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Agentic Regulatory Compliance Assistant

Agentic Regulatory Compliance Assistant and Document Management Portal on Azure

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Agentic regulatory compliance assistant on Azure
Home»Case Studies»Agentic Regulatory Compliance Assistant

North America (United States & Canada)

Food Verification & Certification

About The Client

Food Verification and Certification Company

The company is a leading North American provider of independent, third-party food verification and certification services. It works with food producers, ranchers, processors, and retailers across the United States and Canada. Its organic certification team administers USDA National Organic Program (NOP) certifications, helping farms, handlers, and processors achieve and maintain organic certification under federal organic regulations.

Quantified Business Outcomes

Faster

resolution of NOP regulatory questions across certifier, sales, and audit teams

Citation-Backed

answers tied to specific NOP sections and ranked by authority

Automated

detection of conflicts between binding NOP rules and advisory guidance

Key Business Areas Impacted Included:

  • Time to onboard a new certification standard's document library
  • Document upload and metadata standardization effort
  • Permission administration time and error rate
  • Access control consistency across storage, metadata, and AI search
  • Research time per regulatory question for certifiers, sales, and auditors
  • Document search and retrieval time across standards

The Customer

The company certifies under several distinct standards at the same time. Before this project, it had no centralized system to store, organize, or control access to the regulatory and program documents behind those standards. Finding a specific document often depended on knowing who to ask.

Certifiers, sales representatives, auditors, and administrators each felt the impact differently:

  • 1Certifiers spent significant time reading through NOP regulations and guidance materials to answer questions from organic operations and internal teams.
  • 2Sales representatives needed simple, producer-friendly explanations of certification requirements but were handed the same dense regulatory documents used by certifiers and auditors.
  • 3Confirming whether a NOP guidance document or policy memo was the current binding version or had been superseded required manual cross-referencing across USDA publications.
  • 4Contradictions between binding NOP regulations and interpretive USDA guidance memos weren't flagged automatically, creating audit and certification risk.
  • 5Adding newly published USDA regulations, policy memos, and program updates to the knowledge base was manual, unstructured, and slow.

The Problem

What The Company Needed

The company needed a unified platform that could:

Request a call
  1. 1

    Centralize regulatory documents across every certification standard

  2. 2

    Enforce fine-grained access control down to the folder level

  3. 3

    Keep storage, metadata, registry, and search automatically in sync

  4. 4

    Deliver cited, natural-language answers to regulatory questions

  5. 5

    Give administrators a faster, conversational way to manage the platform

Folio3 Solution

Folio3 built a Document Management and Access Control Portal with an Agentic Regulatory Compliance Assistant on Microsoft Azure, delivered as a self-service web application with a companion Microsoft Teams bot.

Document Management and Access Control Portal

React

React, TypeScript, and Vite for the Documents, Upload, and Admin experiences

Entra ID

Microsoft Entra ID with MSAL.js for login, with app roles and security groups driving authorization

Data Lake

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 as the centralized document repository

Azure SQL

Azure SQL Database as the registry of every standard, sub-group, member, tier, and permitted folder path

AI Search

Azure AI Search as the index for each document's extracted content, embeddings, and metadata

Agentic Regulatory Compliance Assistant

AI Foundry

Azure AI Foundry Agent as the primary assistant for regulatory Q&A

AI Search

Azure AI Search for hybrid retrieval (keyword, vector, and semantic)

Azure OpenAI

Azure OpenAI (GPT-4o and text-embedding-3-small) for answer generation and embeddings

Document Intelligence

Azure AI Document Intelligence for automated text extraction ahead of indexing

Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB for per-user conversation history

AI Foundry

A second Foundry Agent with MCP tools for conversational administration

Teams

Microsoft Teams via Azure Bot Service as a direct channel alongside the web portal

End-to-End Agentic Workflow

Step 01

Onboard a Certification Standard

Administrators create a new standard in a single guided action. The portal automatically provisions:

  • The standard's security groups
  • A dedicated storage folder with baseline permissions
  • The standard's registry entry

Value Delivered

A new standard's document library and access foundation are ready in one step, with no manual setup across storage, identity, and access systems.

