Governed Solutions / System of record
Where the approved answer lives.
Cognatum is a system of record. It stores the approved answer itself. Traditional search & AI only points to an answer and cannot vouch for it.
Where the work already happens
Cognatum, the governed layer
approved · versioned · permissioned
Who asks
Who asks
Cognatum, the governed layer
approved · versioned · permissioned
Where the work already happens
Without Cognatum
Nobody approved that answer.
An AI system does not go live until a review board signs off on it.
Regulated enterprises are deploying AI assistants and agents they cannot prove are answering correctly, and their AI initiatives are stalling at governance review because of it.
Ask who approved the answer an AI assistant just gave, and the honest reply is that nobody did.
A system of record for knowledge stores the canonical, approved, versioned entry. Index-in-place tools point at content wherever it happens to live, which means they cannot version it, approve it, or attest to it.
The word for that record is provenance: who approved an entry, when, from what source, and at which version.
| Select | Title | Type | Taxonomy | Status | Expires | Reach |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Which retention period applies to client trade communications? | Q&A | Records | Approved | in 214 days | 38 | |
| Standardize retention schedules on the records policy | Decision | Compliance | Approved | in 149 days | 31 | |
| Applying a legal hold to a retention schedule | Procedure | Legal | Approved | in 24 days | 27 | |
| How long are supervisory review records kept? | Q&A | Supervision | In review | in 96 days | 18 | |
| Which regions are approved for data residency? | Q&A | Security | Stale | Expired 6 days ago | 12 | |
| Retention questions raised in the Q3 examination | Note | Compliance | Draft | No expiry | 4 |
The choice
Three ways to feed AI.
Three architectures now compete to feed enterprise AI. They differ in the one dimension that decides governance review: whether anyone can attest to what gets generated.
Architecture 01
Index in place
Leave content where it lives, crawl it, and rank it. Nothing to author, and nothing to approve.
Architecture 02
Verification workflow
Add a person who confirms on a cadence that a card is still accurate. A real improvement, and still not a record.
Architecture 03
A governed record
Store the approved entry itself and govern it, so the approval, the date, and the version belong to the answer.
The first one
What an index cannot know.
An index does not know which of the six copies of a policy is current, whether the page it just retrieved was superseded last quarter, or whether anyone with authority ever reviewed the words it hands to a model. It can point to content. It cannot vouch for it. The limit is structural, not a roadmap gap: you cannot version, approve, or attest to content you merely point at.
For disclosure language at a broker-dealer or a medical information response at a pharmaceutical company, it is the point where the AI initiative stalls: an index cannot say who approved what the AI assistant said. The trail ends at a URL, and a URL is not an approval.
Source A · Retention policy v7
Supervisory records are kept for six years.
Source B · Supervisory procedures v3
Supervisory records are kept for five years.
Neither is served as approved
The record settles it
Resolution queued for approval
Entry B supersedes A · Effective 2026-05-01 · queued
A real disagreement
Flag open
Routed to a named person · Records management
The second one
A check is not a record.
The second architecture adds a human check. This is the ground verification-workflow tools such as Guru occupy: a designated verifier confirms on a review cadence that a card of content is still accurate, and unverified cards get flagged. It is a real improvement over pointing. Someone is at least looking.
It still stops short of a governed system of record, in three specific ways.
- No answer-level provenance chain. A verified card says the card was reviewed. It does not say who stands behind the specific answer an AI assembled from it, at which version, from which source.
- No sovereign deployment. The knowledge and its history run where the vendor runs, not necessarily where a regulated customer needs them to.
- No AI running the maintenance loop. Deduplication, reconciliation, and archiving still depend on the sustained human diligence whose lapse left the knowledge ungoverned in the first place.
| SME | Department | Primary Expertise | Availability | In queue | Authority |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| D. Whitfield Head of Records Management | Records Management | Records retention and legal hold | Same Business Day 6h / wk | 3 | Can review Can approve |
| M. Alvarez Compliance Director | Compliance | Supervisory procedures and examinations | Within 2 Days 4h / wk | 0 | Can review Can approve |
| J. Park Senior Counsel | Legal | Data residency and cross-border transfer | Same Week 3h / wk | 1 | Can review |
| R. Okonjo Quality Systems Lead | Quality | Change control and deviation handling | Within 2 Days 5h / wk | 0 | Can review |
| T. Lindqvist Platform Operations Engineer | Operations | Connector configuration and access roles | Same Week 2h / wk | 0 | No review authority |
With Cognatum
Four facts on every answer.
