Normain FAQ

Normain is the Extractional AI platform for experts in audit and assurance, GRC and M&A. You write your method down once as a Notebook and run it across hundreds of files. Every answer is cited to the exact page, slide or cell it came from, a step can write the finished file you hand over, and an expert checks and signs off the result.

A Notebook is where the work happens in Normain. You write it as steps in plain language, the way you would brief a colleague, and give each step the files it should read. Mention an earlier step with @ and the later one builds on its answers. Normain runs the steps in order, every answer carries a citation and a confidence level, and a step can write the finished Word, Excel, PowerPoint or PDF file, including into your own template.

Expert work on documents is slow to do by hand and hard to scale, because the judgment behind it sits with a few experienced people. Chat-based AI does not fix that: its answers change from one run to the next and rarely say where they came from. Normain lets the expert write the method once, run it on every file for every client, and check each answer against its source.

Audit and assurance, GRC and M&A teams, at accounting firms, advisory and consulting firms, and in-house risk and compliance functions. They use it for work such as financial statement and disclosure checks, control testing, vendor and third-party risk, policy gap analysis and due diligence.

The people who know the work best. A senior expert writes the method down once as a Notebook, and the rest of the team runs it on the next engagement. No coding or prompt engineering is needed: the steps are plain language.

Extractional AI is AI built for work that gets signed off. It reads your documents and produces answers that are verifiable, consistent, repeatable and reliable, with every answer cited to its exact source and an expert in the loop. Normain introduced the term in The Precision Manifesto in November 2025.

Conversational AI is built to explore, which suits ideas, rewording and summaries. Extractional AI is built for precision: the same input gives the same output, and every answer points to the page it came from. Most teams use both, each for the work it was designed for.

Normain delivers up to 99% accuracy. Just as important, you never have to take an answer on trust: each one shows its citation and a confidence level, so the expert can check it in a click.

No, and it is designed not to. The expert stops doing the digging and formatting and spends that time on judgment, client work and sign-off.

Customers typically report 50–80% time saved on document-heavy work, and deeper deliverables, because the analysis is no longer limited by how many files a person can read.

Work that repeats across many documents and has to be defensible: audits, control testing, risk assessments, compliance checks, vendor assessments and due diligence. If your team does the same careful reading on every engagement, it is a good fit for a Notebook.

PDFs and scans, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, CSV and text files, Outlook emails, images, video, HTML and ZIP folders. Upload them directly, connect a document store such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box or Dropbox, or paste a link to a web page. A step can also look something up on the web when the files are not enough, and that answer is cited like any other.

Hundreds at once. On the Free plan a step reads up to 50 files; paid plans have no per-step cap.

Yes. Normain is ISO 27001 certified, SOC 2 Type II audited and GDPR compliant, with controls verified by independent auditors. We never train on your data: your documents and answers stay private and are used only for your own work.

Yes. Besides our shared and dedicated hosting on Microsoft Azure, Normain can be deployed in your own cloud on Azure, AWS or GCP, so no data leaves your environment. See the Security page for details.