Sharing knowledge outside the tenant is the un-solved problem
Almost every enterprise tool assumes everyone who needs the answer is on payroll. Microsoft Copilot needs an M365 licence per user. Google's tools need a Workspace seat. SharePoint guest access exposes the entire tenant. Glean and Guru don't try.
But organisations routinely need to share knowledge with people outside the tenant: contractors running a delivery, channel partners selling the product, auditors checking compliance, regulators reviewing process, and, for public sector, citizens accessing published guidance. The default workarounds are: email PDFs, share a SharePoint link and hope the permissions don't leak, or just answer every question manually.
What the workarounds cost
- Drift. The PDF you emailed last quarter is two versions out of date. The recipient is acting on stale information; you don't know.
- Leak risk. SharePoint guest access is a per-document setup that goes wrong easily. Wrong folder, wrong link, wrong group, and your contractor sees the board minutes.
- Licence overhead. M365 licences for guests run from £6 to £24 per user per month depending on tier, just to give them read access to a handful of docs.
- Hidden internal cost. The team that owns the documentation ends up acting as a help desk for external stakeholders. Same questions, by email, week after week.
How AnswerVault changes the loop
AnswerVault lets you create a curated knowledge base from your documents and give external users access to query it through a web interface. They see only what you've chosen to include. They don't need a Microsoft licence, a Google Workspace seat, or any access to your tenant. You scope the knowledge base; they ask questions; the answers come back grounded, cited, and audit-logged.
Where this gets piloted today
Contractor and delivery-partner onboarding
Give your delivery partners access to project documentation, SOPs, brand guidelines, technical standards, and integration specs. They can ask "what's the deployment procedure?" or "where's the change-management process?" without you assigning a paid seat or sending PDFs. When the procedure changes, the next query returns the new version, no email blast needed.
Channel-partner enablement
Channel partners need product documentation, pricing tiers, integration specs, and case studies. They don't need access to your Confluence; they need answers from the subset of content that's intended for them. AnswerVault scopes the knowledge base to "partner-facing content" and they query that subset through a branded web interface.
Regulatory and audit support
When an auditor or regulator wants to verify compliance, they typically get a stack of PDFs and a meeting. With AnswerVault, you can give them temporary access to a queryable interface to the compliance documentation, policies, and governance records. They ask questions, they get cited answers, every query is logged. Faster cycle, less back-and-forth, demonstrable traceability.
Citizen and public-sector access
Public-sector organisations can offer citizens AI-powered access to published guidance, policy documents, and service information. Scoped to the materials the organisation publishes, hosted on UK or EU sovereign infrastructure, audit-logged at the query level.
Why this matters for regulated organisations
- Governed, not open. You choose exactly which documents are queryable. External users can't see beyond what you've curated. There is no implicit "and everything else in the tenant" tail.
- Audit trail. Every query and access event is logged. You know who asked what and when. Useful for compliance reviews, NDAs that require usage records, and post-engagement audits.
- No tenant exposure. External users never touch your Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, or Confluence tenant. There's no guest-access setup, no permission inheritance accident, no way for the wrong document to surface.
- Data sovereignty. All processing happens on EU/UK infrastructure by default. Enterprise sovereign tier deploys on non-US infrastructure for organisations resolving CLOUD Act exposure. External access doesn't change the data residency posture.
- Cost-effective. No per-user licence fees for external users. Copilot would require a full M365 licence per external party; AnswerVault doesn't.
- Branding and scope are configurable. The external surface can be branded as yours, scoped to the knowledge bases relevant to each external audience, and time-bounded if needed.
Who's asking for this today
- Pharma and life-sciences, sharing SOPs with CROs running trials and contract manufacturers without giving them tenant access.
- Legal firms, giving clients self-serve access to a curated knowledge base of policy clarifications and standard precedent.
- Engineering and construction, partner enablement for delivery teams and subcontractors on standards, processes, and safety procedures.
- Public sector, citizen access to published guidance with audit trails for FOI and regulatory reporting.
- Financial services, audit and regulatory support for the compliance documentation set, with logged queries demonstrating procedural access.
This is the use case Copilot, Glean, and Guru structurally can't address. If it's on your roadmap, the conversation usually starts with the sovereignty and licensing constraints, not the AI features. Talk to us and we'll scope what's possible.