Answering questions over internal documents
Answers must be grounded in access-controlled internal sources. Expected disposition: Proceed with controls.
Task boundary
Answering questions over internal documents is assessed as a specific task and workflow, not as a general endorsement of AI for the surrounding job. Answers must be grounded in access-controlled internal sources.
Assumptions
- The corpus has document-level access controls and an authoritative current version for each policy.
- Users are allowed to see both the answer and every cited passage.
- The system can abstain and route questions when retrieval is incomplete or conflicting.
Decision
- Disposition: Proceed with controls
- Pattern: Retrieval-grounded workflow
- Inherent risk: high
Rules that drive the decision
- Private corpus access requires an approved environment and permission-aware retrieval.
- Material answers need passage-level traceability; model memory is not an acceptable source.
Why alternatives were rejected
- A direct prompt lacks the corpus.
- Broad retrieval can leak restricted documents.
Controls
- Apply the requesting user’s permissions before retrieval, generation, logging, and citation display.
- Show document title, version, passage, and observation date for each material answer.
- Abstain on insufficient, conflicting, or superseded evidence.
Acceptance threshold
These are example starting thresholds for a bounded pilot of this workflow, not universal benchmarks. For answering questions over internal documents, the accountable owner should make them stricter when the task, consequence, or policy requires it.
- Unauthorized documents are absent from retrieval, output, citations, logs, and timing-based test observations.
- Every answer in the evaluation set is supported by an accessible current passage; unsupported questions abstain.
Reassess when
- Corpus permissions, document versioning, logging, or connected tools change.
- Answers begin initiating personnel, legal, financial, or operational decisions.