AI Features FAQ
- Which PocketPlatform features are powered by AI?
- User Recommendations and the App Assistant use AI, along with your content, to generate recommendations and answers to app users.
- Where is the content sourced from?
- Generated recommendations and Assistant answers are grounded entirely in your MinistryPlatform data and nothing else. The features cannot browse the internet, so there would never be any recommendations for anything outside of your church's environment. The Assistant cannot search the web or answer open-domain questions. If the answer isn't in your content, the AI is instructed to say so rather than guess.
- How often is the information refreshed and regenerated?
- Each night, we index events, groups, opportunities, sermons, and announcements so the AI can find them by meaning rather than by keyword. Because it's a nightly refresh, something your team adds today becomes available in the AI tomorrow.
- What information can the AI access?
- To personalize recommendations and answers, MinistryPlatform builds a short profile of the authorized user. It deliberately uses coarsened information, meaning the data has been generalized into broader categories or approximations. This includes:
- Age range (not date of birth)
- Gender
- Marital status (but not anniversary date)
- Household makeup - relationships and children's age ranges
- Groups the user is currently in and groups they've been in previously
- City and state only (never a street address)
We specifically exclude names, street addresses, exact dates of birth, email addresses, phone numbers, and any giving or financial data. The user's precise coordinates are used server-side only to compute how far away a group is and are never included in what the AI can access.
The Recommendations feature never sees any text a user enters into the Assistant. It only ever works with MinistryPlatform content and the user's coarsened profile information.
The Assistant can look up two things about the authenticated user (only when they request it): their own event registrations and recent attendance and their own progress through journeys and milestones. A user can never ask about other members, including members of their own household.
- What guardrails are in place to protect our data?
- We have strict standards about the security of personal and sensitive information. On the backend, we're using a version of Claude AI, which never has direct access to information about any user.
Everything runs inside our own AWS environment on Amazon Bedrock. AWS guardrails provide protection for users and churches. Your member data is never sent to a third-party AI provider and isn't used to train anyone's models.
Additionally, every AI call passes through a managed guardrail with a few layers:- Content filtering on what goes in and what comes out – Hate, insults, sexual content, violence, and misconduct are filtered in both directions.
- PII protection – Social Security numbers and credit/debit card numbers are blocked outright. Email addresses and phone numbers are automatically masked, so a user who entered "email me at ..." still gets a helpful answer, with the address redacted.
- Prompt-injection detection on user input – A user can't talk the Assistant out of its instructions.
- Cost controls – Each app has a monthly usage ceiling. If you reach it, app users get a polite message that the AI-powered feature is temporarily unavailable.
- Who can use the AI-powered features in PocketPlatform?
- Only authenticated app users can use these features. Furthermore, you can limit usage to specific users in the App Manager.
- How do we enable an AI-powered feature?
- Contact Support to enable Recommendations and/or the Assistant. They can help you place the Recommendations screen where you want it and customize your Assistant before you make it available.
If needed, you can limit access to each of these features so it only shows up for certain users. This is useful if you want staff to test it out before you release a feature to everyone.