“We mainly need help writing.”
A general assistant is your fit — fast to adopt and excellent at drafting. Choose SenangAI when the question shifts from “write this for me” to “what did we agree, and can I rely on the answer”.
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Four ways to put AI on organisational knowledge — one is governed by design.
We compare categories rather than named products, because the category determines what is possible and the product only determines how well it is done. All four are legitimate choices. The right one depends on your requirements.
The short versionRead this first
Drafting and general work → a general assistant
Finding a document you know exists → enterprise search
Strong engineers, appetite to operate it → build or self-host
Defensible answers and governed action → this
Side by side
What each category can and cannot do.
Marks describe the category at its typical best, not the weakest product in it. A tilde means it depends heavily on implementation or vendor, which is itself worth knowing before a procurement process starts.
CapabilityWhat you are buying
General assistantsChat products
Enterprise searchSearch-first suites
Build it yourselfIn-house or open-source
SenangAIGoverned platform
Knows your organisation
–Only what is pasted in
~Indexes documents well
~As good as the pipeline built
✓Connected graph across sources
Respects existing permissions
–Whatever was shared with it
✓Mirrors source permissions
~Usually retrofitted late
✓Evaluated before retrieval
Cites its sources
~Sometimes, inconsistently
✓Returns the documents
~Depends on implementation
✓Provenance to document and version
Answers multi-source questions
~If you paste everything
~Improving, assistant add-ons
~Brittle beyond simple cases
✓One connected answer across sources
Takes action safely
–No approval concept
~Agents arriving, controls vary
–Approval rarely built
✓Born paused, human approval nodes
Produces an audit trail
–Usage logs at best
~Query logs
–Whatever you instrumented
✓Question, source, model, cost, approver
Runs inside your perimeter
–Vendor infrastructure
~Some offer private options
✓You chose the infrastructure
✓On-premises, private cloud or hosted
You choose the models
–Vendor decides
~Limited choice
✓Fully yours
✓Registry of approved models
Controls its own cost
–Per-seat, opaque usage
~Per-seat
–Token spend surprises teams
✓Enforced budgets and routing
Time to first real answer
✓Minutes
~Weeks of indexing
–Months of engineering
✓Day one on a folder
If a row matters more to you than the rest, that row should decide the category. Most procurement decisions we see are settled by permissions, audit or residency — rarely by answer quality, which is more even across categories than vendors like to admit.
Our column is not a promise sheet. Every tick is demonstrated live during the evaluation — scope isolation, citations, the audit export, a denied request. Ask for the one you doubt most.
In more detail
Each category, fairly described.
Written as we would describe them in a first meeting, including the parts that are inconvenient for us.
General assistants
Genuinely excellent at drafting, summarising and thinking out loud, and improving faster than anything else here. What they lack is a durable, permission-aware picture of your organisation and any concept of approval before action. Most enterprises should keep one.
Right when the work is writing, not deciding.Enterprise search
Mature, permission-aware, and now adding assistants and agents on top of the search core. The distinction that remains is architectural: governance added around a search product, rather than built as the layer everything else must pass through.
Right when the answer is a document.Build it yourself
A capable team ships quickly — from scratch or from a strong open-source stack, whose transparency is genuinely valuable. What you own either way is the operations: permission glue, provenance, approval gates, audit, upgrades, and the pager when it breaks. Deletion is unglamorous too, and each of these takes longer than the prototype did.
Right for one use case, painful for twenty.SenangAI
The governed layer between knowing and doing. Connected memory that reasons across sources, returns evidence, and carries out work under one scope, approval, budget and audit model — on infrastructure you choose. It is more platform than most organisations need for drafting alone.
Right when the answer must be defensible.Find your fit
The right tool for the job you actually have.
Each of these is a real situation we meet, and each has a right answer. We would rather route you correctly in the first conversation — when the fit is us, you will know exactly why.
“Everything lives in one system already.”
Its native search may serve you well. Choose SenangAI as sources multiply — the value of connected memory grows with every system and every permission boundary between them.
“We operate fully in the open.”
Then scope enforcement is architecture you would not use, and a lighter tool costs less. Choose SenangAI when boundaries appear — a client matter, a deal room, an HR case — because they arrive suddenly.
“Procurement gates on a certification.”
Ask us where that one stands before you invest a week in evaluation — you will get a direct answer in the first call. Choose SenangAI when the posture fits, on evidence rather than a badge wall.
“We want agents running fully unattended.”
Our approval gates are deliberate: they do not time out and cannot be satisfied by another agent. Choose SenangAI when a person should own the consequential step — for our customers, that is the product.
“We tried a RAG prototype and it stalled.”
The prototype was not wrong — permissions, audit and cost control are simply the long half of the build. Choose SenangAI to keep the use case and replace the plumbing you were about to spend a year on.
PlatformHow it is built
Ask, see, automate and govern — the capabilities behind these workflows.
Explore the platformUse casesWhere it pays offReal work — legal, finance, IT, risk and more — where defensibility matters more than fluency.
Explore use casesEvaluationDecide on evidenceThree weeks, one use case, and a scope-isolation test in week one.
See the plan
Start with one governed use case
Bring the question your organisation keeps arguing about.
Thirty minutes. We will map one use case, demonstrate scope isolation, and show the audit evidence the platform produces — or tell you plainly that you do not need us yet.