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Platform, Components, & Technology

What is the Contextual AI platform?

The Contextual AI platform is a context engineering layer for enterprise AI: it enables organizations to build specialized, production-grade AI agents that are secure, scalable, and grounded in your organizational data

How does your platform differ from generic chatbots or large language model (LLM) APIs?

Unlike generic LLMs, our platform provides a context layer, tightly integrating your private knowledge base (documents, system logs, workflows) with an LLM so the agent’s responses are grounded in your data, reducing “hallucinations” and improving relevance

What are the core capabilities of the platform?

Key capabilities include:
  • Ingesting/unifying documents into vector stores
  • Parsing and chunking unstructured data
  • Building specialized agents with RAG pipelines
  • APIs and SDKs for programmatic use
  • Enterprise-grade security, scalability and governance

What does “context engineering” mean?

Context engineering is providing agents with the right context at the right time. This includes accurately preprocessing the right data, retrieval cascades, knowledge-base architecture and workflows to operate reliably in enterprise settings, providing context (user history, organizational knowledge, document lineage) to an agent or LLM.

Use Cases & Industries

Which industries are best suited for Contextual AI?

Industries with large complex knowledge bases and/or compliance/regulatory demands: financial services, engineering/manufacturing, legal & professional services.

Can you give examples of typical Contextual AI use cases?

Some examples include:
  • Technical support agents who answer user queries with responses grounded in vast documentation.
  • Policy & procedures agent for employees: making institutional knowledge accessible via chat queries.
  • Internal knowledge agents for onboarding, reducing time-to-productivity of new hires.

How quickly can an enterprise go from concept to production?

Enterprises using our platform have reduced concept-to-production timelines significantly (e.g., as low as ~30 days for initial production deployments) in some cases.

Data

What types of data sources can I connect?

You can ingest documents (PDFs, Word, HTML), logs, databases, knowledge bases, internal wikis, cloud storage—any source of enterprise content that you wish your agents to reference.

Can I connect data from third-party data platforms and cloud providers?

Yes, supported data sources include Google Drive, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft OneDrive, and Box, with more being added continuously.

Do you train your models on our data?

No. We never use your documents, data, or interactions to train or fine-tune our underlying models. Your data remains isolated and is used only to power the AI agents you create within your own workspace.

How is our data used by the platform?

Your data is processed solely for retrieval, reasoning, and real-time inference by your agents. It is not stored for model improvement, shared with other customers, or used outside your environment.

Who owns the AI agents we build on the platform?

You do. Any agents you develop—including their configurations, behaviors, and outputs—are entirely your intellectual property.

Does the platform have any rights to our agents or data?

No. We do not claim ownership over your agents or your data. You retain full rights to everything you create and upload.

Is our data shared with other customers?

Never. Each customer environment is isolated, and your data is not accessible to or used by any other organization.

Security & Governance

How is customer data handled and protected?

Customer data is processed under the customer’s agreement, and our Platform Services process data for the benefit of the customer and their authorized users. We publish a Privacy Policy detailing how we collect, use, and share personal information.

Do you support enterprise-grade governance and access controls?

Yes, the Contextual AI platform supports role-based access, audit trails, enterprise authentication and scalability built for production enterprise use.

Does Contextual AI adhere to major security and privacy frameworks?

Yes, we design with security and privacy in mind (data residency, encryption at rest/in transit, access control) and provide documentation to support enterprise compliance needs. (Specific certifications may vary by region and customer contract.) For more information, visit the Contextual AI Trust Center.

Getting Started & Pricing

How do I get started with Contextual AI?

For a guided experience, you can request a demo. For self-serve, you can sign up, create a workspace, ingest data (documents, logs, other sources), create an agent, and start querying via the UI or API. Our Beginner’s Guide walks you through steps such as API key creation, datastore creation and querying.

Is there a free trial or credits available?

Yes, when you sign up you’ll get 25(25 (50 with a work email address) in free credits to explore the platform and build your first agent.

How is pricing structured?

Pricing is based on usage and varies by volume of queries, data ingress/egress, compute, and SLA. For more information, contact [email protected] for your usage profile and enterprise plan.

What support options are available?

We provide developer documentation (SDKs, APIs), onboarding guidance, enterprise-grade support SLAs, and professional services engagements to accelerate production deployments.

Technical Details & Integrations

Which programming languages and SDKs are supported?

Contextual AI is available via API: cURL, Python, Javascript, PHP, Go, Java, Ruby or via SDK: Python or Node.js.

Can I deploy on-premises or in my private cloud?

Yes, our architecture supports flexible and secure deployment options including fully managed cloud, private cloud, or customer VPC.

How does the Contextual AI platform scale for high-volume/real-time queries?

The Contextual AI platform is designed for production-grade reliability: auto-scaling compute for agents, vector store indexing, caching layers, and optimized retrieval pipelines to support high query volumes with low latency.

Company & Trust

Who are the founders and where is the company based?

The company was founded in 2023 by Douwe Kiela and Amanpreet Singh and is headquartered in Mountain View, California, USA.

Who are some of Contextual AI’s clients or reference customers?

Contextual AI has enterprise clients in sectors such as technology, financial services, professional services; some customers include Qualcomm, ClaimWise, Advantest, Comply, HSBC, ShipBob, Element Solution, IGS, Sevii, and others.

What is Contextual AI’s mission?

Our mission is to replace the DIY complexity of building enterprise AI by providing a unified “context layer” so that AI is accurate, secure, scalable, and specialized to business knowledge and workflows.

How do you stay ahead in AI and maintain trustworthiness of your agents?

We invest in research, model development (including grounded language models, rerankers), enterprise-grade engineering, and alignment to ensure the agents’ outputs are fact-based, cite sources when appropriate, and support audit and traceability.