How Ask stays grounded in your SOPs, with citations

Ask answers questions like “How do we issue a refund?” from your own SOPs. It is designed to answer only from what your company has written down, and to say so when it hasn’t.

How an answer is made

1. Search, as you. Ask runs your question through the workspace’s Postgres full text search with your own sign-in, so row-level security limits the results to SOPs you can open, including libraries shared into the workspace. If the exact wording finds nothing, it retries with the question’s individual words.
2. Pick the best eight. Up to eight of the highest ranked SOPs are numbered 1 to 8. Very long SOPs are cut at 14,000 characters so one SOP can’t crowd out the rest.
3. Answer from those only. The numbered SOPs and your question go to Claude with instructions to ground every claim in them, cite the SOP each claim came from with a bracketed number like [2], and never cite a number it wasn’t given.
4. Report coverage. Claude also states whether the SOPs covered the question fully, partly or not at all. That judgment is used for Insights and removed before you see the answer.

What Ask does when it doesn’t know

• Nothing matched: Ask doesn’t call the AI at all. It replies that nothing in the workspace’s SOPs matches and suggests different words, or checking whether the topic has been written up.
• The SOPs don’t cover it: Ask says so plainly and names the closest topic that is documented. It is told not to fill the gap from general knowledge.
• Partly covered: Ask answers the parts your SOPs cover and says which parts aren’t documented, rather than refusing the whole question.
• SOPs disagree: Ask says they contradict each other and names both.
• The AI declines: you see a message asking you to rephrase or open the SOPs directly.

Reading the citations

Each bracketed number links to the SOP it came from. Open it before acting on anything important. Citations show where a claim came from, but the AI can still summarize a step imperfectly. See Accuracy limits and human review.

Unanswered questions become your backlog

Every question is logged with whether it was answered. Questions Ask couldn’t answer show up in Insights (Business plan), so editors can see which processes people are looking for that haven’t been written up yet.

Note: The question log keeps the text of each question, without the name of who asked it, and members of the workspace can read it. Don’t put anything in a question that you wouldn’t want your workspace to see.

Your Ask history

Each answer is saved to your own history, so you can reopen it without asking again. Your history is visible only to you, keeps your newest 200 answers per workspace, can be deleted by you, and is removed if you leave the workspace.

What Ask is not

• It doesn’t search the web.
• It doesn’t use embeddings or a vector database.
• It doesn’t remember earlier questions. Each question is answered on its own.
• It doesn’t write or change SOPs. To write or improve one, use Build with AI.