PRIVATE BUSINESS ASSISTANT · ZIMBABWE
An AI assistant that knows your business.
Asolen answers from your own documents, policies and processes — securely, with role-based access, so the right people get the right answers and nobody gets the ones they should not.
Your documents stay yours. Role-based access from day one.
ANSWER WITH SOURCE
SchematicAsked by a stores clerk · 09:12
Grounded · 2 sources cited
- Question
- Can I release stock to a customer whose account is on hold?
- Answer
- No. An account on hold needs a written release from the finance manager before any stock leaves. A cash sale is the exception and is treated as a new customer.
- Source
- Credit control policy, v4, section 3.2 · published 11 February 2026
- Also cited
- Stores procedure, section 7 · cash sales
- Confidence
- Grounded · both sources are the current version
- Visible to this role
- Stores · Finance · Management
- Not used
- Board minutes · outside this role’s access
- Logged as
- Q-2026-04417 · retained 12 months
Illustrative question. Every answer cites the paragraph it came from.
THE PROBLEM
The answer exists. Nobody can find it.
The current policy is in somebody’s inbox
Three versions of the leave policy are in circulation, two of them wrong, and the one that counts is attached to an email from 2023 that only one person still has.
Your senior people are a help desk
The same procedural questions, asked of the same four people, all day, because they are the only ones who know. Their actual work happens after five.
Sharing everything is the only way to share anything
The safe response to a permissions question is to lock the folder. So the answer nobody can reach becomes the answer nobody uses, and the rule gets guessed instead.
HOW IT WORKS
How it works.
Four steps, and the second one is the one that matters.
01
Connect your documents
Asolen indexes what you point it at — a Drive folder, a SharePoint site, a shelf of scanned PDFs. Nothing is copied anywhere you have not agreed to.
02
Decide who sees what
Each document set is bound to a role in a table you can read. The rule is enforced by the database, not by the prompt, so it cannot be talked around.
03
Ask in plain words
Staff ask from a browser, from WhatsApp or from Teams, and get an answer with the paragraph and the document version it came from.
04
Read what it could not answer
Every question, answer, citation and refusal is logged. The refusals tell you which policy you have not written yet.
WHAT IS IN IT
What it does, and what stops it going wrong.
An assistant that answers confidently from the wrong document is worse than no assistant. Half of this list is about the answer; the other half is about the boundary around it.
Answering
- Grounded answers with citations
- Every answer names the document, the section and the version date. A member of staff can check it in one click, and they do.
- Refusal
- When the documents do not cover a question, it says so. It does not assemble a confident answer out of adjacent paragraphs.
- Summarise and compare
- Reduce a forty-page contract to its obligations and dates, or show what changed between two versions of a policy.
- Follow-up questions
- It asks which branch, which grade or which contract when the answer depends on it, rather than picking one and being wrong.
Access
- Role-based document sets
- Payroll bands for HR and management. Board minutes for the board. Stores procedures for everyone who touches stock.
- Enforced in Postgres
- Row-level security decides what can be retrieved before the model sees anything. A prompt cannot grant access the database refuses.
- Single sign-on
- Google or Microsoft, with roles mapped from your existing directory so leavers lose access when they lose their account.
- Per-person history
- Each person sees their own questions. Managers see the aggregate, not their team’s individual queries.
Oversight
- Question log
- Every question, answer, citation and refusal, exportable, retained for a period you choose.
- Unanswered questions report
- The most useful report in the product. It tells you which policy does not exist, which one is silent, and which two contradict each other.
- Versioning
- Publish a new policy and the old one stops being answered from immediately. Superseded documents are marked, not deleted.
- Kill switch
- One switch stops all answering inside a minute, without a deployment, while you deal with whatever prompted it.
Asolen is our newest product, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
There is no metric on this section and no quote, because we do not have either yet and inventing them would be the cheapest possible thing to do on a page about trusting an assistant. What we can show you instead is exactly how the access model works, which is the section below.
Pilot deployments
Two Zimbabwean organisations, both under NDA
- Where it is running
- A distribution business and a professional services firm, both in Harare, both indexing internal policy and procedure documents.
- What the pilots are measured on
- Questions answered without a person, questions refused, and how many refusals turn out to be a document that does not exist.
- What we will publish
- The figures, with the client named, once we have written permission and a full quarter of data. Not before.
THE SCREENS
The screens that decide whether you can trust it.
