Use cases/Financial services/Document search
AI document search for Australian businesses
The problem is not storage. You already hold every document. The problem is that finding the one that answers the question needs a person who was there at the time, and that person is in a meeting or has left.
Talk to our team →- Supports
- Records clerk
- Reads
- PDFs, Scans, Email archives, Shared drives, SharePoint
- Runs on
- Your servers, on premises
- Connects to
- SharePoint, Microsoft Copilot, Procore, Google Drive
- Decides
- A person, every time
Architecture
Everything runs on your servers
AI document search means every document converted to machine readable text and indexed on your own servers, so staff ask a question in plain English and get an answer that cites the document behind it. It is not a document management system and it does not replace the one you have.
- SourcesPDFs / Scans / Email archives / Shared drives / SharePoint
- Your serversExtract text by page → Index with permissions → Answer with citation
- ReviewRecords clerk
- OutputQuestions in plain English / Every answer cites its source / Scanned and handwritten material / On your own servers
It takes four jobs off the records clerk
- 01
Questions in plain English
Someone asks what the scope said about temporary works on a job from 2022 and gets the answer, rather than a list of files to open and read.
- 02
Every answer cites its source
The answer names the document behind it. A person can check it, which is what makes it usable for a decision rather than a guess with good grammar.
- 03
Scanned and handwritten material
Site diaries, marked up drawings and photographed dockets. This is harder than office PDFs and we scope it as its own piece of work rather than assuming it.
- 04
On your own servers
A private model inside your environment. Where the work involves commercial terms or personal information, no document leaves the business.
It goes live in five steps
- Step 01
Audit what you actually hold
Where the documents live, how much is scanned rather than typed, and how much is superseded. What is out of date gets resolved before it is indexed, or the system answers confidently from a document nobody should be using.
- Step 02
Make it machine readable
Text extraction across the archive, with scanned drawings, site photos and handwriting treated as their own problem, because they are.
- Step 03
Index in place
Against the systems you already run. Migrations are their own project and folding one into this is how these programs die.
- Step 04
Match permissions to what people already have
A person sees through search exactly what they could see directly. IBM reported in July 2025 that 97 percent of organisations with an AI related breach lacked proper access controls.
- Step 05
Name an owner for each area
Every knowledge domain gets one named person rather than a committee. Without that the index goes stale and people stop trusting it.
Software or a custom build
If your files are already clean, current and inside SharePoint or Procore, then Microsoft Copilot or the search you already pay for may be enough, and we will say so in discovery. A build earns its cost when the material is scattered, scanned or old, when every answer has to cite its source, or when the documents cannot leave your environment.
SharePoint / Microsoft Copilot / Procore / Google Drive / Glean / Confluence
In practice
A Sydney construction business had about 10,000 job PDFs that nobody could search. They can now ask why a supplier was chosen over another on a past job, and the answer comes with the quotes and the email thread that decided it, from a private model on a private server they rent. Ten staff use it, and an answer that took hours of digging now takes seconds.
Grounding is what separates this from a chatbot. Stanford researchers reported in January 2024 that general purpose models answering legal questions without retrieval produced incorrect information on a majority of queries. An answer that names its document can be checked. One that cannot is a guess.
Where the documents sit matters under Australian privacy law. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner issued guidance in October 2024 on privacy and commercially available AI products. Hosting in Australia and processing in Australia are different claims, and vendors are not always careful about the difference.
Answering the same question for a customer rather than a colleague is the same build. Tracking, delivery and document requests get answered from your own systems, with a person approving what goes out.
Questions
What is AI document search?
AI document search means the documents your business already holds made machine readable and indexed, so staff ask a question in plain English and get an answer that cites the document it came from. It runs on your own servers with a private model.
Is this a document management system?
No. We index in place against the systems you already run, whether that is Procore, SharePoint or a shared drive. Nothing is replaced and nothing is migrated. Migrations are their own project and bundling one into this is how these programs die.
Can it read scanned drawings and handwriting?
Often, but not as reliably as a typed PDF, and we scope it separately rather than assuming it. Site diaries, marked up drawings and photographed dockets need more preparation than office documents, and we tell you which parts of the archive are difficult.
How accurate is it?
We do not publish an accuracy figure for our own systems, because we have not measured one we would stand behind. What we do instead is cite the source on every answer, so a person can check it rather than trust it. Treat a single accuracy number quoted without a method with caution.
Who can see what?
A person sees through search exactly what they could see directly. Permissions mirror the access they already have. This gets designed explicitly rather than assumed, because weak access control is the most common way these systems leak. We map it against the groups you already have.
Industries where this comes up
Banking / Insurance / Asset and wealth management / Audit / Construction / Logistics / Manufacturing / Wholesale
More financial services use cases
Estimating / Quoting / Procurement / Ordering / Tendering / Payables / Billing and receivables / Credit file assembly / AML alert triage / Claims triage / Month-end close / Audit evidence matching / Advice file drafting / Lease abstraction / KYC and onboarding / Complaints handling / Regulatory reporting / Underwriting submissions / Board and management reporting
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