Ask AI FAQ
Answers to common setup and operating questions about Ask AI.
For what the app is and how to set it up from scratch, see the
Ask AI Overview.
Setup
Do I need to do anything beyond enabling Ask AI before employees can use it?
No. Once you enable Ask AI from Admin → App Marketplace and your organisation is on the Standard platform tier or above, employees see the chat sidebar immediately. The default settings — action execution on, voice on, shared knowledge on — are ready to use. You can refine settings and Agent Guidelines at any time, but nothing else blocks employees from asking their first question.
Who can manage Agent Guidelines, Verified Knowledge, and the other admin tabs?
The Settings tab is open to admins and Ask AI app admins. Every other admin tab — Agent Guidelines, Verified Knowledge, Knowledge Map, Test Suite, Analytics, and Data Requests — requires the full admin role (admin or above). App admins cannot reach those tabs, by design: the Settings page is the only surface the app-admin grant controls.
Permissions and access
Why can some employees not see Ask AI?
Three things to check. First, the app must be enabled for the organisation (Admin → App Marketplace → Ask AI). Second, if you have restricted the app’s audience to a specific group in the App Marketplace audience settings, only members of that group will see the Ask AI entry point — everyone else is redirected. Third, Ask AI requires the Standard platform tier; it will not load on Lite.
Who can create and edit prompts in the Prompt Library?
Any employee can browse the Prompt Library and use an existing prompt. Only admins (admin or above) can create, edit, delete, or save tenant-private prompts.
Day-to-day
Where does Ask AI pull its answers from?
Ask AI draws on four layers. First, shared company knowledge — Knowledge Base, HR Policies, SOPs, Sites, Wikis, and Drive — each of which you can toggle on or off individually from Agent Guidelines → AI Features. Second, Verified Knowledge entries that admins have approved. Third, live data pulled from connected apps through agent tools (schedules, leave balances, tickets, etc.). Fourth, the files an employee attaches to a message. Optionally, you can include platform help-centre articles by turning on Include Platform Help Articles in Answers in the Settings page.
How does agent routing work, and can employees force it?
Each question is classified and routed to whichever specialist agent owns that domain. There are over 100 built-in domain agents, and each one is gated by the same licence and audience rules as its parent app. If a question spans two areas, the first agent hands the remainder to another mid-conversation. Employees can also force routing by @mentioning an agent inline (e.g. @hr, @scheduling).
What happens when I approve a Verified Knowledge entry?
The entry moves from the Pending tab to the Active tab and immediately becomes part of the retrieval corpus. Future answers can cite it. You can also edit the entry before approving. To remove it later, retire it — it moves to the Retired tab and stops influencing answers.
How do Journeys work and who controls them?
Journeys track multi-step goals (onboarding a hire, migrating a policy) across sessions. Each employee can have up to 3 active journeys at a time, each with up to 12 steps. The assistant updates progress during conversation, and the employee can override any step from their My Journeys page. Journeys are toggled from Agent Guidelines → AI Features: the Journeys toggle controls whether goals are tracked at all, and Journey inference controls whether the assistant infers progress from conversation context. Both are on by default.
Voice
What are the voice limits?
Each voice session is capped at 15 minutes. The per-user daily limit defaults to 30 minutes and is configurable from the Ask AI Settings page; setting it to 0 removes the daily cap entirely. When an employee hits the daily limit, the voice button is disabled until the next day.
Which voices are available?
Ask AI supports 13 voices: Marin (default), Cedar, Alloy, Ash, Ballad, Coral, Echo, Sage, Shimmer, Verse, Fable, Nova, and Onyx. Marin and Cedar are the newest and recommended for best quality. The admin chooses one voice for the whole organisation from the Settings page, where an in-settings preview lets you hear each voice before selecting it.
Attachments
What files can I attach to a question, and what are the limits?
Employees can attach up to 3 files per message, each up to 8 MB. Accepted types: images (PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF), PDFs, Word documents (.doc, .docx), Excel spreadsheets (.xls, .xlsx), CSV, and plain text files. Images are analysed with vision. PDFs are read via text extraction, up to 100 pages; scanned image-only PDFs may have no extractable text and will return a note saying so.
“I attached a Word file but the AI didn’t seem to read it — why?”
In the main Ask AI composer, Word, Excel, and CSV files are accepted and uploaded, but the AI extracts their text only for PDFs and images. The file’s existence is noted to the model, so it knows the attachment is there, but the contents are not parsed into the prompt. For best results when asking about a spreadsheet or document, export it as a PDF first.
When something looks wrong
“Ask AI isn’t answering — it just redirects me”
This means the app is not enabled for your organisation. Go to Admin → App Marketplace → Ask AI and enable it. Also confirm the organisation is on the Standard platform tier (not Lite).
“The AI said it can’t help and offered to open a ticket — what does that mean?”
When the assistant detects that it cannot confidently answer — a capability refusal, an apology answer, or an empty result — it offers a Get human help button. Clicking it files a Service Desk ticket carrying the question, the AI’s answer, and the turn reference, so the person picking it up has full context. This button only appears if the Service Desk app is both enabled for the organisation and accessible to that specific employee; if the employee’s audience rules exclude them from Service Desk, the button is not shown.
“My employees say they can’t clear their conversation”
Check whether Allow users to clear their conversation is turned on in the Ask AI Settings page (it is on by default). When this is off, the Clear conversation and Reset AI completely controls are hidden on every surface — web, mobile, and API — and the server returns a “disabled by your administrator” message if the endpoint is called directly. Clearing is a view-level action (the governance record is retained for the retention period), so this toggle controls a UX affordance, not data retention.
Conversation retention and data
How long are conversations kept?
The default is 24 months. An admin can change this from the Settings page; the allowed range is 1–36 months. Conversations older than the configured period are permanently deleted by a nightly sweep. Shortening the retention period removes history immediately on the next sweep and cannot be undone. Diagnostic flow logs are kept separately for 180 days or the tenant’s retention period, whichever is shorter.
How do I handle a GDPR data-subject request for Ask AI data?
Go to Apps → Ask AI → Admin → Data Requests (admin-only). Select the employee and choose one of three actions: Export downloads their full Ask AI record as JSON (Article 15/20), Redact replaces conversation content with a placeholder while keeping the metadata skeleton (when, which agent, which tools), or Erase permanently deletes all Ask AI data for that person (Article 17). Erasure is irreversible. Each action is scoped to the current tenant — a user with memberships in multiple organisations requires each tenant to process the request separately.
Licensing and limits
Does Ask AI require a licence?
Yes. Ask AI requires a licence and the Standard platform tier or above. An admin enables it from Admin → App Marketplace. Access can be further restricted to specific groups through the app’s audience settings.
What are the hard limits I should know about?
| What | Limit |
|---|---|
| Files per message | 3 |
| File size (composer upload) | 8 MB |
| PDF page extraction | 100 pages |
| Voice session length | 15 minutes |
| Voice daily limit (default) | 30 minutes per user (0 = unlimited) |
| Active journeys per user | 3 |
| Steps per journey | 12 |
| Conversation retention | 1–36 months (default 24) |
| Diagnostic flow-log retention | 180 days or tenant retention, whichever is shorter |
More help
- Ask AI Overview
- Ask AI — What It Can Do and How to Govern It
- Ask AI — the assistant answers Ask AI questions from these articles.