AI & privacy¶
Tessio includes an optional AI assistant ("Tess") for ticket triage, summaries, draft replies, similar-ticket search, and a natural-language "Ask Tess" search. This page describes what leaves your instance when AI is enabled, and the guardrails that protect personal data.
AI is opt-in¶
AI is disabled by default. No data is sent anywhere until an administrator enables it in Settings → Tess AI and supplies an OpenAI API key. Each feature (summary, draft, triage, similar search, ask) is toggled individually. If you leave AI off, Tessio makes no external model calls at all.
The provider is OpenAI. The API key you enter is encrypted at rest with your
TESSIO_SECRET_KEY and is never returned to the browser.
What is sent to OpenAI¶
When a feature is enabled, the relevant ticket text is sent to OpenAI to produce that result:
| Feature | Sent to OpenAI |
|---|---|
| Triage | Ticket title + description |
| Summary | Ticket title + description + comment text |
| Draft reply | Ticket title + description + comment text |
| Similar tickets | Ticket title + description (as an embedding) |
| Ask Tess | Your question + matching ticket titles |
PII redaction guardrail¶
Before any of the above leaves your instance, Tessio scrubs common personal
identifiers and replaces them with placeholders ([REDACTED_EMAIL],
[REDACTED_SSN], [REDACTED_PHONE], [REDACTED_CARD]):
- Email addresses
- US Social Security numbers
- Phone numbers
- Credit-card numbers (validated with the Luhn checksum)
The same redaction is applied to AI-derived data that Tessio stores — the triage reasoning note and the vector embeddings — so raw PII is never persisted by the AI pipeline either.
This guardrail is always on and cannot be disabled, and it is boundary-only: it never alters the original ticket. An agent or HR user still sees the real values in the ticket record; the redaction applies only to what is sent to or derived by the model.
Best-effort detection
Redaction is pattern-based and tuned to catch the common formats of each identifier while avoiding false positives on things like ticket numbers and dates. It is not a guarantee against every obfuscated variant (for example, a number spelled out in words). For the strongest assurance that no personal data reaches a third party, leave AI disabled.
Turning AI off¶
To stop all external model calls, switch off Enable Tess AI in Settings → Tess AI (or never enable it). No further data is sent once it is off. Embeddings created while AI was on remain in your database — they are derived from already-redacted text — and are removed together with their tickets when those tickets are deleted.