Ask a plain-English question across every document in a data room and get an answer with cited page numbers. "What's the customer concentration?" "What does the IP assignment clause say?" "What was Q3 2025 ARR?" Type it, Peony returns the answer and links to the exact pages it came from.

Peony has two distinct Q&A surfaces. This page covers AI document Q&A — the AI that reads your files and answers your questions. The separate room-level Visitor Q&A module lets outside reviewers post questions to your deal team; that lives on its own page: Visitor Q&A.

Plan Availability

AI document Q&A — the AI chat covered on this page — is Business+. On Free, the panel prompts you to upgrade ("AI chat is available on Business and above"). Usage scales by tier: Business gets the base allotment, Data Room 5x, Deal Team 10x, Enterprise custom.

What It Does

Open the AI chat inside any data room — it appears as the Chat sidebar ("Ask anything...") — type a question, and Peony reads across every document to answer. This is the AI document Q&A surface, separate from the room's Q&A tab (that tab is the Visitor Q&A workspace where human reviewers post questions). Each answer comes with citations — the source document and page number. Click a citation to jump directly there.

It's built for two audiences:

Sellers stress-test their own room ("what does our deck say about gross margin?") before buyers do.
Buyers move through thousands of pages without opening every file.

When a reviewer asks a question through the Visitor Q&A flow, they can be dropped directly on the cited page from the notification email.

How to Use It

Open a data room and click AI in the top-right corner. The AI Chat sidebar opens ("Ask anything..."). Type a question in plain English.

The answer comes back in the chat, with its source chip and citations:

Check the source chip

The chip at the bottom left of the chat, just above the "Ask anything..." box, tells you what the AI is allowed to read:

The data room's name (in the screenshot, Project Falcon) means the answer draws on every source in that data room, and only that data room.
A file name means the chat is scoped to that one file. The AI answers from that file alone. It will not fall back on pre-trained knowledge, and it will not search online.

In both cases the answer comes from your documents, not from the open internet or from what the model already "knows".

Check the citations

Every answer paragraph has a citation underneath it, precise to the page (for example Project Falcon - Vendor Due Diligence Report.pdf (p. 3)). Each one links to a specific page in a specific document, so you can verify rather than trust.

This is especially useful when you have a lot of questions to get through: instead of opening files and scrolling, ask for the number and jump straight to the page it came from. It is at its best for locating a specific figure.

Chat history

Your chat history stays in the AI Chat sidebar so you can revisit earlier answers. If a buyer wants the full session record at deal close, use the analytics Export on the Analytics tab — Peony exports viewer and session activity as a CSV.

Turn On AI Chat for Visitors

As an admin you can always use AI Chat in your own room (on a plan that includes it). Whether a visitor can use it while viewing the data room is decided per group.

Open the data room and click Permissions in the left sidebar.
Select the group whose visitors you want to allow.
On the Security tab, find the AI document Q&A card in the Security control grid and turn it on.

On: visitors in that group can start AI Chat from the data room they were shared and ask questions about its documents.
Off: visitors in that group do not get AI Chat. Your own team still can.

The setting belongs to the group, so you can allow AI for one counterparty and keep it off for another. When you share a single file or folder instead of a room, the matching switch is AI chat under Permissions in the Create secure link panel. See Share a single file.

This is not the Visitor Q&A switch in the room's Settings tab. Visitor Q&A turns on the ordinary question workflow, where visitors post questions and your team answers them. It has nothing to do with the AI. See Visitor Q&A.

What It's Good At

Summarizing long documents. "Summarize the key points" on a 200-page deck or 50-page contract.
Finding specific clauses. "What's the IP assignment language?" returns the text and the page.
Cross-document comparisons. "How does 2024 P&L revenue compare to the 2025 forecast?"
Extracting specific numbers. "What was Q3 2025 ARR?" "How many employees?"

Limitations

Not available on a free trial. Trial users cannot use AI Chat. It switches on when you upgrade to a paid plan that includes it (Business and above). See AI features and the trial.
File editing. AI Q&A is read-only — it can find, summarize, and cite, but cannot edit documents inside the data room. In-room editing is underway.

How AI Credits Work

AI features run on a credit balance. Two things spend credits:

Document processing on upload. When you add files, Peony processes them so the AI can read across them. More documents — and larger ones — consume more credits. This happens even if you never open the AI Chat sidebar, which is why a fresh upload can draw down your balance before you've asked a single question.
AI questions. Each question you ask spends credits to generate the cited answer.

Your allotment scales with your plan (Data Room is 5x the Business base, Deal Team 10x, Enterprise custom) and resets monthly. If you run out, you can top up from AI Credits in the account menu, or wait for the next monthly reset. Heavy usage in the prior cycle can mean a longer wait before the reset lands.

Open the account menu (bottom-left Settings) and choose AI Credits:

The Here is your AI usage window shows two bars, the Monthly usage limit and your Top-up credits, plus the date the new monthly allowance arrives. To add more, pick an amount under Buy more credits and click Buy.

Privacy and Model Info

AI document Q&A uses a production LLM with enterprise data-handling agreements. Document content is sent at query time to generate answers but is not used to train any model.

Your chat history is retained in the AI Chat sidebar so you can revisit earlier answers. There is no separate Q&A transcript export today; the analytics Export on the Analytics tab covers viewer and session activity, not a full question-and-answer log.

Processing on upload, which extracts text so the room is searchable and AI Q&A can cite pages, runs under the same data-handling terms. The Index documents setting only adds numbered prefixes. See Document indexing.

Common Questions

Why were my AI credits used when I never opened the AI?

Credits are consumed by document processing on upload, not only by chat. Every file you add gets processed so the AI can read it, and more or larger documents draw down more credits. If your balance dropped after an upload, that is expected. Top up from AI Credits in the account menu or wait for the monthly reset.

Can I turn AI Q&A on for viewers, or is it admin-only?

You control it per group. Open Permissions, select the group, and on the Security tab turn on the AI document Q&A card to let that group's visitors use AI Chat, or leave it off to keep it to your own team. Admins can always use it on a plan that includes AI.