Frequently Asked Questions

All This Guy servers are hosted in the European Union by EU providers, ensuring data sovereignty and GDPR compliance by default.

Key security features:

• EU data residency with replication across European data centers
• Minimal data retention policy - only what's necessary for service delivery
• Original documents not stored - only converted, indexed versions
• Flexible AI provider selection - choose EU-only or worldwide providers

This EU-first approach means your data stays within European jurisdiction, giving you full compliance and control.

Learn more: Infrastructure & Security

ATG implements a category-based access control system that ensures users only see information they're authorized to access:

• Knowledge categories organize information by sensitivity level (e.g., "Company-wide," "HR only," "Management only")
• Each source is assigned to specific categories
• Users are granted access to specific categories based on their role
• Search and retrieval automatically respect these permissions

This means sensitive HR data, confidential management information, and public company knowledge can all coexist in Ask This Guy, with the system automatically showing each user only what they're authorized to see.

Learn more: Webapp

Yes! Beyond searching and answering questions, Ask This Guy (ATG) can be extended with custom tools that integrate with your business systems.

Custom tools can:

• Update your CRM with customer information
• Trigger workflows in your business applications
• Query internal databases for specific data
• Create tickets in your support system
• Send notifications to team members
• Execute business-specific actions unique to your organization

These custom tools are developed specifically for your needs and can make Ask This Guy a truly integrated part of your tech stack. For write operations, the system always prompts users for approval before executing actions, ensuring control and preventing unintended consequences.

Learn more: Tools and MCP

Ask This Guy (ATG) is an intelligent AI-powered assistant designed for businesses that helps teams quickly find information from their company's internal data or the web, and leverage AI to perform various tasks. Accessible through a simple chat interface or embeddable widgets, it delivers accurate, reliable, and contextualized answers wherever employees need them. Powered by leading AI models, ATG clearly indicates its sources for every answer, allowing organizations to verify information and retain control over the content they produce.

Ask This Guy was created in February 2025.

The company is domiciled and based in France.

Ask This Guy was founded by Rémi Chkaibane and Jean-Christophe Budin, experienced engineers from INSA Lyon.

Yes. Ask This Guy has been commercially available since 2025.

• Clients are already deployed in production environments (deployments since 2025).
• The company is profitable from its first fiscal year and self-funded.

Pricing is determined after a needs assessment, based on:

• the number of users
• the expected usage

The subscription is flat-rate (no “per token” surprises or opaque billing) and starts at €400/month.

ATG is powered by leading AI models from providers including Cerebras, Gemini, Mistral, Nebius, DeepInfra, OpenAI, Black Forest Labs, and Scaleway. Organizations can choose between EU-based providers (ensuring data sovereignty with servers hosted in the European Union) or worldwide providers, depending on their compliance requirements and preferences.

ATG supports nearly any language. Ask your questions in the language you're most comfortable with, and it will understand and respond accordingly.

ATG intelligently selects from a wide range of tools and sources to give you the best answer! Depending on your request, it might:

• Search your company's knowledge base for internal documentation and information
• Search the web for current news, trends, or external information
• Look for specific documents by name or content within your organization
• Fetch content from URLs you provide or that are relevant to your question
• Access connected platforms like Confluence, Notion, or Slack

While you can always specify which tools or sources you'd like Ask This Guy (ATG) to use, it's also smart enough to automatically select the most relevant ones based on your question. If your request would clearly benefit from a web search, document lookup, or URL fetch, ATG may use those tools proactively - even if you didn't explicitly ask. This ensures you get comprehensive, accurate answers every time.

Ask This Guy (ATG) is truly a versatile assistant! You can use it just like you might use other AI chatbots, for a wide range of tasks:

• Content Creation: Ask it to write emails, summaries, reports, LinkedIn posts, or even brainstorm marketing ideas.
• Collaboration: Use it to brainstorm with you, help structure a project, or improve existing texts.
• Information Retrieval: Simply ask your questions and get answers based on your internal documents, the Internet, or the AI's general intelligence.
• Data Queries: Ask questions in natural language to query structured databases directly, making it easy to extract insights without needing technical query languages.
• Embedded Support: Access This Guy directly within your institutional websites, IT tools, and web applications through embedded widgets, providing assistance exactly where you need it.