These are schematics, not photographs: the same columns and field labels as the live system, with document names of the kind every organisation has. Real captures replace them as clients give permission to publish their libraries.
ACCESS MATRIX
SchematicWho can be answered from what
6 document sets · 5 roles · enforced in Postgres
| Document set | Stores | Finance | HR | Management | Board |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stores and dispatch procedures | Read | Read | — | Read | Read |
| Credit control policy | Read | Read | — | Read | Read |
| Payroll and salary bands | — | Read | Read | Read | Read |
| Employment contracts | — | — | Read | Read | Read |
| Board minutes | — | — | — | — | Read |
| Supplier agreements | — | Read | — | Read | Read |
| 6 sets | 2 | 4 | 2 | 5 | 6 |
Illustrative. A role cannot be answered from a set it has no read on, because the check runs in the database before retrieval.
DOCUMENT LIBRARY
SchematicIndexed sources · 09:40
6 documents · 4 sets
| Document | Set | Version | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Credit control policy | Finance | v4 · 11 Feb 2026 | Current |
| Credit control policy | Finance | v3 · 4 Aug 2025 | Superseded · not answered from |
| Stores procedure | Stores | v2 · 3 Jan 2026 | Current |
| Leave policy | HR | v6 · 28 Feb 2026 | Current |
| Supplier framework agreement | Finance | Signed 19 Feb 2026 | Current · scanned, text extracted |
| Board pack · March 2026 | Board | 12 Mar 2026 | Restricted |
| 6 documents | 4 sets | 1 superseded |
Illustrative document names.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
SchematicWhat Asolen could not answer · last 30 days
4 gaps · 56 questions
| Question | Asked | Why it was refused | Owner |
|---|---|---|---|
| What is the fuel allowance for a site visit? | 22 | No document covers it | Write it · Operations |
| Can I take leave during my notice period? | 14 | Leave policy is silent | Amend v6 · HR |
| What is the discount limit for a repeat customer? | 11 | Outside this role’s access | Decide who may see it · Finance |
| Who signs off a purchase over $5,000? | 9 | Two documents disagree | Resolve · Finance |
| 4 gaps | 56 | 4 owners assigned |
Illustrative.
WHAT IT CONNECTS TO
Where it reads from, and where people ask it.
Nothing here asks you to move your documents into a new system first. Asolen reads where they already live, and answers where your staff already are.
Where your documents already are
Including the scanned ones nobody wants to retype
- Google Drive and Workspace
- Whole folders or shared drives, with permissions read from Google rather than re-entered by hand.
- Microsoft 365, SharePoint and OneDrive
- Sites, libraries and folders, including document sets with their own permission groups.
- PDF, Word, Excel and PowerPoint
- Including scanned PDFs and photographed pages: text is extracted and the page it came from is cited, so a clerk can check the original.
- A folder on your own server
- For organisations whose documents have never been in a cloud and are not going to be.
Systems it can be asked about
Answers about figures, not just about documents
- CheckERP and ASOFT ERP
- Read-only, through the same row-level security the user has in the ERP itself. Nobody gains access by asking a question instead of opening a screen.
- Read-only SQL views
- A view you define and control, so Asolen can answer “what is our current credit limit for this customer” without touching anything else.
- Google Sheets
- For the reference tables that live in a sheet and always will — rate cards, allowances, approved supplier lists.
Where staff ask
A foreman on a site does not open a portal
- The reason this product gets used in Zimbabwe. A driver, a foreman or a stores clerk asks from the phone in their hand, and the same access rules apply.
- A browser
- A plain page that loads on mobile data, with the citation visible without scrolling.
- Microsoft Teams and Slack
- For the office staff who already live there, with per-user identity rather than one shared bot account.
Identity, audit and Zimbabwean specifics
The parts a board asks about
- Google and Microsoft single sign-on
- Roles mapped from your directory. Somebody who leaves the company loses Asolen at the same moment they lose email.
- Audit log export
- Every question, answer, citation and refusal, with a person and a timestamp, exportable for an auditor or a regulator.
- ZIMRA circulars and statutory instruments
- Indexed like any other document you supply. Asolen quotes them and names the date; it does not interpret them, and it tells the user to ask an accountant.
- Shona and Ndebele questions
- Answered from English documents, with the citation in the language of the source so nothing is lost in the middle.
