Your Teams channels are a knowledge graveyard
Every HR, IT, and project channel runs the same loop: someone asks a question that's already answered in a policy doc somewhere; a senior person types out the answer (or links to a SharePoint file half the team can't navigate); the question gets asked again a week later by someone who didn't scroll back far enough.
McKinsey's number is nine hours a week per knowledge worker lost to searching. The version inside Teams is more pointed: the answer exists, your team can't find it, and the cost lands on whoever's most senior in the channel.
What AnswerVault changes
Mention @AnswerVault in any channel, chat, or thread. The bot retrieves a grounded answer from documents you've approved, posts it inline with a citation back to the source, and logs the query against your tenant's audit trail. The person who asked doesn't leave Teams. The person who'd usually answer doesn't get pinged.
Three things differentiate the output from what Copilot gives you today:
- Scoped to approved sources. Answers come from a curated knowledge base of current policies and SOPs, not everything a user can see across the tenant.
- Cross-ecosystem. Documents in Google Drive and Confluence are first-class alongside SharePoint, indexed at equal depth.
- External-reach ready. The same knowledge layer can be exposed to contractors and partners without an M365 licence. Copilot can't do that.
Where it shows up in your tenant
HR and People Ops channels
"How much notice for parental leave?" "What's the bereavement policy?" "Can I work from another country for two weeks?" These are the highest-volume, lowest-strategic-value questions in your HR inbox. AnswerVault answers them in the channel where they're asked, cites the version of the handbook in force today, and disappears when there isn't a confident answer instead of guessing.
IT helpdesk
"How do I connect to the VPN?" "What's the password reset process?" "Is there a known issue with the printers in Bracknell?" Deflect L1 questions before they become tickets. The IT team writes the answer once, in the documentation it already maintains. AnswerVault surfaces it.
Project channels
"What did we decide about the pricing change?" "Where's the latest spec for the integration?" "What were the risks called out at last week's steering?" Meeting notes, design docs, and decision logs become queryable from inside the channel the project is actually run from.
Customer-facing teams
"What's our SLA for enterprise customers?" "What's the workaround for the sync issue?" Get the right answer while you're on the call, not after. Bonus: every query is audit-logged, so you have a record of what the support team consulted before a customer escalation.
Why not Copilot
Microsoft Copilot is a productivity assistant; AnswerVault is a governed knowledge layer. They're different categories, and most organisations running Copilot still need somewhere to get a trustworthy answer from an approved policy. Three structural differences:
- Copilot can't restrict to approved documents. It searches everything a user has permission to see, including superseded drafts, personal OneDrive, and abandoned SharePoint sites. For a compliance question, that's the wrong shape of answer.
- Copilot can't extend to people without an M365 licence. Contractors, partners, auditors, and citizens can't get answers from your documentation without you assigning a paid seat or sending PDFs by email.
- Copilot treats non-Microsoft sources as second class. Google Drive and Confluence go through connectors with lower indexing depth and slower freshness.
The full breakdown is on the Copilot comparison page.
The governance layer
For regulated organisations, the question "where did that answer come from?" is not rhetorical.
- Curated knowledge bases. You pick which SharePoint sites, Drive folders, and Confluence spaces feed AnswerVault. Nothing else can surface.
- Source citation on every answer. The reply includes a link to the document and (where available) the section. Verifiable, auditable.
- Audit trail. Every question and answer is logged at tenant level. Useful when an auditor asks "how does your team access the current procedures?"
- Admin-scoped. The tenant admin chooses the SharePoint sites, Drive folders, and Confluence spaces that feed AnswerVault. Everything they connect is queryable by everyone in the tenant, nothing outside is.
- EU/UK hosted, with a non-US sovereign tier for organisations needing to resolve CLOUD Act exposure.
Available on Pro and above
Teams is included on Pro (£7/user/month), Business (£14/user/month with data residency and SSO), and Enterprise. See the pricing page for the full breakdown, or get started on the free Starter tier first and add Teams when you upgrade.