Three common approaches
First: paste documents into chat. Fast, but hard to control who pasted what; answers can’t write back to systems; unfit for confidential data.
Second: vendor enterprise plans or project spaces. Fine for small-team trials—still check whether data may be retained and whether it connects to your permissions.
Third: build your own—documents into your retrieval, questions through your APIs, answers in your admin. That’s what most companies mean by “connecting internal data.”
Minimum components for a self-built setup
Login and permissions, an updatable document store, retrieval, model calls, source display, and logging. Missing any of these, it’s still a demo.
Leaf Technology first confirms whether data can be organized and whether third-party APIs allow the needed usage, then assesses a PoC or production system.
Author
葉科技
With 13+ years of software development experience, we focus on AI system integration and Web systems. Founded in 2022, our work includes our own AI video SaaS (Mofly AI), a personality-quiz Web product (MindTest AI), an enterprise AI assistant (Leaf AI Workspace), membership and inventory systems and admin backends, plus embedding recognition capabilities into existing products.
FAQ
Do we have to use OpenAI?
No. Gemini, Claude, or other models can be swapped by data region, price, and task—the key is permissions and data flow on the system side.
Next, see AI System Integration, or read the Related case studies.