Grace: the AI assistant

Grace is the AI assistant that lives inside the Foldr web app. She can answer questions about files in your storage, run searches you describe in plain English, take actions on your behalf (move, copy, share, tag, redact), and generate new documents. Word, plain text, spreadsheet, or PDF. She can also write MaSH automations for you, given a description of what you want to happen.

Grace runs against your Foldr storage with the same permissions you have. She doesn’t see anything you can’t, and any action she takes (sharing, moving, deleting) is recorded in the activity log under your name.

What Grace can do

Conversational Q&A and search

Open Grace from the chat icon in the web app’s top bar. Ask questions in natural language and she’ll either answer directly (when the answer is in the conversation context), search across your files for what you’re asking about, or read a specific file you point her at. She can stack queries. Narrow the result set, drill into a specific file, ask for a summary. And remembers the conversation across the session.

Behind the scenes she has tool access for: search and field queries, file lookups and content reads, sharing queries (who has access to what), bookmarks, checkouts, and reconciliation against external data.

Take action on files

Grace doesn’t just read. She can act. With your permission she can:

• Move, copy, rename, or delete files
• Edit a file’s content in place (Word, Excel, plain text)
• Create new files (text, Word, spreadsheet, PDF) from a prompt
• Share files with named users or generate public / secure links
• Set or update custom field values
• Mark files for checkout, bookmarking, or redaction

Destructive actions (deletes, share grants, content edits) go through a confirmation step. Grace describes what she’s about to do, you accept or refuse. The confirmation token expires quickly, so accidental approvals after-the-fact don’t replay.

Generate documents

Grace’s document generators land at three endpoints, each producing a real file in a Foldr share rather than a chat-only response:

• Word and PDF documents. Given a prompt and an optional reference document, generate a structured Word document and write it to a named path in your storage. Useful for summaries, reports, and template-based authoring.
• Plain text files. Same idea, but for .md, .txt, code, or anything that doesn’t need Word’s structure.
• Spreadsheets. Generate or append rows in an Excel file. Useful for “extract these fields from every invoice in this folder and append to the running spreadsheet” workflows.

The generated file lives in your storage immediately. There’s nothing to download from a separate UI.

Write MaSH automations (“Let Grace write this for me”)

When authoring a mashlet in Foldr Settings > Automation, the editor includes a “Let Grace write this for me” entry point. Describe the automation in plain language (“when an invoice lands in /Inbox, extract the total and email me if it’s over £5000”) and Grace produces a draft mashlet, complete with a suggested trigger configuration. You review the script, adjust if needed, and save.

The codegen flow is gated by an additional permission (USE_GRACE_AUTOMATION) on top of the base USE_GRACE permission. Administrators can grant chat access without granting automation-authoring access if that’s the right policy for the role.

Licensing and gating

Grace is gated by a feature flag and two permissions.

Feature flag (grace):

• Foldr appliance: licensed add-on. Contact sales / support to enable.
• Foldr SaaS: included in Business and Enterprise tiers.

Per-user permissions:

• USE_GRACE. Required for any Grace surface (chat, document generators).
• USE_GRACE_AUTOMATION. Required additionally for the mashlet codegen flow.

External users (Secure Link recipients) can’t use Grace regardless of permissions or licence. Every Grace route has the DenyExternalUsers middleware. Grace is for authenticated internal users only.

Usage metering

Every Grace request is metered through UsageTracker against a per-tenant grace budget. Administrators see usage per user and per period in Foldr Settings > AI. When a user or tenant exceeds their configured budget, Grace pauses with a clear message until the next period rolls over (or the admin raises the limit).

Accepting a Grace-drafted mashlet doesn’t incur additional metering. Only the generation request counts.

Admin setup

Grace runs against an LLM provider configured in Foldr Settings > Integrations > AI. The administrator picks the provider, supplies credentials, and chooses model defaults. Once configured and the grace feature is licensed, Grace becomes available to any user granted the USE_GRACE permission.

For the metering side (per-user limits, per-period budgets, default warning thresholds), see the same Settings page.

Privacy and data handling

When Grace processes a request, the relevant context. The files she’s reading, the search results she’s looking at, the conversation so far. Is sent to the configured LLM provider for that request only. Foldr does not store user chats with the provider beyond the request lifecycle, and providers configured for enterprise use typically have data-handling agreements that prohibit using the inputs for training.

Specifically, what gets sent depends on the request:

• Chat questions → the conversation history plus tool results (search hits, field values, file metadata, file content snippets when she’s asked to read).
• Document generators → the prompt plus any reference document content you’ve explicitly pointed her at.
• Mashlet codegen → the prompt plus the schema of available MaSH surfaces (so she knows what she can write against).

Grace never sees files you can’t access, never sees other tenants’ data, and never sees external user content. Audit logs record every Grace action for compliance review.

See also

• MaSH introduction. The automation language Grace can write for you
• Captur. Document data extraction; Grace can search across Captur-populated fields
• Custom Fields. Grace can read and update field values when granted permission