to train models | Depends on plan and settings | Never |
| Who controls it | They change the model, the rules and the price at will | You. Nothing changes unless you ask |
| Cost for 25 people | About £500 a month in seats | About half that, all in |
Set-up
from £2,500one-off
Your material in, your people set up, your rules written down. About two weeks from first conversation to first login.
Running
£12 to £20a person a month
Minimum ten people. Covers the server, the computing, nightly checks, backups and a reply to any problem by the next working day.
Your side
One personan hour a month
Someone who can add and remove people and tell us when material changes. No technical skill needed.
Now with Google Drive
Plug it into your Google Workspace. Ask your Drive anything.
Point it at your shared drives and it reads them: Docs, Sheets, Slides, PDFs, Word files. Your people sign in with Google, pick a drive, and ask. Every answer comes from that drive's files and names the file it came from.
The clever bit is who sees what. It reads your Drive sharing and your Google Groups, so a person only ever gets answers from files they could already open. Finance stays in finance. Change a permission in Google and it follows within the hour. Change a file and so does the answer.
- Read-only. It never writes to your Drive, never moves a file, never touches the bin.
- Nothing to install. No plugin, no app, no new passwords. A browser and a Google login.
- Your Google, your keys. Runs inside your own Google Cloud project. Nothing goes to a US AI company.
- Microsoft 365 next. SharePoint and OneDrive on the same footing.
Who it suits
- Professional practices with procedures, precedents and client files that must not leave the building.
- Membership organisations with a body of teaching, recordings and transcripts that members keep asking about.
- Small firms with a handbook nobody reads and a founder everybody asks.
- Anyone told by their insurer, regulator or clients not to put confidential material into public AI tools.
What it is not
It is not a general chatbot. Ask it about the weather and it will tell you that is not in your material. That is the point.
It is not a place your documents live. They stay where they are. The assistant reads them; it does not keep them.
It does not replace judgement. It finds, quotes and drafts, faster than a person can, and shows its working so a person can check.
See it working on your own material.
Drop me an email, or book a 20-minute call: your documents, your questions.
stewart.bennett@understood.co.uk