How CDIA works

Step 1. Select the project evidence

Create a project for the matter. Add documents in three categories: Project Records (correspondence, emails, meeting minutes, site diaries, instructions, applications, certificates, scanned papers), Reports (expert and consultant reports, claims, witness statements) and Contract (the contract, its schedules and amendments).

You can add files or whole folders, and your folder structure is kept. Everything is copied in; your originals are never moved or changed. CDIA reads PDF (including scanned PDFs, using its built-in text recognition), Word (.docx), Excel (.xlsx, .xlsm), CSV, Outlook email files (.msg) and plain text. Then choose Prepare Project and CDIA reads every document, page by page, into searchable evidence. When it finishes, a Project Ready summary tells you how many documents are ready and names any that could not be read.

The category matters. CDIA treats the three kinds of material differently in its answers, so a report’s version of events is never presented as what the records show.

Step 2. CDIA investigates it

Ask CDIA is the home screen. Type a question the way you would ask a colleague.

For example: What does the contract say about payment notices? Who instructed the design change? What variations remain unresolved? What happened with the drainage works?

CDIA works out what kind of investigation the question needs (a general investigation of the records, a contract-wording question, a dated sequence, a listing, or a deep read of one report) and gathers the relevant evidence. This preparation runs on your computer.

By default an investigation draws on the whole prepared project. You can instead point it at particular folders or documents using the source selection on the Ask screen. That selection is a firm boundary. If you select only the Meeting Minutes folder, CDIA investigates those minutes and does not quietly add the contractor’s reports because your question mentions them.

Step 3. Review what CDIA found

CDIA does not answer straight from a question. When the evidence is gathered, the investigation pauses and shows you what it found before any answer is written.

The review lists the evidence by kind, for example: Contemporaneous records, 2 documents, 2 extracts. Report extracts, 1 item. Contract, 1 clause. Open Review evidence to inspect each item and untick anything you do not want used. Everything starts ticked and nothing is hidden. When you are content, click Continue.

No final answer is written until you continue, and the review controls what goes into it. With Cloud AI, relevant evidence may already have been sent to your provider during preparation and reading; unticking excludes items from the answer but cannot recall what has already been processed. What you see in the review is the complete evidential basis of the answer that follows.

Step 4. Receive a cited answer

Answers are plain English. Factual statements carry citations, for example (Site_Diary_2022_04.pdf, p. 12).

Statements from day-to-day records, from reports and from the contract are kept visibly distinct. Under the answer, a scope note states how much of the selected evidence was considered, which kinds of evidence were used, whether any document was read in full, and whether anything was left out because it could not fit the AI’s working capacity.

If the evidence does not answer the question, CDIA says so. If two documents conflict, CDIA states each account and identifies the conflict rather than picking a winner. You can then ask follow-up questions in the same investigation: Why did they say that? Show me the evidence. What about the following week?

Step 5. Click through to the original evidence

Click any citation and the source document opens beside the answer, at the cited page for PDFs.

Scanned documents open as a searchable copy where one exists, so the cited text is selectable, while the original scan stays untouched as your document of record. Word, Excel and Outlook files open in your usual application. Opening a citation is a local action: it opens a file from your disk, with no network call.

Citations are issued and checked by CDIA itself, and the AI cannot invent a citation identifier. Source locations are given where CDIA holds them; some full-document reads cite the document rather than a specific page.

Step 6. Use the same evidence for Advice or Draft

Ask establishes what the evidence supports. Advice and Draft build on that from the same reviewed evidence, either after an investigation or directly from evidence you have selected yourself.

Advice is professional analysis reasoned from the evidence: what the records show, competing interpretations, strengths and weaknesses, and what to investigate next. It is opt-in, clearly labelled as AI analysis, cited, role-neutral, and not legal advice.

Draft produces written work product: factual background sections, project histories, chronology narratives, contractual background, issue summaries, briefing notes, or a response grounded in the selected material. Factual sentences must cite the reviewed evidence, and CDIA checks the citations before showing you the draft; a draft it cannot verify is not shown. Drafts export to Word with a line stating which AI produced them.

A draft is a starting point produced from the evidence you supplied. It does not establish contractual or legal entitlement and it needs your professional review before use.

Choosing the AI

The first time you create a project, CDIA asks whether to use Cloud AI or Private AI. Both use the same evidence controls, the same citations and the same honesty rules. You can change the choice at any time in Tools > AI Settings.

For Cloud AI, CDIA walks you through creating an API key with the provider, pasting it in and testing the connection. The key is stored in the Windows credential store.

The specialist tools

All of these work from the same prepared evidence with the same citation discipline. They sit in the left-hand navigation.

Tool	What it does
Chronology Builder	Build a dated, cited picture around a topic from the records, filter by phrase, reference or date range, save items to an investigation set, export to Word
Evidence Q&A	Closed questioning of an evidence set you curated yourself, answering only from that set
Evidence Listing	Exact, exhaustive listing of every place a phrase appears across the project, with counts and locations. The dedicated Evidence Listing search is deterministic: no AI decides which matching records are included
Report Q&A	Choose particular reports, claims or statements and question them in depth, with report-and-page citations
Contract Search	Find contract clauses by their wording
Activity Investigation	Where you have loaded programme files, check programme activities against the project records
Workspace	A scratchpad for pasted material such as a letter received or meeting notes. Workspace answers do not carry project citations

Ready to try it?

Install CDIA, load the example project and ask your first question. The Quick Start Guide gets you working in about fifteen minutes.