Tillion is an AI-driven assistant specializing in legal, privacy, compliance, and data security. It functions like a knowledgeable colleague who can instantly answer questions, analyze documents, and ensure regulatory requirements are met. At Tillion, we don’t just build this powerful tool for others - we rely on Tillion internally every day. We leverage our own AI assistant across all teams - from legal and compliance to engineering and HR. By automating routine tasks, consolidating critical data, and providing our own team with instant answers, Tillion ensures smoother workflows, stronger compliance, and more informed (and faster!) decision-making throughout the company.
In this post we’ll explore how we apply Tillion’s capabilities in-house and how that self-use enhances our speed, efficiency and trust.
Tillion’s conversational interface lets our team members ask questions in their own language and get instant answers based on our internal knowledge. Whether it’s clarifying a section of our data retention policy, assessing how we protect customer data, or analyzing contractual obligations, employees can simply ask Tillion and receive accurate, contextualized responses drawn from company policies, agreements, past decisions, and best practices. This not only saves time compared to searching manuals or asking around but also ensures that the answers are more accurate and aligned with our latest internal knowledge and best practices.
For example, a developer can ask, “Do we allow use of personal devices for work email?” and Tillion will immediately answer based on our IT and privacy policies, citing the relevant section for reference.
Another example is when our legal team wants to determine when a lease agreement will be terminated and calculate the lease costs for the upcoming year. By simply asking Tillion: "What are the termination dates of our lease agreements, and what will our total lease expenses be for the next 12 months?" Tillion will then retrieve the relevant information from contracts and provide an instant, structured response.
We have integrated Tillion with multiple internal data sources – from our legal document repository and version-controlled policies to our vendor databases and even our code. Additionally, Tillion holds the latest applicable regulations and laws, ensuring that compliance-related queries always reflect the most up-to-date legal landscape. Tillion consolidates this information into a unified Data Room, meaning that when it answers questions or analyzes a scenario, it draws on all relevant data at once. Internally, this has broken down silos between departments, allowing our legal team’s documents, security team’s reports, and privacy team’s guidelines to live under one AI-driven system.
For example, when preparing a compliance report or answering a complex query such as “Which vendors handle personal data and have signed our DPA?”, Tillion pulls the needed facts from various systems and presents a cohesive answer. This single source of truth improves our data governance, ensures consistency, and prevents outdated information from being used in decision-making.
Tillion’s AI is built with knowledge of major regulatory and security frameworks, including GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, ISO 27001, SOC 2, and industry-specific standards. However, Tillion does not just rely on static configurations - it is actively being updated with new regulations as they emerge, ensuring that any guidance or analysis provided is aligned with the most current legal and compliance requirements.
Internally, this capability is like having an ever-vigilant compliance officer monitoring all activities. For instance, if our product team is discussing a new feature that affects user data, they can consult Tillion about relevant privacy laws. Tillion might remind them about a GDPR provision or our own data handling standards that apply, ensuring regulatory adherence by design.
Additionally, when we audit our processes, Tillion can quickly map each practice to the required controls in frameworks like SOC 2 or ISO 27001, highlighting any gaps. This built-in expertise gives our team confidence that we remain compliant with evolving laws and standards and even helped us obtain our SOC 2 type 2 certification and maintain it with minimal effort.
Legal teams are always understaffed and overburdened with questions and tasks. Since Tillion serves as our Conversational Data Room - holding our internal legal documents as well as external laws and regulations that impact us - it serves as our "first line of defense" for all legal, compliance, privacy and security questions. While Tillion does not give a legal advice, it’s phenomenal at providing accurate and fast answers to complex queries, enhancing the ability of our internal team members, who then add their (human) judgment to Tillion's (AI) answers and get enhanced by Tillion as their smart assistant.
When our team needs external advice (for example - from our external law firm), we share the question directly from Tillion together with the answer that Tillion already provided and the highlighted references that Tillion included in its answer. This creates massive efficiencies, as our external counsels start with the answer + references, instead of having an open question. The result is faster turnaround and much lower legal bills, effectively enabling humans to tackle high level, strategic aspects (with Tillion's assistance) and completely removing all simple, tactical and repetitive tasks since Tillion fully handles them.
In short, Tillion enhances our teams’ capabilities and created a robust three lines of defense framework:
Managing the deluge of documents – contracts, policies, compliance reports, meeting notes, and agreements - is a challenge for any organization. Tillion’s AI helps us tackle this by intelligently analyzing, categorizing, and organizing documents. We routinely upload important documents into Tillion (or it syncs and ingests them directly from our systems), where it then tags and extracts key insights from each file, provides automated summaries and instantly answers questions. Employees can quickly navigate our document repository by category or search for specific provisions without having to read everything.
