Webinar: A New Era for Finding Answers in iManage

When workloads are heavy and deadlines are tight, even saving a single step in a workflow can translate into hours gained back over the course of a week. That was the challenge covered in our recent webinar on Ask iManage, where iManage leaders explored how the agentic AI assistant is helping users move beyond search to start delivering real, contextual answers — securely, and directly inside iManage Work. 

Hosted by Director of Commerce & Operations (AI) Paul Bower, Senior Product Manager Jack Lees, and Principal Strategic Consultant Julie Huner, the session introduced the latest release of Ask iManage and unpacked what it means for organizations looking to turn the AI promise into everyday productivity. 

Why search alone is no longer enough

The webinar opened with a candid look at the current state of AI adoption across legal and knowledge-driven organizations. While generative AI tools proliferate by the day, many firms have found that pilots stall and enthusiasm fades when tools sit outside governed systems or fail to align with real workflows. 

As discussed, the issue is no longer whether AI can generate content; it clearly can. The more pressing concern is how to enable AI to reason across trusted information, understand intent, and deliver outcomes without introducing new risk. That shift in expectations has paved the way for agentic AI and agentic search. 

From keywords to reasoning

A central theme of the webinar was the evolution of search itself. Traditional search requires users to know the right keywords, apply filters, and manually review results. Even more advanced AI search often stops at a single-shot answer or a list of relevant documents that must be manually reviewed. 

Ask iManage goes beyond those limitations. By applying reasoning and multi-step analysis, it’s designed to understand what a user is really asking, locate the right information across the document management system, and synthesize a cited response. Instead of wading through dozens of files, users can issue prompts such as: “What are the limitations of liability terms in the ACME agreement?” or “Find the employment contract for John Smith.” 

In response, Ask iManage delivers clear, contextual answers grounded in the source documents and presented in a way that supports confident decision-making. 

Agentic search in action

The live walkthrough explored how this approach changes everyday work. Rather than forcing professionals to guess which terms were used in a document or how content was tagged, Ask iManage reasons across the entire library. It can compare clauses, identify patterns, and surface insights that would otherwise require hours of manual effort. 

This is where the concept of agentic search becomes tangible: the system doesn’t just retrieve information; it plans the steps needed to answer the question, validates findings, and presents a synthesized result with citations. The outcome is faster access to collective knowledge without sacrificing accuracy or control. 

Built for trust, by design

Security and governance were recurring priorities discussed throughout the session. One of the most common barriers to AI adoption has been the risk introduced when documents leave a governed environment. Ask iManage addresses this directly. 

Because it is seamlessly integrated into Work, documents never leave the platform. There is no additional infrastructure to deploy, no external system to manage, and no compromise to existing security models. Organizations benefit from advanced AI-driven reasoning while maintaining the controls and protections they trust today. 

What this means for your organization

The webinar concluded with a look ahead at how Ask iManage can support broader transformation efforts. By reducing friction in everyday tasks, Ask iManage helps professionals focus less on finding information and more on applying it. By embedding AI where work already happens, it also supports adoption without disruption. 

For firms evaluating how to operationalize AI in a secure, practical way, Ask iManage offers a clear path forward: one grounded in real workflows, trusted content, and measurable time savings. 

View full webinar on demand

This recap only scratches the surface. To see Ask iManage in action, hear directly from the product and AI leaders behind it, and explore the latest enhancements in more detail, we invite you to watch the full webinar on demand.

Top 3 questions addressed during the webinar

1. How does Ask iManage search work? Is it keyword search, semantic search, or RAG? 

Answer: Ask iManage uses an agent-based architecture — not a pure keyword search, not a traditional RAG system. The agent interprets natural language to understand what you're really asking, then formulates targeted searches using keywords, Boolean operators, metadata filters, and the Work 10 search infrastructure. It searches iteratively, evaluates results, refines its approach, and reads retrieved documents to extract and synthesize information. It's best described as agentic AI: it reasons about your question and adapts its strategy rather than just matching terms. 

2. Does Ask iManage respect document permissions, ACLs, ethical walls, and SPM policies? 

Answer: Yes — this is fundamental to how Ask iManage works. All ACLs, document permissions, SPM policies, information barriers, and ethical walls are fully respected at query time. Users will only see content they have authorized access to. No separate security configuration is required — Ask iManage inherits the iManage comprehensive security framework automatically. If a user doesn't have access to a document, Ask iManage will not surface it. 

3. What is the level of effort to implement Ask iManage? 

Answer: Turnkey. Turn it on in cloudimanage.com and make it available — no re-indexing, no migration, no additional infrastructure required. All processing occurs within dedicated Azure OpenAI instances in the iManage secure boundary, with zero additional configuration needed.