Most AI tools ask you to trust them with your data. Answergrove by KSJ starts from the opposite premise: your documents stay in your Microsoft 365 tenant, your queries are processed in your Azure environment, and nothing leaves your control. The Answergrove private AI agent is not a SaaS product, not a cloud service, not a subscription. It’s built into the infrastructure you already operate.
The Problem Answergrove Solves
Generic AI tools — including Microsoft 365 Copilot — are built for breadth. They can summarise any email, draft any document, and answer general questions. What they can’t do reliably is answer specific questions about your specific documents with the accuracy and privacy that regulated industries require. See how Microsoft Copilot compares to a private AI agent for SharePoint document retrieval.
Consider the gap:
- A project manager asks: “What does our contract with Bergsen say about payment terms for variations?” Generic AI gives a general answer about variation clauses. Answergrove retrieves the exact clause from the exact contract, cites the source, and links to the document.
- A finance manager asks: “Which supplier invoices this month exceed the contracted framework rate?” Generic AI can’t answer this at all. Answergrove queries your SharePoint invoice library against your contract data and returns a list.
- A compliance officer asks: “Which of our agreements are subject to GDPR data transfer restrictions?” Generic AI gives general GDPR guidance. Answergrove searches the actual agreement text across your full contract archive.
The difference is not intelligence — it’s grounding. Answergrove’s answers are grounded in your documents, not in general knowledge.
What the Answergrove Private AI Agent Is — Technically
The Answergrove private AI agent is deployed inside your Microsoft 365 tenant and your Azure subscription — here’s how to deploy a private AI agent in your Microsoft 365 tenant. It has three components:
Document intelligence layer
Your documents (contracts, invoices, drawings, policies, procedures) are indexed using Azure AI Search — a vector embedding index that lives in your Azure subscription. The documents themselves stay in SharePoint; the index is a semantic representation that enables meaning-based retrieval. No document text leaves your environment.
AI reasoning layer
When a user submits a query, Azure OpenAI Service (running in your Azure subscription, in your chosen region) processes the query and retrieves relevant passages from the index. The model is hosted by Microsoft in Azure — not by us, not by a third party — under your Azure subscription agreement and data processing terms.
Interface layer
Users interact with Answergrove through a Microsoft Teams chat interface or a custom SharePoint page. No new application, no new login, no VPN. The interface respects existing SharePoint permissions — users see answers only from documents they already have access to.
Privacy by architecture, not by policy: Answergrove doesn’t send your documents to a third-party AI service and promise to protect them. It processes your documents on infrastructure you own and operate. Microsoft sees the compute usage in your Azure subscription, just as they see any other Azure workload — not the document contents.
What Answergrove Can Do
Semantic document search
Find any clause, provision, or fact across hundreds of documents in seconds — without knowing the exact words. “Payment terms for variations” finds the clause even if it’s phrased as “valuation of architect’s instructions.”
Cited answers
Every answer includes the source document and the specific passage. Not “the contract says something like this” — but “Contract ref. BERGSEN-2024-03, Section 12.4.”
Cross-document queries
Compare terms across multiple contracts, find all documents meeting a condition, or identify discrepancies between what was agreed and what was invoiced.
Workflow integration
Surface relevant contract terms during invoice approval, display project-specific policies in Teams channels, or trigger alerts when a document clause condition is met.
Permission-aware results
Users only see answers from documents they have SharePoint access to. No new permission model to maintain — Answergrove inherits your existing SharePoint security.
Multilingual documents
Answergrove handles documents in English, Latvian, Norwegian, Swedish, and other European languages — relevant for Nordic multi-site operations.
Who Answergrove Is For
Answergrove fits organisations with three characteristics:
- Document-heavy operations. The value scales with the volume and complexity of your document archive. 50 contracts is useful; 500 contracts is transformational. Answergrove is most impactful where finding specific information manually takes meaningful time.
- Data sensitivity requirements. If your contracts, financial records, or operational documents can’t leave your controlled environment — either for regulatory, contractual, or competitive reasons — Answergrove’s architecture is the right fit.
- Microsoft 365 as the document backbone. Answergrove works with documents stored in SharePoint, Teams file libraries, and OneDrive for Business. If you already use Microsoft 365 as your document store, the integration is direct.
Industries where we’ve deployed Answergrove or have active interest: construction (our verified five-year case), professional services, Nordic public sector, financial services, and manufacturing. Multi-site builders can read more about a private AI agent for construction.
How Answergrove Differs from Microsoft 365 Copilot
Copilot is a broad productivity tool — email drafting, meeting summaries, general document questions. Answergrove is a deep document intelligence tool — specific retrieval, cited answers, custom workflows, in-tenant processing. The two can coexist: some organisations use Copilot for general productivity and Answergrove for document intelligence. Others find Answergrove covers both needs at lower total cost for their use case.
For the detailed comparison: Answergrove vs Microsoft 365 Copilot.
How Answergrove Is Deployed
The Answergrove private AI agent is not a product you install from an app store. It’s a custom build, configured for your document types, your SharePoint structure, your workflows, and your approval chains. Every deployment starts with our Audit & Roadmap engagement (from €1,500) — a fixed-scope exercise that maps your document landscape and designs the implementation.
Typical deployment timeline: 6–10 weeks from audit to live agent in your tenant. Build cost: €4,950–€19,950 depending on document archive size, integration requirements, and workflow automation scope.
There is no recurring per-seat fee. Answergrove runs in your Azure subscription — you pay Azure compute costs (typically €80–€250/month for standard usage) and optionally a maintenance retainer. You own the configuration.
What Microsoft 365 license is required?
Any Microsoft 365 Business or Enterprise plan that includes SharePoint is sufficient. Answergrove does not require a Copilot license. An Azure subscription (separate from M365) is needed for the AI processing components — Azure OpenAI Service and Azure AI Search.
Is Answergrove a Microsoft product?
No. Answergrove is built by SIA KSJ using Microsoft’s Azure AI and SharePoint infrastructure. The AI models (Azure OpenAI) and search infrastructure (Azure AI Search) are Microsoft services running in your subscription — Answergrove is the configuration, integration, and custom application layer built on top of them.
Can Answergrove search across Teams conversations, not just documents?
Yes, with a compliance license (Microsoft 365 E5 or E5 Compliance add-on). Teams message content can be indexed alongside documents. Most Answergrove deployments focus on documents first (higher value density per token indexed) and add Teams conversation search as a later phase.
What’s the difference between Answergrove and Azure OpenAI “on your data”?
Azure OpenAI “on your data” is Microsoft’s native feature for connecting OpenAI models to your data. Answergrove uses this as one of its underlying components but adds SharePoint permission inheritance, multi-document workflow triggers, integration with Power Automate approval flows, and custom UI configuration. Answergrove is the production-ready application layer; Azure OpenAI on your data is an infrastructure building block.
Want to see what Answergrove would look like for your documents?
Tell us your document types, volume, and primary use case. We’ll design the right architecture and quote a fixed build.
Book a 30-min call → See pricing