We will name the model provider and its data-retention terms in writing before you sign, and we will tell you if either changes. An AI product that will not answer that question does not deserve your documents.
PRICING
What Asolen AI costs.
Priced on seats and documents, with the free trial taking no card. Where it has to run somewhere specific — a private region, or your own server — that changes the number and we will say by how much before you commit.
FROM
$90/monthCovers ten seats, up to 500 indexed documents and 2,000 questions a month, with role-based access configured with you.
- 14-day free trial with no card
- Role-based access configured with you before anything is indexed
- Question log and the unanswered-questions report
- Export of your documents and logs at any time
Your documents stay yours. Role-based access from day one.
What moves the number
- Seats
- Per person who asks questions. Someone who only reads the question log is not a seat.
- Documents indexed
- Banded. Five hundred policies and procedures is the first band; a decade of contracts and board packs is not.
- Questions per month
- Banded, and the band is generous because a team that stops asking has stopped getting value.
- Where it runs
- The standard hosting is included. A specific region, or an installation on hardware you own, is quoted separately and honestly.
- Connectors
- Drive, SharePoint, WhatsApp, Teams and Slack are included. A connector into something we have not met is scoped once.
Every price on this page is also on the pricing page, with the services and workshops alongside it.
IMPLEMENTATION
Ten working days, and most of it is deciding who sees what.
Indexing is quick. The valuable part is an explicit conversation about access, which most organisations have never had to have in writing before.
DAYS 1–2
Inventory
We list what you have and where it lives. Almost every organisation finds three versions of something important and one document nobody can locate at all.
DAYS 3–4
Set the roles
Document sets are bound to roles in a table you read and approve. This is a business decision and you make it, not us.
DAYS 5–6
Index
Documents are indexed, scanned pages included. Superseded versions are marked rather than deleted, so an auditor can still see what the rule used to be.
DAYS 7–8
Test with real questions
Each department writes ten questions they genuinely ask. We check the answer and the citation together — an answer without a checkable source does not count as passing.
DAYS 9–10
Roll out
One department first. The rest follow once that one has stopped finding wrong answers, which is usually within a week.
What we need from you
- Access to the drive, site or folder the documents live in.
- A list of roles, and who is in each one.
- A decision, per document set, about which roles may be answered from it.
- Ten real questions per department. This is the whole test, and it cannot be delegated to us.
- One person who owns the document library after we leave.
What training is included
- One hour per department on asking well and on reading a citation.
- One session for the library owner on publishing, superseding and re-indexing.
- One session for management on the question log and the unanswered-questions report.
- A named contact on WhatsApp.
Nothing is indexed until you have signed off the access table. That is the order the work happens in, and we will not reverse it to save a week.
QUESTIONS
The eight questions a board asks about an AI assistant.
Does our data train anyone’s model?
No. Your documents are indexed into your own tenant and are not used to train a model, ours or a supplier’s. We will name the model provider and its data-retention terms in writing before you sign, and we will tell you if either changes.
Where is our data stored?
On managed Postgres infrastructure with daily backups, and we will tell you the exact region in writing before you sign. You can export everything at any time, in a standard format.
Can someone get an answer they are not entitled to?
The check runs in Postgres before retrieval, so a document a role cannot read is never sent to the model in the first place. That means a prompt cannot argue its way past it. We test this with a deliberately planted instruction inside an indexed document, and the test is part of every release.
What if it makes something up?
Every answer cites the document, the section and the version date, so an invented answer is visible rather than plausible. When the documents do not cover a question it refuses and says why. A refusal appears in the unanswered-questions report, which is where the useful work is.
Does it work with scanned paper documents?
Yes. Scanned PDFs and photographed pages are read, indexed and cited by page, so a member of staff can check the original. Handwriting is unreliable and we will tell you that rather than let you find out.
Who inside Silverconne can read our documents?
Nobody, unless you grant support access, and that grant is time-limited and logged. We cannot read your library to answer a support question by default, which occasionally makes support slower and always makes it safer.
Can we start small?
Yes. Most clients start with one module or one site and add from there.
What happens if we stop working with you?
You keep your data and your licences per the contract. No hostage-taking.
Something not answered here? Ask us directly.
NEXT STEP
Bring ten questions your staff keep asking.
We will index one folder, set the access rules with you, and you can check every answer against the document it came from.
Your documents stay yours. Role-based access from day one.