Ask questions in plain English across the whole diocese — people, parishes, finance, DBS, training, vacancies, schemes, trusts and more. Before anything reaches the AI, personal data is redacted; and the assistant can only ever see what you can see.
This is the part that answers the GDPR question head-on: the pipeline every request passes through, in order, every time.
People and places in your question are resolved to internal identifiers before anything else happens.
Phone numbers, NI numbers, postcodes and email addresses are stripped from the input.
The system checks that no raw personal data is about to leave the platform — and blocks the call if it is.
Results come back mapped to records the logged-in user is permitted to see. Nothing more.
Not a chatbot bolted onto a database — an assistant built inside the permission model, with the same rules as everyone else.
The assistant inherits the logged-in user’s access — route, resource and field level. A parish administrator and a DSA asking the same question get answers scoped to what each is allowed to know.
Builds visualisations, proposes workflow rules, previews segment audiences and assigns training — each action with human confirmation before anything changes.
Azure OpenAI by default — inside the Microsoft estate most dioceses already trust — and provider-abstracted, so you’re not married to one model vendor.
~48 tools spanning the operational areas of the platform — from a quick lookup to a strategic report.
“Which parishes in this deanery are in vacancy?” “Whose DBS expires this quarter?” — answered from live records, not a stale export.
Aggregate statistics, comparisons, compliance trends, strategic reports and forecasts — generated when asked, with the workings shown.
Describe the report in plain English; the Data Explorer writes and validates the query. See reporting & dashboards →
The assistant can propose automation rules — “remind treasurers when returns are due” — for a human to review and enable.
Every answer is rateable, and administrators get usage analytics — what’s asked, what works, what needs a better tool.
In the portal, the Parish Assistant gives diocese-approved answers — and any live safeguarding concern is signposted to people, never handled by a model.
The interesting question was never “can we add AI?” — it was “can we add AI without a single piece of personal data leaving the diocese?”— Read more: Embedding AI in regulated software · AI data governance · AI for charities and dioceses