A knowledge base that people can read and assistants can't is doing half its job. Connecting them is usually an afternoon. For the step-by-step version, see Connect Claude to your everyday tools . - Connect the four places: knowledge base, project tool, cloud storage, chat.
- Start with the knowledge base. Highest value, lowest risk, and it tells you immediately where your knowledge is thin, because the assistant will be confidently wrong about exactly the things you never wrote down.
- Connect your role management too. An assistant that knows who does what can answer "who should I ask about this", which is the most asked question in any growing team.
- Ask it questions you already know the answer to first. That is how you learn what it can and cannot be trusted with.
On privacy, be proportionate. Your documents are almost certainly already sitting with a large cloud provider, and the assistant vendors offer the same class of contractual protections.
Check that business terms apply to your account and that your data is not used for training, keep genuinely sensitive material out of the connected surface (personnel files, beneficiary data, anything held under a duty of confidence), and don't let a theoretical worry about the assistant distract you from the much larger real risk, which is that only one person knows how your organization works.
What you keep out of the connected surface depends on who you serve. Write down where you drew the line and why.