AI Support That Talks, Knows Your Data, and Learns
Every Space can now have a helpdesk AI that answers from real sources, speaks with visitors, and gets better as questions come in. Here's how advanced retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) works for your Space, in plain words.
Mark Vernon · VTC · 10/15/2026
Most communities and small organizations answer the same questions over and over. When does registration open? Is this item still in stock? Where do I find the form? Someone usually knows the answer, but that person is busy, asleep, or on holiday. Meanwhile the visitor waits, or gives up.
AI Support is our answer to that problem. It is a Space's public helpdesk AI. It works inside the VTC app and also outside it. It shares its engine with the AI Guide you already know inside VTC.
This article explains what AI Support does today, how it stays grounded in your own information, and what we're planning next.
What RAG means, without the jargon
RAG stands for retrieval-augmented generation. The idea is simple. Before the AI writes an answer, it first looks things up in a trusted set of sources, then writes its reply based on what it found.
Think of the difference between asking a stranger a question and asking a well-prepared receptionist who checks the binder before answering. A general AI model on its own can sound confident while guessing. With RAG, the answer is tied to your actual documents and data, which makes it far more useful and much easier to trust.
AI Support takes this further by drawing on several kinds of sources at once, and by noticing when it doesn't have a good answer.
Three ways to talk to it
People don't all like to ask questions the same way, so AI Support offers three modes:
Chat. Type a question and get a written answer.
Speak. Ask out loud and hear the answer read back.
Live voice. A natural, back-and-forth spoken conversation, powered by Gemini Live. You can talk over it and interrupt, the way you would with a person.
Voice support is paid for by the Space owner, at 3 credits per minute.
If a Space hasn't turned voice on yet, visitors can tap Ask this Space to turn on voice support. It's a gentle way for the people you serve to tell you what they'd find useful.
And inside VTC, the AI Guide will offer a Space's free voice support when that Space has it, so members can reach it from where they already are.
It answers from what your Space actually knows
AI Support draws its answers from:
Your Space's documents and Q&As. The guides, policies, and answers you've already written.
VTC help and VTC Academy. So questions about how to use VTC itself get a solid answer too.
App data for signed-in users. When someone is signed in, AI Support can answer from their own data and their Space's app data, always within their permissions. A member asking about their own information gets a relevant answer. They don't see anything they couldn't already see.
That last point matters. Being helpful should never mean leaking information, so AI Support respects the same access rules as the rest of VTC.
Live answers from your collections
Here's a feature we're especially pleased with. Many Spaces keep information that changes often, such as a stock list, a schedule, or a directory. Uploading a fresh document every time something changes is tedious, and the AI ends up answering from yesterday's version.
Instead, a Space can mark a collection as Public to AI Support and choose exactly which fields to share. Guests then get answers from the live data. If an item sells out at noon, the AI knows at noon.
You stay in control. You pick the collection, and you pick the fields. Anything you don't share stays private.
It learns, with you in charge
No AI gets everything right on day one. What matters is how it improves. AI Support learns in a careful, supervised way:
It spots gaps. When new questions come in that it answered weakly, hourly gap checks run to look at them.
It drafts answers from real sources. Where your documents or data contain the answer, AI Support prepares a draft based on those sources rather than inventing one.
Admins approve with one tap. Nothing new becomes an official answer until someone on your team says yes.
Unanswerable gaps become to-dos. If there's no source for an answer, the question becomes a to-do, a clear signal that something is missing from your materials.
Users give feedback. Visitors can give any answer a thumbs up or thumbs down, so you can see what's working.
Over time, this builds a helpdesk that reflects the real questions your community asks, written from your real information, and checked by your own people.
Coming soon
We want to be clear about what's live and what's still being built. The following is planned, not yet available:
AI Support inside the Support ticket app. People will be able to ask the AI first and, if they still need help, escalate to a ticket with the conversation transcript attached, so nobody has to repeat themselves. The AI will also suggest replies to support agents, and resolved tickets will feed into the learning process.
Network training libraries that can reference a Space's support docs. Training material across a network will be able to point to the support documents a Space already maintains, so knowledge is written once and used in more places.
We'll share more as these features get closer to release.
Getting started
If you run a Space, the best first step is simple: make sure your key documents and Q&As are in place, then look at which collections would be worth marking as Public to AI Support. Keep an eye on the gaps and to-dos it surfaces. They're a useful map of what your community wants to know.
Good support isn't about having an answer for everything. It's about giving honest, accurate answers quickly, and getting better every week. That's what we've built AI Support to do.