FAQ

Questions decision makers ask.

Straight answers about running Empisto on your own infrastructure: your data, who sees what, cost, and how to start.

twelve questions · plain answers · no jargon

What is Empisto?

Empisto is a private AI workspace that runs on your organisation's own infrastructure. Your people ask questions in plain language and get answers drawn from your own documents and knowledge, without that material being sent to an outside AI service.

How is this different from ChatGPT or Copilot?

Public AI tools are good, but they run on someone else’s infrastructure, and your content goes there to be answered. Empisto runs inside your walls instead. You decide which models run and who can reach which knowledge, and nothing depends on an outside service staying available or trustworthy.

Does our data ever leave the organisation?

No. Empisto is built with no outbound path for your content. The models, the search index and the applications all run inside your network, and installations with no internet connection at all are supported. There is no cloud service behind it that your data has to reach.

What will our people actually use it for?

Asking questions of company documents, finding a specific answer without knowing where it was filed, summarising long material, and working inside built-in applications. The first application is project management. Others, including analytics, come in later releases.

How do we know the answers can be trusted?

Answers are built from your approved documents, and each answer shows the sources it used, down to the passage it drew on, so anyone can open the source and check it. That said, AI can still be wrong. Decisions that matter should keep a person in the loop, and we would rather say so plainly than promise perfection.

Can different departments see different information?

Yes, and it is enforced rather than assumed. Knowledge is organised into spaces shared either across the whole organisation or with named teams, and access follows each person’s role. One team’s private material never surfaces in another team’s answers. We hold ourselves to that with automated tests that fail the build if it ever does.

Can it connect to the systems we already use?

At launch the focus is documents and knowledge, which is where most of the value sits. Connecting to other business systems is on the roadmap rather than finished, though the platform is built with that seam in place. When you evaluate it, we will tell you exactly what works today and what does not.

What is an SDK?

A software development kit: the tools and instructions your own developers would use to build something on top of a product. It matters here because it means you are not limited to what we ship. If your team needs something nobody sells, they can build it on Empisto, and it runs inside the same walls under the same rules about where data can go. Most organisations never touch it, and you do not need it to use Empisto.

Do our employees need technical or AI knowledge?

No. People type a question the way they would ask a colleague. There is nothing to learn about prompts, query syntax or programming.

How is Empisto priced?

A fixed licence and a support agreement, not a meter. The bill does not move because your teams used the system more this month, so the budget can be set once instead of watched. There is no public price list: scope depends on your size and your deployment, so pricing is agreed directly.

What do we need in order to run it?

Your own servers, with hardware sized to the models you want to run. Empisto uses standard, widely used model-serving software, so it runs on ordinary server hardware as well as on larger dedicated accelerators. What you need depends on model size and how many people use it at once, so we size it with you rather than quoting a specification that would not fit.

How do we get started?

Empisto is pre-launch, and we are taking on a small number of design partners. That means working directly with us on a real use case, with the access and attention that implies. If that fits, use the form on this page and tell us a little about your situation.

Design-partner program

Be among the first to run Empisto.

We are taking on a small number of design partners before launch. Tell us where to reach you.

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