Running in production
In use by the office team (three named accounts). Access for care staff is an open decision, because most of them sign in as guests, and Microsoft does not let guests use these assistants.
The situation
An agency’s office team looked things up by hand in a 1,037-page accreditation binder, 15 CMS manual chapters, the employee handbook and the regulations. They could not be sure any of them was the current version.
The cost of leaving it alone
A wrong answer about an order signature or a labor rule is a survey finding or a wage claim. And a regulation that changed last month is invisible if nobody is watching.
What we built
Two assistants in Microsoft Teams. An HR assistant answers from the handbook, an HR binder and California and federal labor-law sites. A policies-and-procedures assistant answers from the agency’s policies, the CMS manuals, the federal Conditions of Participation, California Title 22 and the Health and Safety Code. Answers cite the document, section or policy number, say what the documents do not cover, and keep California law separate from the handbook. Terminations and discipline go to an attorney.
A weekly regulation watch compares each saved copy with its official source, by byte comparison, amendment date, the Federal Register and the California notice register. It stages newer copies for a person to read and emails them. Nothing is swapped automatically, and clean weeks send no mail beyond one all-clear a month.
Microsoft Copilot Studio in TeamsSharePoint and OneDrivePython on a timer for the watcherAzure pay-as-you-go billing with a budget alert
Why AI, or why not
AI for the assistants, none for the watcher. The questions are unstructured and a person otherwise reads and judges thousands of pages, so a language model earns its place. The watcher uses no AI at all: byte, date and hash comparisons found every stale file.
The results
How PHI was protected
- A new agent’s defaults are permissive. Ungrounded answers, web access, file uploads, tenant-wide data access and connected agents were all switched off before any document was added.
- Each assistant is shared with named accounts only, and each has its own knowledge set, because anyone who can chat with an assistant can read what it knows.
- No PHI is intended to enter either assistant.
- The watcher never changes the policies folder; a person reads every change.
- A limitation we disclose: the HR assistant also consults five public labor-law sites, so the text of a question may leave the tenant. The policies assistant has no web access.
What we would tell you to skip
Scope the audience before choosing the platform. Most care staff are guests, which Microsoft’s assistants do not support, and we learned it after the first assistant was built. And never trust a citation you have not looked up: the page numbers looked perfect and were wrong.
Reusable for
California agencies on Microsoft 365 whose office team needs a closed-book assistant over policies and regulations.