Onboard a Certification Standard

Step 02

Upload and Structure Regulatory Documents

Administrators upload documents and tag each with:

  • Category and authority level
  • Document type and version year
  • Current-version status

The portal also:

  • Flags duplicate file names against existing copies
  • Guides administrators through a replace flow

Value Delivered

Every document carries consistent, structured metadata from the moment it's uploaded, and duplicate or stale versions are caught before they cause confusion.

Upload and Structure Regulatory Documents

Step 03

Grant Fine-Grained, Folder-Level Access

Access is governed by:

  • A tiered role model (User, Admin, Super Admin)
  • Per-standard membership
  • Sub-groups scoped to specific folder paths within a standard

Every grant or revoke propagates together across:

  • Storage ACLs
  • Blob access metadata
  • The registry
  • The search index

Value Delivered

Access is restricted to exactly the right subset of a standard's documents, and direct storage access, document listings, and AI search results never disagree.

Grant Fine-Grained, Folder-Level Access

Step 04

Browse, Preview, and Download Governed Documents

Users work directly with the document library to:

  • Browse documents across their authorized standards
  • Preview and download copies

All under the same access rules enforced everywhere else in the system.

Value Delivered

Teams self-serve against the library, not only through chat, with access boundaries enforced consistently either way.

Browse, Preview, and Download Governed Documents

Step 05

Ask Natural-Language Questions with Grounded Citations

Certifiers, sales representatives, and auditors ask questions in plain English. The assistant:

  • Retrieves content through hybrid keyword, vector, and semantic search
  • Scopes results to the standards and folders each user is authorized to see
  • Generates answers grounded in, and cited back to, the governed library
  • Ranks sources by authority level, separating binding NOP rules from advisory guidance

Value Delivered

Faster, cited answers to regulatory questions, without users needing to know which standard's library a document lives in or what it's named.

Ask Natural-Language Questions with Grounded Citations

Step 06

Administer the Platform Conversationally

As an alternative to the Admin screens, administrators chat with the Admin Agent to manage:

  • Standards
  • Members
  • Sub-group permissions

The Admin Agent reports back exactly which actions it performed.

Value Delivered

Faster, lower-effort administration for routine changes, with full visibility into what changed.

Administer the Platform Conversationally

Step 07

Access from Web or Microsoft Teams

Users reach the portal and assistant from the web application, or chat with the assistant inside Microsoft Teams using session commands to:

  • Start new conversations
  • List past conversations
  • Switch between conversations

Value Delivered

People work from wherever they already are, with the same governed content and access rules following them across channels.

Access from Web or Microsoft Teams

Impact & Outcomes

By deploying a Document Management and Access Control Portal with an Agentic Regulatory Compliance Assistant on Azure, the company replaced scattered documents and unreliable access management with a single, trustworthy system of record for its multi-standard certification library.

  • Faster resolution of NOP regulatory questions across certifier, sales, and audit functions.
  • Improved certification accuracy through authority-ranked, citation-backed answers tied to specific NOP sections.
  • Reduced certification risk through automated detection of conflicts between binding NOP rules and advisory guidance.
  • A standardized knowledge base with full metadata governance across organic regulations and USDA guidance documents.
  • Higher certifier productivity by eliminating repetitive manual research across fragmented document repositories.
  • Consistent access control across storage, metadata, and AI search, with any inconsistency surfaced immediately rather than discovered later.
  • The ability to scale across certification standards without scaling the manual effort of organizing, securing, or searching documents.

Ready to put agentic AI to work on regulatory compliance?

Talk to our experts to see how Azure AI Foundry and Azure AI Search can turn your regulatory library into governed, cited answers your teams can trust.

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