Genius answers questions about your organisation's documents, in conversation, citing the documents it used.
This chapter is shorter than you might expect, and it points backwards a lot. That is the honest shape of the subject: almost nothing that makes Genius correct is configured on the Genius screen.
Ask it something
Open Genius in the left menu and ask a question about the cases you have filed:
Which motor claims are waiting for a driving licence?
What did the repair estimate say on claim 2024-0184?
Which supplier certificates expire in the next sixty days?
The answer comes back with citations — the documents it drew on. Click one and you are in the case.
An addendum is cited by its full number — Dossier #123/620 — and a question about Dossier 123 covers its addenda too, each one only if you may open it.
Read the citations, not just the answer. They are the part you can verify, and the habit of checking them is the difference between a useful assistant and a confident one.
What is actually happening
It helps to be plain about this, because the marketing language around AI assistants is not.
An assistant answering from your documents retrieves some passages and writes fluent prose about them. The writing is the easy part and it is very good. Everything that decides whether the answer is right happened before the model was involved:
| What decides the answer | Where you configured it |
|---|---|
| Which documents exist, and whether they are current | The process, and the dossiers made from it — chapters 3 and 4 |
| Where retrieval looks | The assistant you pick in Genius: an Area, or Total search |
| Which values the model may read | Every field of the process that is not sensitive |
| Which values it may never read | Sensitive fields, on the process's Genius step |
| Who may see what | Permissions — chapter 8 |
The three ways an answer goes wrong
Two of the three are not fixed on this screen.
1. It retrieved the wrong passage
Semantic search finds text that resembles the question, and resemblance is not relevance. A question about a cancellation clause finds the paragraph that talks about cancellation most fluently, which is not necessarily the one that governs.
The fix is narrower retrieval, not a better model. Ask the assistant of the Area the question belongs to, not Total search. To narrow it further, apply a filter on the Dossiers list and click the Genius button on the filter bar, Ask the Genius about these dossiers: only the dossiers the filter selects are searched. This is the failure you fix on the Genius screen.
2. The reader was not allowed to see it
This is not a quality problem. It is an incident.
Permissions are applied when the passages are selected, not when the answer is displayed. Filtering the output is too late — the model has already read the document and will paraphrase it.
What makes this dangerous is how quiet it is: the answer looks helpful, there is no error, no warning, and nothing in the transcript says a boundary was crossed. It can run for a long time before anybody notices.
If a field must never reach the assistant, mark it under Sensitive fields, on the process's Genius step. That is the switch, and it is in the process editor, not on this screen.
3. The document was no longer current
A superseded policy. An expired certificate. A renegotiated contract. Still well written, still on topic, still the best semantic match.
This is where answer quality stops being an AI problem and becomes a governance one — and it is why the Require expiry date switch on the process's documents was worth turning on (chapter Your first Process). An assistant reading a document store with no notion of currency will cite last year's terms with complete confidence.
One assistant per Area
Genius assistants are not created or configured: they are your organisation's active Areas. Under Assistants, in the left column, there is one entry for each active Area, in alphabetical order, with the Area's name, description, icon and colour. Creating, renaming or deactivating an Area is what adds, changes or removes an assistant — chapter Your first Area.
An Area's assistant searches only the dossiers of that Area you have access to. The first entry in the list, Total search, is not an Area: it searches every area you are authorized to see, unfiltered.
There are no instructions, model or way of retrieving to choose per assistant: they all answer the same way, and what changes is where they look. Narrower assistants give better answers, so ask the right Area first and keep Total search for when you do not know where the answer is.
The saved conversation
Genius keeps your most recent conversation. Under Conversation, in the left column, is that conversation, with the date it was last updated; click it to reopen it. New conversation clears the panel to start another, and the saved conversation stays there until the new one receives its first message and becomes the saved one.
Guided conversation
A process can be filled in by talking to Genius instead of through the form. Under New guided conversation, choose the Process and click Start. Only processes whose script is switched on appear (the process's Guided conversation step, in chapter Your first Process), and only for people who may create dossiers: starting a guided conversation creates a dossier of that process straight away, in Draft.
Genius follows the process's script, one step at a time:
- Question — asks for the value of a dossier field. A question that is not required can Skip.
- Query — runs a Query trigger of the process and writes into the dossier what its answer brought. If it fails, you can Repeat it or Fill in by hand.
- Confirmation — shows fields already filled in to Confirm or Correct.
- Document — asks for a file for a Document of the process; say Done once you have sent it.
- Conclusion — the end of the script: Conclude and submit submits the dossier.
A sensitive field never goes through the conversation: it is kept in the dossier only. A conversation left unanswered for too long is abandoned, and the dossier stays as it was.
Your guided conversations are in the left column, under Guided conversations in progress (Resume) and Finished guided conversations (Open), each with Open the dossier. Remove takes the conversation out of your history; the dossier stays as it is.
What you should have now
- At least one answer with citations you followed back to a document.
- The same question asked of an Area's assistant and of Total search, and the difference seen.
- Every field that must never be read by AI marked under Sensitive fields, on its process's Genius step.