For example, when our sales team wants to quickly identify the revenue-sharing terms in a set of recently signed partnership agreements, they can ask Tillion: "Summarize the revenue-sharing clauses from our last five partnership contracts". Tillion will instantly extract and summarize the key provisions, eliminating the need to manually sift through dozens of pages and ensuring critical details are surfaced immediately. Similarly, our legal team might upload a new vendor contract, and Tillion will automatically tag it as a 'Vendor Agreement', highlight key clauses such as data protection terms, termination dates, and liabilities, and even flag any unusual terms for review.
Additionally, Tillion can highlight potential risks in deal documents, such as unusual termination clauses, liability limitations, or conflicting obligations. It ensures that compliance officers and legal teams focus on strategic review rather than manual data extraction, improving both efficiency and accuracy in contract management. When it’s time to summarize a policy or prepare training materials, Tillion can generate a quick digest of the relevant documents, further streamlining document-heavy workflows.
One reason Tillion stands out is its contextual understanding of the legal, privacy, and security domain. Beyond just knowing our internal info, we’ve trained Tillion on general industry knowledge and best practices. We benefit from this dual expertise on a daily basis. For instance, if our privacy team asks, “What are the best practices for handling data subject access requests under GDPR?” Tillion can answer with a mix of our company’s procedure and the broader industry guidelines, citing relevant regulatory context.
It can even advise on trends - like noting a new state privacy law that might impact our operations. This contextual awareness means Tillion doesn’t operate in a vacuum, it gives recommendations with real-world perspective. For decision-makers, having an AI assistant that understands the nuances of their field is like consulting an expert colleague who’s always available and is always up-to-date.
This expertise is particularly useful when handling negotiations or conducting risk assessments. For example, when evaluating a potential acquisition deal, Tillion can analyze historical agreements and industry trends to highlight potential risks or advantages. It ensures that our legal and business teams operate with data-backed insights rather than guesswork.
Anyone who has dealt with vendor security assessments, compliance questionnaires and more recently - DORA questionnaires, knows how time-consuming and even frustrating they can be. They are long (often hundreds of questions) and are used by prospective clients to evaluate aspects such as security and privacy practices. They represent a recurring burden for many organizations, frequently changing and requiring businesses to stay up-to-date with evolving requirements. Tillion completely automates this process by filling out security questionnaires based on the most up-to-date internal and regulatory information.
For example, instead of having employees spend hours manually completing a 250-question vendor security questionnaire, Tillion instantly pulls the latest compliance documentation and policy statements to generate accurate, consistent responses. When asked, “Describe your data encryption practices,” Tillion can instantly pull the precise answer from our security policy (e.g., “All customer data at rest is encrypted using AES-256, and in transit via TLS 1.2+”). It does this for question after question, filling out the form 100 times faster and more accurately. This significantly reduces the time and cost associated with compliance work while ensuring that responses always reflect the latest security standards and internal procedures.
Our compliance team reviews the responses, but that’s like taking a test when you have an answers sheet, compared to doing it on your own. They might make some edits, but when you have all answers + highlighted references to the source documents, a task that used to take days to weeks is now done within 1 hour. This capability has transformed a once tedious internal task into a quick, reliable process. We not only save significant time, but we also eliminate human errors and ensure every response is aligned with our official policies. Tillion’s success in automating our own security questionnaires is a compelling proof point when we tell clients we can help them get the same level of efficiency on both filling up and reviewing questionnaires.
Using Tillion internally has delivered massive, measurable benefits in terms of efficiency, speed, and trust:
With Tillion double-checking our work against legal and security frameworks, we operate with greater confidence in our compliance status. When new regulations or standards emerge, Tillion’s knowledge base is updated, and it helps our compliance team quickly adjust internal policies. Moreover, everyday decisions - from design choices in our product to handling a customer’s data request - are enhanced by having Tillion’s expert advice on tap. Our leadership team frequently consults Tillion for risk assessments and “what-if” analyses, knowing that the recommendations consider both our internal context and industry best practices. The end result is better, faster decisions that we and our customers can trust, backed by data and expert logic.
Tillion’s self-use story isn’t just about internal improvements – it’s a powerful proof of concept for our clients. By using our own AI assistant to run our business, we demonstrate our deep trust in Tillion’s reliability and effectiveness. This approach means we encounter scenarios our clients might face, allowing us to continuously refine the product. When we say Tillion can automate document analysis or streamline risk assessments, we have our own success stories and data to back that claim, as well as our customers’.
Industry professionals often ask whether AI solutions really live up to their promises. At Tillion, we can genuinely say yes, because we’ve seen the results first-hand.
Using Tillion internally has also driven innovation - many of Tillion’s features were honed or inspired by our internal needs before becoming client-facing offerings.
In conclusion, at Tillion we use Tillion every day, and it makes a noticeable difference.
Workflows that once bogged us down are now smooth and fast. Compliance obligations that seemed daunting are under control. Our teams collaborate better, armed with instant knowledge and insights. This not only benefits our organization but also assures our customers that Tillion is battle-tested. Clients can trust that when they adopt Tillion, they’re getting a solution that has been proven in the real world – starting in our very own offices and throughout our outstanding customer base.