The main goal is to provide you with relevant, rapid responses that are perfectly adapted to your professional context!

Absolutely! Here are some common use cases to get you started:

• "Write a follow-up email to a prospect who's been inactive for 2 weeks."
• "What are the key findings of our latest sales report?"
• "Tell me the latest news from our competitors."
• "Summarize our HR maternity leave policy for me."
• "Explain how our latest product offer works in 3 simple sentences."

Here are examples using This Guy within embedded widgets and querying structured data:

Widget Context Examples:

• "I'm on the employee portal - what's the process for requesting remote work?"
• "I'm looking at our product catalog - can you explain the pricing tiers for our enterprise plan?"
• "I'm in the customer support tool - what's our standard response time policy?"
• "I'm on the IT help desk page - how do I reset my VPN credentials?"

Querying Structured Data Examples:

• "What were our total sales in Q3 2024 by region?"
• "Show me the top 5 performing products from last month's sales data."
• "Which experiments in our research database had a success rate above 85%?"
• "What's the average customer satisfaction score for our support team this year?"
• "How many units of Product X were sold in France during the last quarter?"
• "Compare our monthly revenue growth between January and October 2024."

These examples show how Ask This Guy (ATG) can assist you directly within your workflow tools and help you extract insights from complex datasets using simple, natural language questions.

Ask This Guy (ATG) is designed to keep you in control. With each answer, it clearly indicates its sources, whether they are internal documents or web links. This allows you to easily verify the information and trace its origin, ensuring you retain control over the content you produce while gaining efficiency.

Ask This Guy (ATG) is designed to give you quick access to your company's essential information without you having to sift through countless files or tools. Here's a quick peek behind the curtain:

• Curated Knowledge Base: Your This Guy workspace administrators are the ones who select, centralize, organize, and categorize the information that becomes accessible through the assistant. This ensures the data is always relevant and reliable.
• Diverse Information Sources: Administrators can include data from various platforms, such as:
  • Confluence (spaces, pages, documentation bases)
  • Files (PDF, Word, PowerPoint, etc.) uploaded directly
  • Notion workspaces
  • Slack conversations and shared files
  • Automatically selected and crawled web pages
• Structured Categories: Each source is linked to a specific knowledge category (like "Company-wide," "HR only," or "Management only"). These categories help organize knowledge and define who can access what, ensuring confidentiality of sensitive data while making the right information available to the right people.
• Contextual and Controlled Search: When you ask Ask This Guy (ATG) a question, and you choose to activate the Organization knowledge search, the assistant will look for answers specifically within the sources you have access to, taking into account the defined categories. The AI then provides precise citations for the documents or pages it used, so you can always verify the information or explore further.

To get the most accurate and useful responses from This Guy, how you phrase your questions (we call them "prompts" in AI-speak!) is really important. Here are some tips to help you craft effective prompts:

• Be Clear and Specific: Always try to express your questions or requests as clearly as possible. For example, instead of "Show me the report," try "Can you show me the sales report for Q4 2025?"
• Provide Context: If your question relates to a specific project, team, or topic, be sure to mention it. For instance, "How do I submit an expense report for the marketing team?"
• Engage in Dialogue: If the initial answer isn't quite what you expected, don't hesitate to ask follow-up questions or request clarification. You could say, "Can you explain that in simpler terms?" or "Could you give me an example?"
• If Ask This Guy (ATG) doesn't seem to understand your question, try rewording it or breaking it down into smaller, more manageable parts.
• Use Examples: Providing an example can help This Guy understand your intent better. If you want a summary in a particular style, you could say, "Summarize this article in bullet points, like this: [example bullet points]."

