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Customize conversational AI

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Custom instructions let you shape how conversational AI answers questions across your organization. Use them to teach conversational AI your vocabulary, state which asset types to prefer or exclude, and set the response language.

Before writing instructions, see Custom instructions for conversational AI to understand how they work, what patterns to use, and what to avoid.

Prerequisites​

Before you begin, make sure you have:

  • Admin access: you must be an Atlan admin who can access Settings and Labs.
  • Conversational AI enabled for your tenant. See Set up conversational AI.

Set custom instructions​

  1. In your Atlan workspace, click Settings from the left menu.
    • If you are using the Old UI (Classic), go to Admin settings from the left navigation panel.
  2. Click Labs and find the Atlan AI section.
  3. For Customize Conversational AI, click Add instructions.
  4. In the Enhance chat responses dialog, for Custom instructions for chat, write your instructions—one rule per line.
  5. Click Save.

Changes apply to conversations started after you save. Open a new chat to test them—an in-progress conversation keeps the instructions it started with.

Conversational AI and enrichment use separate instructions

Customize Conversational AI shapes chat answers. Customize Atlan AI, in the same Labs section, shapes generated descriptions, READMEs, and other enrichment suggestions. Setting one doesn't change the other.

Test your changes​

Custom instructions affect every user, so treat a change as a change to production:

  1. Write down five to ten questions your users actually ask, and note the current answers.
  2. Save your instruction change.
  3. Start a new conversation and re-ask the same questions.
  4. Compare. Check that the intended rule fired, and that unrelated answers didn't get worse.
  5. If answers degraded, remove the most recent instruction and re-test. Introducing rules a few at a time makes it obvious which one caused a regression.

Pay particular attention to questions that worked before your change. The cost of a bad instruction shows up as broad, gradual degradation rather than as an obvious error.

Next steps​