Introducing Policy Studio: a new home for the work you were already doing

Policy Studio is live in beta at /studio. It's the new home for the working tools on Got AI Policy — the ones you actually use when you're drafting, reviewing, or comparing an AI policy, or when you're training the team who has to live with it.

If you've used the site over the last few months, most of this will look familiar. Policy Review has been here. Compare has been here. Trust Drills launched a few days ago. Policy Builder has been quietly growing. What's new is that they now share an address, a shelf, and a workflow — instead of each one sitting off in its own corner of the site.

Why we built Studio

The registry side of Got AI Policy answers a lookup question: does this municipality have an AI policy, and what does it say? That's useful, but it's not the whole job. The people who spend time on this site are usually the ones who have to write the policy, defend it at council, keep it current, and train staff on the parts that matter on a Tuesday afternoon.

Studio is the working half of that job. It's where the registry stops being a reference book and starts being a workbench. You can pull two policies up next to each other and see where they actually differ. You can drop your own draft in and get a structured read on what's strong and what's thin. You can start from a blank page with a guided flow instead of a Word template someone emailed you in 2022. And you can run a two-minute Trust Drill with the team so the policy survives first contact with a real Friday afternoon.

What lives in Studio right now

Policy Review

Paste or upload your own draft. Studio reads it against an evidence ruleset — the same ruleset used to grade public policies on the registry — and shows you what's covered, what's ambiguous, and what's missing. It's not a grade for the sake of a grade; it's a checklist you can bring to the next revision meeting.

Compare

Pick two municipal policies from the registry and see them side-by-side by theme — governance, procurement, transparency, risk, staff use, resident-facing use. The comparison view is deliberately boring: it's meant to make it obvious where two councils drew different lines, so you can decide which line fits your community.

Policy Builder

A guided draft flow that walks through the questions a policy actually has to answer — who approves AI use, how residents are notified, what happens with vendor data, how staff report a mistake. You end up with a first draft you can hand to counsel and a council, not a finished policy. That's the point. The hard part of policy work is the conversation; Builder just makes sure the conversation covers the right ground.

Trust Drills

Six two-minute scenarios — deepfake calls, shadow-AI leaks, chatbot mistakes, vendor pitches — that put staff inside the pressure the policy is supposed to protect them from. Free, phone-first, no login, nothing stored. Studio is where facilitators run their own drill sessions with an access code.

Why now — and why one roof

The honest answer: because the tools kept ending up in the same email threads. Someone would ask for a comparison, then a review of their draft, then a drill for the front-desk team. Sending them to three different corners of the site meant three different mental models and three different "where do I even start" moments. Studio is one shelf. Open the shelf, pick the tool, go.

It's also the honest end of a lot of work over the last couple of days and weeks — pulling features that already existed into a shape where they cooperate, sharpening the pieces that were rough, and quietly rewriting a few things that were confusing. Nothing here is being invented from scratch. It's being brought home.

It's a beta. On purpose.

Studio is labelled beta because it is one. Some flows are polished; some are still catching up to the flows next to them. Some copy is going to change next week because someone on a call is going to point out that it's confusing. Some features you want aren't in there yet — team libraries, saved templates, richer exports, deeper cross-municipality benchmarking — and we know it.

Two tools in particular are explicitly marked Beta inside Studio: Policy Builder and Trust Drills. Policy Builder is stable enough to draft a real policy with, but the clause library and section spine are still expanding and we're actively rewriting parts of the guided flow based on what people run into. Trust Drills is fully playable, but the facilitator features — session boards, cohort reports, custom scenarios — are the newest surface on the site and the one most likely to change quickly. Policy Review and Compare are the more settled tools; Builder and Drills are where your feedback moves the needle fastest right now.

We're shipping like this because the alternative is sitting on a private roadmap for another quarter while the sector moves. Folks are telling us what they need. We're listening. We'd rather iterate in the open, with real drafts and real feedback, than announce a "final" version that's already out of date on launch day.

Thank you — genuinely — for the patience while we've been rearranging the furniture. If something is broken or awkward, that's the fastest thing to fix. Email support@gotaipolicy.ca or drop it in the community forum and we'll see it.

What you can do today

• Open /studio and take the four tiles for a spin — Policy Review, Compare, Policy Builder, Trust Drills.
• Drop your current draft (or a draft you inherited) into Policy Review and see what the evidence ruleset flags.
• Compare your municipality against a neighbour or a peer of similar size — the differences are usually the interesting part.
• Send a Trust Drill link to one colleague this week. That's the whole training plan.
• Tell us what's missing. The roadmap is being shaped by what shows up in the inbox.

Where this is going

The direction is more harmony, not more surface area. Studio should feel like a workbench, not a menu. That means better handoff between the tools — a comparison that flows into a review, a review that flows into a builder session, a builder draft that flows into a drill for the team. It means better collaboration for the folks working in small teams. And it means keeping the registry side and the working side of the site pulling in the same direction, so what you learn on one shelf shows up on the other.

The short version: we're excited. There's a lot more coming. And we're going to keep listening.

Resources and further reading

Frequently asked questions

What tier do I need to use Policy Studio?

Free accounts can open Studio, browse the clause library, and start a draft. Starter ($19/mo or $190/yr CAD, 14-day free trial) lifts monthly generation quotas and unlocks full-draft mode plus XLSX/DOCX exports. Pro adds 4 pooled team seats for organizations drafting together.

How is Studio different from Policy Review?

Policy Review reads a document you already have and scores it against the 62-block evidence corpus. Studio is where you write, edit, and iterate a policy — with an outline, clause library, private consistency check, and versioned sections. Studio contains Review; you can run a review on any draft without leaving.

Can our team edit the same draft together?

On Pro, yes — 4 pooled seats can co-edit inside a Workspace-scoped draft. On Starter (solo), you can share exports (PDF, DOCX, XLSX) with reviewers outside the app; live co-editing is Pro-only.

Does Studio use my draft to train models?

No. Draft contents are scoped to your account (and Workspace organization on Pro). We do not use private draft text to train models or to influence outputs for other accounts.

Can I export a finished policy?

Yes. Every signed-in user can export CSV and PDF; Starter+ adds DOCX and XLSX. The exporter strips inline HTML so the file is clean and ready to circulate to legal, IT, or council.