Yes, absolutely! While Ask This Guy (ATG) is a powerful tool designed to be very helpful, it's an AI, and like all AI models, it can sometimes make mistakes or provide information that's outdated. For critical decisions or important tasks, it's always a good practice to double-check the answers against official sources or documentation. Your judgment is key! 👍

Your data security is important! Here are a couple of things to remember:

• Respect Confidentiality: Only share information that you are authorized to access
• Avoid Unnecessary Sensitive Data: Be mindful of the information you provide. Unless you are absolutely sure that Ask This Guy's privacy and security settings are appropriate for it, avoid entering sensitive or personal data. If you're ever in doubt, it's best to check with your administrator or team leader first.

To ensure you have the smoothest and most effective interactions, try to steer clear of these:

• Using Only Keywords: Typing just keywords or very short phrases can sometimes confuse the chatbot. Always try to use complete sentences!
• Overloading with Jargon: While This Guy understands a lot of technical language, using too much jargon or too many acronyms can occasionally lead to misunderstandings. Keep your language simple and clear, especially when you're just getting started.

While This Guy doesn't have feelings (it's an AI, after all! 😉), using polite language like "please" and "thank you" can make your interactions feel more natural and positive. It's a nice habit to maintain!

Agents are customizable AI personalities that can be tailored for specific purposes within your organization. Each agent can have:

• Unique instructions and personality: Define how the agent interacts and responds (e.g., customer support bot, sales assistant, technical helper)
• Specific tools: Choose which capabilities the agent can use (knowledge search, web search, image generation, custom tools, etc.)
• Knowledge access: Control which knowledge categories and information sources the agent can access
• AI policy: Select EU-based or worldwide AI providers based on your compliance needs

This means you can create different agents for different teams or use cases, each optimized for its specific role!

Learn more: Agents • ATG Embedded

Built-in tools come standard with This Guy and include capabilities like web search, knowledge base search, document retrieval, URL fetching, and image generation. Administrators can enable or disable these for each agent.

Custom tools are developed specifically for your organization to address unique needs, such as integrating with proprietary systems, performing specialized data queries, or triggering specific business workflows. These tools extend This Guy's capabilities beyond the standard feature set.

Both types of tools can be configured per agent, and administrators control which tools users can access.

Learn more: Tools and MCP

Absolutely! Ask This Guy (ATG) offers embeddable widgets that can be integrated into:

• Your corporate websites for visitor assistance
• Internal systems and tools for employee support
• SaaS products and web applications for customer-facing AI assistance

ATG Embedded (ATG Agents integrated into your websites or applications) can be fully customized with your branding, configured with specific Agents, and integrated with your platform's data and workflows. It's perfect for providing AI assistance exactly where your users need it - without leaving your application.

Learn more: ATG Embedded

ATG Embedded is designed for integration into your own platforms, while the standard web app at app.askthisguy.com is for internal employee use.

ATG Embedded features:

• Full visual customization and branding
• API-based integration requiring minimal development
• Context-aware responses using your platform's data
• Client-specific metadata support for personalized interactions
• Custom tool integration for platform-specific actions
• No user management required (uses your existing authentication)

Both solutions share the same underlying knowledge base and can use the same configured sources, ensuring consistency across all deployment channels.

Learn more: ATG Embedded

Press Review is an AI-powered news digest service that helps teams stay informed about relevant topics without spending hours researching.

Administrators create "briefs" with specific topics, keywords, and focus areas. Users can then generate fresh, customized news digests on demand that:

• Search the web for current, relevant articles
• Filter content based on the configured brief
• Compile a structured, easy-to-scan report
• Provide insights on competitive intelligence, market trends, and industry news

It's perfect for competitive intelligence, account management, strategic planning, and staying on top of what matters to your business.

Learn more: Press Review

Predefined Prompts are ready-to-use templates that help users get professional-quality results with just a few clicks.

Administrators create and optimize prompts for common tasks (like writing follow-up emails, summarizing reports, or analyzing data). Users can then:

• Browse available prompt templates
• Select a prompt with one click
• Add specific details or variables
• Get consistent, high-quality results

This ensures everyone uses proven, effective prompts without needing to be prompt engineering experts. ATG even includes an AI-powered optimization feature that helps administrators refine prompts for maximum effectiveness.

