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Ask ahead: answers from your own content

Ask ahead is the AI agent that answers your employees' questions using your own intranet content and documents, with links to the sources.

What is Ask ahead?

Ask ahead is the AI agent that answers your people's questions using your own content. Employees type a question in plain language and get a short, direct answer, built from the news, pages and documents you've chosen, with links to the sources so they can check the details.

Instead of searching through policies, handbooks and long pages, your people just ask: "How many vacation days do I have?", "How do I submit my expenses?", "Who do I contact about a new laptop?"

 

Why use Ask ahead?

  • Answers, not search results. Employees get the answer itself, not a list of documents to read through.
  • Grounded in your content. Ask ahead only answers from the sources you give it. If the answer isn't there, it says so instead of making something up.
  • Always traceable. Every answer links to the page or document it came from, so people can read the original and trust the result.
  • Less pressure on HR, IT and internal support. The repetitive questions get answered on their own, any time of day.
  • More value from content you already have. Handbooks, policies and guides that are hard to navigate become easy to use.
  • Respects your audiences. Each person only gets answers from the content and files targeted to them. A Swiss employee gets the Swiss handbook, a Spanish employee gets the Spanish one.
  • You stay in control. You decide exactly which content Ask ahead uses, and you can add or remove sources at any time.

 

Typical use cases

  • HR and policies: vacation, absence, benefits, expenses, working hours, the employee handbook.
  • Onboarding: new joiners find their way around without asking colleagues the same questions over and over.
  • IT and tools: how-tos, equipment requests, access and security rules.
  • Processes and guidelines: purchasing, travel, safety instructions, quality procedures.
  • Frontline teams: quick answers on mobile, without digging through long PDFs.

 

How it works

1. Turn on Ask ahead

Go to AI Agents and open Ask ahead. Under 'ask ahead' AI, tick Enable 'ask ahead' and click Save.

Employees can use Ask ahead as soon as at least one content source has been added.

2. Choose the content Ask ahead answers from

Under Manage content sources, you choose what Ask ahead can use. There are two kinds of sources:

ahead News & Pages: Editors can add any news or page to Ask ahead when they create or edit it, using the Ask ahead option in the content settings. MS Office, text and PDF files attached to that content are included too. Under ahead News & Pages you see all the content currently included, with its type and target audience, and you can remove content from Ask ahead there.

External files: Under External files you can upload documents that don't live on your intranet, such as handbooks, regulations or guides.

  • Supported formats: PDF and PowerPoint, up to 10 MB per file.
  • After upload, each file is processed before Ask ahead can use it. Its status shows Pending, Ready or Failed.
  • For each file you can optionally set:
    • Targeting, so only the selected audience gets answers from this file.
    • Tags to categorize the file.
    • Link URL to send people to a different place than the uploaded file when it's shown as a source (for example, the original document on SharePoint).
    • Languages, if the document is only relevant for people using a specific content language.

You can also add files automatically through the API. See Imported documents for Ask ahead.

Tip: Ask ahead is only as good as its sources. Keep them up to date and remove outdated documents, so answers stay correct.

Who gets answers from what

Ask ahead respects your target audiences. When someone asks a question, Ask ahead only uses the content and files that are targeted to that person:

  • News and pages use the target audience you set on the content itself.
  • External files use the targeting you set on the file. A file without targeting is available to everyone.

This lets you give different answers to different groups. For example, upload one employee handbook targeted to Switzerland and another targeted to Spain: when an employee asks about vacation days, they get the answer from the handbook that applies to them.

3. Tell employees what they can ask

Under Custom feature description, write a short text explaining what Ask ahead knows about, for example "Employee handbook, travel policy and IT guides". Employees see this text when they use Ask ahead in the search, so they know what kind of questions it can answer.

4. How employees use it

  1. Employees open the search and ask their question in Ask ahead.
  2. Ask ahead answers in a few seconds, using only the sources you've added and that are targeted to them.
  3. Below the answer, Sources link to the pages and documents the answer came from.
  4. They can keep going with a follow-up question.

If Ask ahead can't find the answer in your sources, it says so and suggests asking a different question.