Why every AI answer in government needs a source and a log
An AI answer with no source is an opinion dressed as a fact. In government work, that is not good enough.
· 3 min read · For government departments and offices considering AI tools for files and records
A department has years of files, orders and correspondence, and searching through them by hand for a past reference takes an officer hours. AI tools promise to search and summarise this in minutes, which is genuinely useful — but only if the officer can trust what comes back, and only if there is a record of who asked what and when.
Signs an AI tool is not ready for this work
- It gives an answer but does not point to the exact document and page it came from.
- There is no record of which staff member asked which question, and when.
- Files have to leave your office or servers to be processed somewhere else.
- The tool sounds confident even when it is guessing, with no way to tell the two apart.
What a good tool does
Every answer should come with its source — the document and the page it was drawn from — so an officer can open that page and check it themselves before it goes into an order or a reply. Every question asked should be logged, for an internal audit and for the officer's own protection if a decision is ever questioned later. And for anything sensitive, the files should stay inside your own office or data centre, not be uploaded to a service outside your control.
What it costs you
The real requirement is discipline on the vendor's side, not a bigger budget on yours — a tool that shows sources and keeps a log is not inherently more expensive to run than one that does not. What it does need is your IT team's involvement early, to confirm where the files and the processing actually happen, since “in the cloud” is not a good enough answer for many kinds of government records.
Questions to ask any vendor
- Can you show me, on a real file, exactly where an answer's source page is displayed?
- Is every question and answer logged, and can I export that log for audit?
- Where do our files physically sit — our own office, our own data centre, or a third party's servers?
- What happens when the tool does not know the answer — does it say so, or does it guess?
How we can help
Kaappu is our models in a box that sits inside your own office or data centre. Staff search, summarise and ask questions in Tamil, Hindi or English, every answer shows its source page, and every question is logged for audit. Nothing leaves your building. Tell us about your files at talk to us and we will show you Kaappu on a sample.