Learn more: Predefined Prompts

This Guy can integrate with a wide range of platforms and data sources:

Standard Connectors:

• Confluence (spaces, pages, documentation)
• Notion (workspaces, pages, databases)
• Google Drive (documents, spreadsheets, presentations)
• SharePoint/OneDrive (Microsoft document repositories)
• Slack (conversations and shared files)
• File uploads (PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, images, etc.)
• Web pages (automated crawling of specified sites)
• Email (share documents via email)

Custom Connectors:

ATG can develop specialized connectors for your proprietary systems or unique data sources on demand.

All connectors automatically sync to keep your knowledge base up to date!

Learn more: Connectors

This Guy uses advanced multimodal AI processing to understand both text and images within your documents.

The system:

• Extracts images from PDFs, Word documents, presentations, and other files
• Analyzes visual content using computer vision AI (charts, diagrams, photos, technical illustrations)
• Generates detailed descriptions of each image with business context
• Indexes both text and images for comprehensive search
• Can reference images in responses, providing context-aware answers that include visual information

This means when you ask questions, This Guy can draw insights from both the written content AND the visual elements in your documents - achieving 95%+ accuracy with support for 50+ languages.

Learn more: Documents & Images

Yes! Users can attach files directly to their messages, including:

• Documents: PDF, Word, PowerPoint, text files
• Media: Images, videos, audio files
• Spreadsheets: Excel and other structured data

This Guy will analyze the attached files immediately and provide answers based on their content, making it easy to get insights from files without needing to add them to the knowledge base permanently.

RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) is the technology that makes This Guy's answers accurate and trustworthy.

Here's how it works:

1. You ask a question
2. This Guy searches your knowledge base using both semantic and keyword search
3. Relevant documents are retrieved and provided as context
4. The AI generates an answer based on the retrieved information (not just from memory)
5. Sources are clearly cited so you can verify the information

This approach minimizes AI "hallucinations" (made-up information) and ensures answers are grounded in your actual documents and data. The RAG system converts all documents - including images - to markdown format and creates vector embeddings for intelligent semantic search.

Learn more: Data & RAG

Yes! This Guy offers flexible AI policy selection:

• EU Policy: Data is processed only by EU-based AI providers with servers in the European Union
• Worldwide Policy: Allows use of additional global providers like OpenAI

Administrators can choose the policy that matches your compliance requirements. ATG integrates with multiple leading providers including Mistral, Nebius, Scaleway, Gemini, DeepInfra, OpenAI, and Black Forest Labs - giving you both flexibility and control.

Learn more: AI Policy

If you're not receiving emails sent by Ask This Guy (invitations, confirmation codes, notifications), here are the steps to follow based on your environment:

Microsoft 365 environment:

• First, check your Junk Email folder
• Check the Microsoft quarantine: https://security.microsoft.com/quarantine
• If you find the emails, ask your IT administrator to add team@askthisguy.com to the allowlist

Google Workspace environment:

• First, check your Spam folder
• Contact your IT administrator to check the quarantine: admin.google.com ⇒ Apps > Google Workspace > Gmail > Quarantine
• If emails are in quarantine, ask your administrator to configure rules to allow Ask This Guy senders

General tip: Make sure the email address used in your This Guy profile is correct and active.

Still having issues? Contact our support team at support@askthisguy.com

If This Guy cannot find the expected information:

• Check your wording: Try rephrasing your question more clearly and specifically
• Provide context: Mention the document name, project, or knowledge category concerned
• Check your access: Make sure you have access to the knowledge category containing the information you're looking for
• Contact your administrator: The information you're looking for may not yet be indexed in the knowledge base

If you're experiencing performance issues:

• Check your Internet connection: An unstable connection can affect performance
• Refresh the page: A simple reload can resolve temporary issues
• Try another browser: Some browsers may work better than others
• Check extensions: Some browser extensions can interfere with This Guy
• Contact support: If the problem persists, report it to your administrator or contact ATG support at support@askthisguy.com