Interacting with documents in Workplace Assistant

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You can use Workplace Assistant to ask questions in natural language about documents attached to your workflows and cases, summarize documents, and search for information across documents, all without leaving your workflow context.

Workplace Assistant integrates with Content Assistant to help you query and manage documents within your workflows and cases. When Content Assistant is enabled in your environment, it helps you work with documents conversationally.

  • Ask questions about document content: Get instant answers from policy documents, procedures, contracts, and other business documents with source attribution showing where the information was found.
  • Summarize documents: Generate AI-powered summaries of single documents or compare content across multiple documents.
  • Search for documents: Find relevant documents across an object store using natural language descriptions and add them to your cases.
Prerequisites:
To use Content Assistant features, your environment must have:
  • Content Assistant enabled in the object store where your documents are stored.
  • Security permissions configured for document access.

Using Content Assistant features

You interact with Content Assistant through the conversational interface of Workplace Assistant. Simply ask questions or make requests in natural language.

Asking questions about documents
When you work on a workflow or case, you can ask questions about documents attached to that workflow. Questions can be:
  • Single-document questions, where you select a specific document and ask questions about its content. For example, "Summarize the main points of this policy document."
  • Multi-document questions, where you ask questions that search across multiple or all documents in a workflow or case instance. For example, "What are the differences between the original contract and the amendments?".
Workplace Assistant provides answers with source attribution, showing which document contains the information, the relevant excerpt, and the page or section number.
Generating document summaries

You can request summaries of documents from the case or process detail page.

  • Select a document and ask: "Summarize this document"
  • Request comparative analysis: "Summarize the key differences between these three policy documents"
  • Get quick overviews: "What are the main points in the customer service handbook?"

Summaries are generated using AI and include references to specific sections of the source documents.

Finding and adding documents

You can search for documents across the object store by keyword and add them to your current process or case.

  • Use natural language to describe what you're looking for: "Find all resumes for candidates who went to University of Toronto".
  • Workplace Assistant searches the repository while respecting your security permissions.
  • Review the results and confirm which documents to add to your case.
Document searches contain specific keywords with metadata filtering, which is useful for finding documents when you know the exact terms used in them. Note that searches respect your security permissions and only return documents that you're authorized to access, based on your security settings.
Verifying document completeness

You can check whether required documents are present in cases. For example:

  • Ask: "What documents are attached to this case?"
  • Query across multiple cases: "Show me all claims where damage photos are missing"
  • Verify specific document types: "Does this case have the signed approval form?"

This helps to ensure that cases are complete before processing or approval.

For configuration information, see Enabling Content Assistant features External link opens a new window or tab.
To learn how Content Assistant-based document queries work in different scenarios, see Use cases.

Privacy and security

Content Assistant integration maintains enterprise security standards:

  • Permission-based access: You can only search and view documents you have permission to access based on your FileNet security settings.
  • Audit logging: All document searches and content queries are logged for compliance and audit purposes.
  • Secure communication: All interactions between Workplace Assistant and Content Assistant use encrypted connections.
  • No data leakage: Document content is not stored or cached outside of the secure FileNet repository.