Concepts
Understand how AskRAI delivers responsible AI — from knowledge management and guardrails to confidence scoring and governance
AskRAI is a Responsible AI platform that delivers intelligent automation with built-in safety, compliance, and accountability. Every response is grounded in curated knowledge, evaluated by the guardrails you have attached, scored for confidence, and recorded in a full audit trail.
How a query flows through AskRAI
When a user asks a question, the platform runs a multi-step pipeline designed to keep the response grounded, governed, and traceable.
- The user sends a question through Microsoft Teams — the one human channel available today — or a machine calls through a programmable interface (API, CLI, or MCP) authenticated with a credential.
- Active AI Guardrails evaluate the question against your safety, compliance, and quality rules. A guardrail set to Block stops the request here and no answer is produced; one set to Warn or Redact records or rewrites and lets the turn continue. The same rules can instead be set to read the generated answer, or the arguments an agent sends to a tool.
- AskRAI searches the curated knowledge base for relevant content and composes a grounded answer.
- The platform assigns a confidence score reflecting how well the knowledge base supports the answer.
- The response is delivered. Afterwards, your escalation rules are evaluated against the confidence band and can open a support ticket for human follow-up.
- Every step is recorded in a complete audit trail for governance and continuous improvement.
A guardrail on the Input stage runs before retrieval, so it can stop an answer from being generated at all; one on the Output stage runs after generation and can still withhold or rewrite the answer before anyone reads it. Escalation runs after the answer has been delivered, so it can raise a ticket for a human — but it cannot withhold the response.
Core concepts
The RIESE Model
Five pillars that define what your AI assistant does — Resolve, Inform, Engage, Support, and Escalate.
Knowledge Management
How content enters the system, gets organized into packs, and powers AI responses.
Guardrails
Active AI Guardrails that evaluate every interaction for safety, compliance, and quality.
Confidence & Escalation
How confidence scoring works and when conversations escalate to humans.
Access Control
Users, roles, groups, and multi-tenant isolation that control who sees what.
Governance & Audit
Audit trails, analytics, sandbox testing, and the continuous improvement loop.
How it fits together
Knowledge management defines what the assistant knows. Guardrails define what it must not do. Confidence scoring defines how certain it must be. Access control defines who gets access to what. And governance gives you the tools to monitor, measure, and improve over time.
Each concept builds on the others — groups bundle knowledge packs with guardrails, and the audit trail captures how all of these interact during every conversation.