Nothing goes live until a named person signs off, and the sign-off is recorded, so every live entry carries four facts an AI assistant inherits every time it answers from the record.
- A named approver: a person with authority put their name on this entry.
- A timestamp: when the approval happened, not when someone last happened to look.
- A source: the document or system the entry derives from.
- A version: which iteration the approval attaches to, with the history retained.
Use disclosure D-214 rev 6. It supersedes rev 5 for all retail communications and carries the current market-risk language. SOP-4471 v3
The chain
What an auditor wants.
The chip is a summary. Behind it is a chain, and the chain is what an auditor actually wants. Each link names the one below it, so a generated answer leads back to a dated decision a person made, rather than to a URL.
Superseded versions are retained rather than overwritten. That is the part that matters after the fact: the question is rarely what the entry says today, it is what it said on the day the answer went out, and who had signed off on that.
The answer, as served
Use disclosure D-214 rev 6. It supersedes rev 5 for all retail communications and carries the current market-risk language.
Asked: Which risk disclosure is approved for the retail fact sheet?
The entry and version it came from
Version v3, in force
v2 and v1 superseded and retained
The source that version derives from
SOP-4471
What version v3 was drafted from
The decision that put it in force
Approved by J. Mercer, Regulatory affairs
2026-07-14 · version v3, against SOP-4471
What the chip represents is evidence supplied toward the customer's own obligations: who approved this answer, when, and from what source.
Connected
Four flows, both directions.
- Ingest, from source systems into Cognatum over a plain API and over MCP, the open standard AI assistants use to reach outside data: raw knowledge enters from wherever work happens.
- Provide, from Cognatum to consumers over MCP and API: governed, approved entries reach people and AI.
- Write-back, from Cognatum to the source systems: corrections propagate to the place the error came from, so people stop finding the stale version.
- Usage signals, from consumers back into Cognatum: what gets used, questioned, and contradicted feeds the next cycle of the loop.
What never moves is where the truth lives. The canonical, approved, versioned entry lives in Cognatum. Other systems can reference it, cache it, or sync from it, but exactly one entry carries the approval, and every consumer, human or machine, answers from it.
Cognatum governs the entry
source · version · approver · permissions
Where it lives
And you decide where.
A governed home raises one more question: where does that home live, and who gets to connect to it? That is what Sovrinty is for. Sovrinty is the control layer on top of Cognatum, and it becomes available once your knowledge lives in Cognatum, because control needs something real to hold.
It is a separate product and this page does not sell it. What is worth knowing here is the shape of the choice it gives you, because it is the question a security review reaches within about ten minutes.
- Your hardware. The knowledge base runs in your own environment rather than ours.
- Another country. The same knowledge base, in a jurisdiction you choose.
- Another vendor. Which systems and which model providers connect to it stays your decision.
Common questions
What people ask here.
What is a knowledge management system of record?
It is the store that holds the approved answer itself, versioned, with a record of who approved it and when. A search index points at content wherever it happens to sit, which is why it cannot version that content, approve it, or say who stood behind it.
We already have enterprise search. Why is this different?
Search solves finding. This solves defending. A search box that returns the right document is a good search box, and it was never asked to vouch for what it returns.
What does an answer carry?
Four facts: the person who approved the entry, the date they approved it, the document it came from, and which version the approval attaches to. Superseded versions are maintained, so what an answer said on a date in March is a lookup.
Do we have to move our content?
No. Source systems keep their content and feed in. What moves is where the approved version lives: exactly one entry carries the approval, and every reader, human or machine, answers from that one.
Does this make us compliant with anything?
No. Standards and regulations assess organizations, not software. What you get is evidence toward duties you already carry: an approver, a date, a source, and a version on every answer provided.
Knowledge governed. Intelligence everywhere.
See it on your own content, in your own environment.