// case study
Business Chat
A private AI assistant that organisations can roll out with confidence. It runs inside their own Azure environment, respects their identity and security rules, and stays fast and practical for everyday work.
- timeline
- 2025
- role
- Founder & sole engineer
- cloud
- Microsoft Azure
- identity
- Entra ID SSO
Business Chat answering in real time, with the model picker and sidebar tools
// the problem
Teams wanted AI. IT needed control.
Consumer AI tools spread through organisations faster than IT can approve them. People paste internal documents into public chatbots because there's no sanctioned alternative, and security teams are left choosing between blocking AI and accepting the risk.
Business Chat was my answer: a product that gives teams a genuinely good AI assistant while letting the organisation keep ownership of the environment, the data and the rules. I designed, built and shipped it on my own.
// what it does
Runs in the customer's tenant
Deployed into the organisation's own Azure subscription, so the cloud resources, networking and data all stay theirs, with infrastructure and model costs paid directly to the providers.
Identity and access built in
Single sign-on with Entra ID, with users and groups deciding who can use which models, tools and integrations, in line with existing policies.
Model choice, not lock-in
Admins choose which models are available (GPT, Gemini and others) and can offer different options to different teams, switching as the landscape moves.
Knowledge and integrations
Document upload for grounded Q&A, image generation and business systems connected through MCP, all governed by the same access rules.
// in use
Generating a campaign visual from an uploaded logo, using Gemini
// design decisions
- Customer-hosted, not SaaS
- Many organisations can't send internal data to a third-party platform. Running in their tenant removes that blocker entirely.
- Updates on the customer's terms
- New versions are published, but each organisation decides when to roll out, which matters for change-controlled IT teams.
- Usage and insights
- Admins can see adoption and usage across teams, which is what turns a pilot into a business case.
// stack
- Azure
- Entra ID
- Azure OpenAI
- Gemini
- MCP
- React
- Next.js
- TypeScript
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