Using the Advisor

What is the Advisor?

The Advisor is an AI assistant grounded in Nia's impact-investing knowledge base and your fund's own uploaded documents. It answers questions about:

• ESG best practice and standards — climate, labour, gender, grievance mechanisms and more
• Your fund's own policies, once you upload them to the Policy Hub
• How to implement impact-investing practice
• Nia's playbooks and guidance on fund management

The Advisor retrieves before it answers: it searches the knowledge base for relevant passages, then composes an answer grounded in them. Every answer carries citations you can check.

Asking a question

1. Go to Nia Advisor in the sidebar.
2. You will see a chat interface with suggested starter questions.
3. Type your question and press Enter.

Answers stream as they are produced, and the chat shows which specialist area is answering — questions are routed to the most relevant playbook rather than searched across all of them at once, and that routing keeps itself current as the library changes.

Good questions to ask:

• "What does Nia's guidance recommend for measuring climate risk?"
• "What is our fund's exclusion list?" (after uploading the policy to the Policy Hub)
• "How should we design a grievance mechanism?"
• "What is the 2X Criteria and how do we apply it?"

Tips for better answers:

• Be specific. "How should we measure climate risk in portfolio companies?" beats "tell me about climate."
• Upload your fund's policies first, so the Advisor can cite your documents alongside Nia's guidance.
• The Advisor distinguishes a factual lookup in your own documents from a request for advice, and answers each differently — phrase the question the way you mean it.

Answers are written to be readable: bullets and numbering rather than walls of prose.

Attaching a document to a conversation

You can attach a document to a conversation and have the Advisor review it — useful for a draft policy or a document you have not added to the Policy Hub.

Out-of-scope questions

The Advisor is honest about the limits of its knowledge. Ask something outside Nia's knowledge base — live market data, current news, weather, or anything unrelated to impact investing — and you get a clear refusal:

"I don't have enough verified information in the Nia knowledge base to answer that reliably. Please contact the Nia team for guidance on this topic."

It will not speculate or answer from general knowledge, and a declined response carries no citations.

Conversation history and retention

Conversations are saved so you can return to earlier questions and answers.

Conversations are retained for twelve months, after which they and their attachments are purged automatically. Conversations that existed before this window was introduced keep their original longer retention. The retention period is shown in the Advisor screen.

Next steps

• Citations & Sources — how to read and verify answers.
• Usage Caps — monthly run allowances and what counts as a run.