Connecting your AI service to the Assistant

You can connect your company's own internal service as another source the AI Assistant can draw on, alongside your published Userlane content. When a user asks a question, the Assistant can pull relevant material from your service and cite it in the answer. Each user is verified through their existing Microsoft session, so your service applies its own access rules and returns only what that user is allowed to see.

For the settings that control how the Assistant behaves, see Configuring the AI Assistant. For knowledge base integrations such as SharePoint or Confluence, which are set up separately, see the Integrations section.

What you need

A search or retrieval service of your own: one that takes a question and returns relevant content for it, rather than one that writes its own final answer.
A Microsoft Entra tenant: so the Assistant can verify each user through their Microsoft session. Your Entra administrator grants Userlane delegated access to the service once. Without this consent, sign-in fails.

Setting up the connection

In the Portal, under Agentic Assistance, open the Connections tab.

Under Microsoft tenant, enter your Directory (tenant) ID and Application (client) ID. These are shared by every property in your company.
Under AI service, enter a name for the service and its endpoint. This is set per property, so different properties can point at different services.
Ask your Entra administrator to grant the one-time admin consent, so the Assistant can sign users in to your service.
Check the request and response format shown on the page, so your service returns results in the shape the Assistant expects (see below). There is nothing to configure there; it is shown for whoever builds your service.
Save the connection.

Request and response format

The Assistant sends your service the user's question and expects a list of results in return. Your service should accept the question and return a list of results, each with an id, a title, a url, and a short snippet of the relevant content. The exact format is shown in the Portal:

Request

POST /v1/search
{
  "version": 1,
  "query": { "question": "How do I reset the password on my finance account?" }
}

Response

{
  "version": 1,
  "results": [
    {
      "id": "kb-4471",
      "title": "Reset your password",
      "url": "https://help.example.com/kb/4471",
      "snippet": "To reset your password, open Settings, choose Security, then..."
    }
  ]
}

How it works

When a user asks a question, the Assistant can query your connected service for relevant content, alongside your Userlane content, and cite what it uses.
Each user is verified through their existing Microsoft session, so your service returns only content that user already has access to.
Your connected service adds to your Userlane content. It does not replace it.

The Userlane AI Assistant
Configuring the AI Assistant