Happy Halloween. This is a public service announcement about AI vampires, and about why a lot of public sector organisations have already been bitten without noticing.
The picture above started life as a joke for LinkedIn. Two circles. On the left, AI that sucks your data. On the right, KnowledgeFlow. The overlap is the bit the vampire doesn’t survive: daylight, accuracy and GDPR compliance, with a hint of garlic.
It’s a daft image, but the problem behind it isn’t.
The vampire is already in the building
Shadow AI is the polite name for the AI tools your staff use that nobody signed off. A housing officer pastes a tenant’s complaint into a free chatbot to tidy up the reply. A planning team drops a 40-page consultation response into a summariser because the meeting is at two. Someone in HR asks a consumer tool to soften a letter and leaves the name in.
None of these people are doing anything malicious. They have a deadline and a tool that works. That is exactly how vampires operate. Nobody has ever been bitten by something they thought was dangerous.
What has gone wrong is quieter than a headline. Nobody signed a data processing agreement. Nobody knows which country the data landed in, whether it was kept, or whether it was used to train the next version of the model. Your own AI policy almost certainly forbids all of it, and almost nobody has read your AI policy.
Under UK GDPR your organisation is still the controller for that data wherever it ends up. For a housing association, council or NHS trust, that isn’t just a scary story. It’s a breach notification with your name on it. You just haven’t had it yet.
Vampire rules
Folklore agrees on one thing. A vampire cannot come in unless it is invited. KnowledgeFlow works on the same principle, and so does everything we build around it.
- It lives in your own Microsoft Azure tenancy. Your documents never leave. There is no Leading AI server with your data on it, and there is nothing for us to lose.
- It only reads what you point it at. You decide which documents it can see. It doesn’t go wandering through SharePoint looking for something interesting.
- Every answer comes with its source. The document it was drawn from is right there, so you can open it and check it in the clear light of day. If the answer isn’t in your documents, it says so, rather than inventing one.
- Nothing trains anyone else’s model. Your data is used to answer your questions. That’s the end of the list.
- It keeps a record. What was asked, what was answered, and which document it came from. When someone asks six months later why a decision was made, you have the trail.
None of this is exotic. It is what the vampire tools don’t do, because it isn’t how they make money.
What KnowledgeFlow actually is
KnowledgeFlow is a secure, organisation-specific AI assistant that answers questions from your own documents, cites them, and stays inside your Microsoft Azure tenancy.
It isn’t a replacement for Copilot or ChatGPT. It’s the thing you use when the answer has to be right and the data has to stay put. Policy, procedure, contracts, case notes, the stuff that gets people into trouble when it’s wrong.
It is already in use across:
- Housing associations, where repairs teams use it to answer tenant queries from the policy that actually applies, and where the record of what was said and when matters under Awaab’s Law.
- Councils, where it sits on top of the shared drive nobody wants to open and finds the live version of the document, not the three dead ones.
- Schools and colleges, where staff get answers from their own policies without emailing the one person who remembers.
- The NHS, where the question is almost always “what does our guidance say” and the answer almost always has to be traceable.
More than fifty organisations and six hundred assistants later, nobody has been bitten.
Garlic is an optional extra
You don’t need to ban AI. Your staff are using it because it helps, and banning it just moves it onto their phones. What you need is a version of it that follows vampire rules: invited in, kept to the rooms you allow, and gone by morning with nothing in its pockets.
Stakes not required. Garlic is optional.
If your people are using AI with fangs, we should talk.
