The assistant that reads your files for you

Two very different things wearing the same word

There is the chat window, where you decide what to paste. And there is the assistant built into your office suite, which reads your files, your mail and your calendar on your behalf.

They feel similar and they are governed completely differently. The chat window's scope is whatever you chose to send. The in-suite assistant's scope is everything your account can open, which is not the same as everything you know about.

It inherits your permissions, not your intentions

This is the sentence to remember, and it is the source of nearly every uncomfortable surprise during a rollout.

In most organisations, far more material is technically accessible to each person than anyone believes. A folder shared "with everyone in the company" in 2019. A document link set to "anyone with the link" for one external review and never changed. A departmental drive that inherited open permissions when it was migrated. A budget planning file left in a shared area over a weekend.

Before the assistant, these were protected by obscurity. Nobody browsed them because nobody knew they were there, and the file names gave nothing away.

An assistant that searches by meaning across everything you may access removes the obscurity in one step. Ask "what are the salary bands for a senior analyst" and it may answer — correctly, with a citation — from a planning spreadsheet you were always permitted to open and would never have found.

Nothing has been breached. The permissions were always wrong. What changed is that the wrongness became reachable by asking a question in ordinary English.

What to do when it happens to you

You will, at some point, receive an answer you should not have seen. The right response is short:

1. Stop reading. Do not open the source document to see what else is in it.
2. Note the file and where it was found.
3. Tell whoever owns it, and your IT or information governance contact. Frame it as a permissions finding, because that is what it is.

This is worth agreeing as a team norm before an assistant is switched on rather than after, so that the first person it happens to knows what to do and is thanked rather than investigated.

If you are the person deciding whether to switch it on, the access review comes first. Reviewing sharing settings across a document estate is dull, and it is the whole of the work.

What it cannot see

The other half is equally important, because "the assistant did not find it" is not evidence of absence.

Typically outside its view: systems without a connector, files in personal drives, material in a colleague's mailbox, older archives that were never indexed, attachments in formats the indexer skipped, and anything scanned as an image without a text layer.

So a search that finds nothing tells you about the index, not about the organisation. This matters most for the questions where absence is the answer — "have we ever agreed to this before?" — which is exactly where people are most tempted to trust it.

Insist on the link

An in-suite assistant should give you the document and the passage, not a paragraph of confident synthesis. Where it offers a citation, click it. Where it does not, ask:

Which file did that come from, and quote the sentence. If more than one file contributed, list each with its own quote.

Two things follow. You find out whether the answer came from a current document or a 2019 draft with a similar title — the commonest real error, and one no amount of writing quality reveals. And you discover when the answer came from general training knowledge rather than your files, which happens more often than the interface implies.

Why IT prefers it anyway

Despite all of the above, an in-suite assistant is usually the option your information governance people will accept, and their reasoning is sound. It typically runs under the organisation's existing contract, inside the same data-processing terms as the documents themselves, with no separate transfer to a consumer service and no training on your content. Compared with thirty employees pasting client material into personal accounts, it is a large improvement in a real risk.

The trade is quality: in-suite assistants often run a smaller or cheaper model than the flagship chat product, and they are noticeably weaker on hard reasoning. You are buying governance with capability, deliberately.

If you have no suite

Plenty of readers work somewhere without a corporate licence — a clinic, a school, a two-person firm, a locked-down network.

The free path exists and is covered properly in the last lesson of this block: LibreOffice for the documents, a local model through Ollama for the assistance, and local indexing for the search. It is more work to set up, it runs on hardware you already own, and nothing leaves the building — which for some of this readership is not a compromise but the requirement.