In An Era of DIY AI, KnowHow Is Doubling Down on Security & Privacy

Artificial Intelligence is everywhere right now, and for good reason. From asking ChatGPT to draft an email to using AI copilots in spreadsheets to searching the internet in new ways, these tools have quietly become part of our everyday workflow.

But as is often the case, many of the impressive conveniences of AI, especially custom-built GPTs trained on company data, policies, and internal documentation, have significant privacy trade-offs that can leave companies exposed and giving inaccurate information to their frontline staff.

In light of this, KnowHow is proud to announce its SOC II Type 1 Certification, a significant milestone in its lifelong commitment to upholding customer security and privacy as paramount. From strict internal security protocols to data segregation, KnowHow stands in stark contrast to publicly available tools like ChatGPT and Gemini, which train their models on uploaded data, are known to hallucinate (i.e., make up answers), and have very few enterprise access controls.

In this article, we’ll walk through KnowHow’s privacy and security protocols and how they compare to other seemingly convenient tools that treat data privacy as an afterthought.

DIY GPTs: What Most People Miss

Some leaders at smaller restoration companies are giving their technicians access to ChatGPT (or a similar tool) and telling them to just ask the chatbot any questions they have. Others are building custom GPTs, which feed custom data, instructions, policies, and procedures to produce more specific results. On the surface, these can seem like clever shortcuts.

However, these models are not built with data security or privacy as a cornerstone, and as a result, there are significant risks these companies undertake when giving their team access to publicly available AI tools:

• You don’t control where that data is going. Once you upload it, you’ve lost control of what you’ve put into it. Conversations with these publicly available AI tools are not deleted, and instead are often used to train future AI models.  This means your private company information could be surfaced to another user, even the company down the street. In an industry where many companies take pride in their “secret sauce”, freely giving it away to AI models to train their data on is counterintuitive.
• You can’t control what it says. AI hallucinations (false information from AI) are a common occurrence. That chatbot might pull something from the internet, or misinterpret a prompt, and confidently tell your tech to take the wrong step, putting a project, a contract, or even someone’s safety at risk. And when something goes wrong, there’s no audit trail to review what was said, by whom, or why.
• You might be violating copyright law. Even if you remove logos and footers, or strip PDF passwords, uploading proprietary documents — like IICRC standards — into a third-party AI tool is often a breach of license. And legally, the liability doesn’t fall on the tool. It falls on you.
• You lose visibility and control. With DIY AI tools, there’s no insight into how your team is using them. You don’t know what questions they’re asking. You can’t ensure they’re getting the right answer, or a GPT fabrication that sounds smart. You don’t know if they’re using it at all. If a team member leaves your company, they can walk out with all your data and policies as well.

It’s easy to assume that a DIY solution gives you more control. In reality, it removes the guardrails entirely and can open you up to huge liability. For industries like restoration, where accuracy, liability, and clearly recorded paper trails matter, that’s a risk that companies can’t afford to take.

So what’s the solution?

Clearly, it’s not avoiding AI altogether. It’s choosing AI that’s purpose-built, properly governed, and deeply aligned with how your business actually works.

How KnowHow Was Built Differently

Restorers need a tool they can rely on that delivers clear, trusted answers to their staff out on the jobsite and in the office.

That’s what KnowHow is built for.

When a technician on your team opens KnowHow, they’re not asking some open-ended chatbot a question and hoping for the best. They’re searching through a living, breathing hub of your company’s documented SOPs, best practices, safety procedures, and carrier-specific workflows. What they see isn’t generic advice; it’s your company’s way of doing things.

And because KnowHow is used by everyone from field techs to back office staff, everything is permissioned. Team members only see what they need to see, and content can be surfaced, hidden, or restricted based on roles, regions, or tags. That means no confusion, no outdated attachments floating around, and no accidental oversharing of sensitive info.

All of this is powered by an AI assistant (Howie) that pulls directly from your company’s knowledge. Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Your data stays your data. Nothing you upload is used to train our AI models. Period. We use only anonymized, internal data fine-tuned to restoration-specific scenarios — to ensure the answers we generate are based on your real processes, not public guesses.
• You’re always in control. Want to restrict a process to only your managers? Done. Make it unsearchable? Easy. Tag-based visibility, permission settings, and content controls are all built in because every team runs differently, and your data should follow your structure. When team members leave, they lose access to your company's content as well.
• You can track how your team engages with your content. KnowHow gives you visibility into what’s being used, when, and by whom — so you can see what’s working, identify knowledge gaps, and make better decisions about training and support.
• Howie doesn’t hallucinate. Our AI isn’t pulling information from the internet, Reddit, or outdated blogs. It’s tuned to deliver grounded, actionable answers — based on your actual standards and the best practices and documents that you’ve uploaded.

And when your team is relying on KnowHow to store and deliver the most critical information in your business, trust in the platform isn’t optional.

It’s exactly why we didn’t just build for convenience. We built for confidence.

From how your data is stored and accessed, to how we monitor and recover it in the rare event of an issue, security has been baked into KnowHow from day one. And to make that trust tangible, we

decided to meet one of the most rigorous security and privacy frameworks in the industry: SOC 2.

SOC 2: What it Actually Means (And Why It Matters)

SOC 2 is a security and privacy framework that governs how companies manage sensitive customer data. Everything from how you onboard employees, to how you store and delete documents, to how you respond to emergencies.

There are five trust principles in SOC 2: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy. KnowHow’s compliance is centered on security, which means we’re required to:

• Review system access permissions every quarter
• Maintain detailed audit logs and change tracking
• Conduct ongoing risk assessments and penetration tests
• Back up data in secure, monitored data centers
• Maintain high availability with disaster recovery systems (99.98% uptime, with a 24-hour recovery point in the worst case)
• Follow strict authentication protocols when building and maintaining software

In short, SOC 2 is about building trust into every layer of the product and proving it through an external audit.

The Bottom Line

Custom GPTs and general-purpose tools may seem like an easy solution, but they come with hidden risks of data exposure, legal liability, unreliable answers, and zero visibility into how they’re used. For restoration leaders, that’s a gamble you can’t afford.

That’s why we built KnowHow to meet a higher standard.

Becoming SOC 2 compliant requires KnowHow to implement and maintain the kinds of controls, protocols, and safeguards that serious enterprise vendors demand: this includes quarterly access reviews, intrusion detection systems, full audit trails, disaster recovery procedures, secure data centers, and airtight authentication practices. All reviewed and validated by a third-party auditor.

Want to see what secure, purpose-built AI looks like in action?

Book a demo with our team and see how KnowHow helps restoration companies train faster, work safer, and scale with confidence.