Industries / Energy and utilities
Answers the control room can trust.
You run critical infrastructure under rules you did not write. Every answer your AI gives names the procedure it came from, and its revision. Cognatum supports reliable infrastructure management.
Without Cognatum
Which revision is at the site?
“I am told to adopt new tools on insane timelines, then blamed when the data is messy.”
Before an assistant reaches an operating team, compliance asks where its answers came from and whether every site is on the same revision.
Procedures live in several systems and disagree. A site follows a superseded revision because the update never reached it.
An assistant reading uncontrolled content answers from a draft on a shared drive and a note somebody wrote after an outage.
A procedure is revised and the sites still working from the old one keep getting the old answer, because nothing connects the two. Nobody approved those answers and no record says who was told what.
Verbal authorization from the control room is sufficient, and the written form can follow within the shift.
No source · no approver · no date
Why this industry
The properties an audit expects.
An audit does not ask whether the answer sounded right. It asks what the answer rested on, who approved that, and whether the evidence was made at the time.
- Attributable. Every approval is tied to an identified person, not to a shared account or a mailbox nobody owns.
- Made as the work happens. Evidence is written as events occur, rather than assembled in the weeks before an audit.
- Bounded. A live index of everything the utility has ever written is not a defined input. A set of approved, numbered entries is.
- Restricted. Information about your own systems is served by clearance, and a refusal is recorded with who asked and when.
What we will not claim
None of this makes your organization compliant with any reliability standard, and we will not tell you it does. Standards are enforced against registered entities, not against the tools they buy.
What Cognatum supplies is evidence toward obligations you already carry: numbered entries, approvals attached to named people, a change history, and a record of who was refused.
Which retention period applies to client trade communications?
Entry SOP-4471
- v4 In force
Retention extended to seven years for client trade communications.
D. Whitfield, Records management · 2026-07-02
- v3 Superseded · retained
Chat channels brought into scope.
D. Whitfield, Records management · 2025-11-14
- v2 Superseded · retained
Exception process added for legal hold.
M. Alvarez, Compliance · 2025-03-09
- v1 Superseded · retained
First approved version.
M. Alvarez, Compliance · 2024-06-18
→ what the entry said on a date is a lookup
With Cognatum
Five things that need approving.
What an assistant answers from at a utility is not one kind of thing. Five classes carry a control duty of their own.
Operating procedures
The revision in force
Ask what to do and the answer comes from the revision in force at that site, with a named approver on it, not from whichever copy ranked first.
Restricted information
Answers stop at the boundary
What comes back is decided by who is asking, at the point the answer is made. A refusal is recorded rather than silent.
Audit evidence
Written as it happens
Access records, reviews and approvals are asked for by period. Kept per entry and per version, a period is a query rather than a project.
Design basis
Why the plant is like that
What was designed, and why, is knowledge other work depends on. It is served the way it was written down and approved.
Regulatory commitments
What you told the regulator
A filing or a commitment binds you afterwards. Answering from approved entries means the answer matches what was actually submitted.
Why not search
A document store is not an answer store.
You already run a controlled document system, and it does its job. The gap sits one level below it.
AI systems do not serve documents. They serve answers pulled out of documents, and that extraction is where control is lost.
A system of record stores the approved answer itself, numbered, approved, and carrying the controlled document behind it.
Cognatum governs the entry
source · version · approver · permissions
Frameworks
What each framework asks.
| Instrument | What it asks of you | What we supply toward it |
|---|---|---|
| NERC CIP-003 | Documented security management controls, with a senior manager accountable for them. | A named person approves each entry before it can be served, and the name travels with every answer built on it. |
| NERC CIP-004 | That access is granted on the basis of need, and revoked when the need ends. | Access to an entry is decided by clearance at the AI layer, not only at the document store it originated in. |
| NERC CIP-011 | That information about your cyber systems is identified and protected from unauthorized disclosure. | Retrieval and answers are gated by clearance, and every refusal is recorded with who asked and when. |
| FERC-approved reliability standards | That evidence of what you did is retained and produced on audit. | Each entry keeps its versions and its approvals, so producing what was live on a given date is a lookup. |
| 10 CFR Part 50, Appendix B | For nuclear operators, that documents prescribing work are reviewed and approved by authorized personnel before release. | Approval is recorded on the entry with the approver, the date and the source, and superseded revisions are retained rather than overwritten. |
This table describes obligations that fall on your organization, and the evidence Cognatum produces toward them. It is not a claim of certification or conformity, ours or yours.
In practice
Which procedure applies at that site?
A regional operations team needs the current procedure for a switching task, and the last revision never reached their site.
They ask, and the answer comes from the revision in force, with its effective date and the person who approved it attached.
The passages that must not be reworded come back as written, because a paraphrase of a clearance rule is a different rule.
Before the audit, compliance reads the usage and conflict reports rather than assembling evidence from scratch.
Returned word for word
“No work shall begin on this equipment until the clearance is issued and the holder has verified the isolation points at the device. Verbal authorization alone is not sufficient.”
D-207 · v5
- Field procedure Unchanged
- Control room display Unchanged
- AI assistant Refused
What was refused
Asked to send “confirmed isolation on the display” in place of “verified the isolation points at the device”. Rewording approved text is refused, not corrected.
Common questions
What compliance teams ask first.
What do we show an auditor who asks how AI answers are controlled?
The record. Every entry the assistant answers from carries a named approver, an approval date, a version history, and the source behind it. You produce the entry, who approved it, when it changed, and what it said on any given date.
Our procedures live in a controlled document system. Why another store?
That system governs the document. AI does not serve documents, it serves answers taken out of them, and that extraction is where control is lost. This governs the answer, and records the controlled document behind it.
How is information about our own systems kept out of an answer?
Clearance is evaluated when the answer is assembled, against the person asking. What they are not cleared for does not appear, and the refusal is recorded with who asked and when.
Does this make us compliant with the reliability standards?
No, and no software can. Standards are enforced against registered entities and assessed on how you operate. What you get is evidence toward that: numbered entries, approvals attributed to identified people, and a change history.
A procedure was revised. How do the sites stop using the old one?
The moment the new entry is approved it is what the assistant serves, on every channel and at every site at once. The old revision is archived with the dates it applied, so a question about last year still has an answer.
Who approves an entry, operations or compliance?
Your organization decides, per class of entry. What does not vary is the mechanism: an approval is a named person and a date, and nothing is served that has not passed one.
Knowledge governed. Intelligence everywhere.
See it on your own content, in your own environment.