Integrate Microsoft Teams with Aptly

Aptly + Microsoft Teams

Overview

Aptly Assistant is Aptly's Microsoft Teams app. People ask in plain language what they can approve and up to what limit, and get an answer drawn from your governed Aptly records, with a citation to the decision, the delegation, the limit and who granted it. When they choose to act, they can approve, issue or revoke authority in the same conversation.

Aptly Assistant is free in the Microsoft Marketplace for every Aptly client.

Key capabilities

Plain-language answers on decision rights
Ask whether you can approve a specific purchase order, contract or hire and get a direct answer with the limit and any conditions, such as a second approver for vendors outside the approved list.

A citation on every answer
Every answer shows the decision, the delegation, the limit and who granted it. Answers come only from the governed records finance, legal, procurement and compliance already rely on, never from a general model's own knowledge.

Full chain of authority
Trace any authority back through each delegation to where it originated, and see which of your authorities are about to expire.

Notifications and alerts
Get notified in Teams when authority is issued, approved, revoked or nearing expiration. Alerts can go to specific channels or private chats, so each governance event reaches the people who need it.

Org-wide questions, answered by role
Questions about the wider organization return decisions and published limits rather than naming individuals.

Approve, issue or revoke in the conversation
Act on authority directly in Teams, with no second application to open. Every action runs through the same authority check, so an out-of-authority action never executes, and each one is recorded to the audit trail.

Authority insights
Ask where approvals are piling up or whether a position holds authorities that should stay separate. Authority bottleneck insight is in preview. Segregation-of-duties analysis is available in the Enterprise tier.

Security and data handling

• Read-only model: 67 allowlisted read-only API operations. The model has no create, update, delete or approval operation; changes happen only when the user chooses to act.
• User-scoped answers: Every call to the Aptly API uses the asking user's own credential, not a service account, so no answer exceeds what that user could already see.
• Regional processing: Message content is processed and stored in the client's chosen region. No customer data is used for model training.
• Model and guardrails: Runs on Azure OpenAI, with no data sent to a non-Microsoft AI provider. A deterministic scope guard refuses off-topic or instruction-override prompts before they reach the model.

Value to organizations

Approvers stop acting from memory. The answer sits where the decision is made, the citation makes it auditable, and the same governed record serves every surface: Teams, Slack and the web today, with custom agents in preview.

Example use cases

• Approval check: Confirm a purchase order is within your limit, and whether a second approver is needed, before you approve it.
• Coverage during travel: Issue a time-bound delegation to a colleague from the conversation.
• Expiring authority: See which of your delegations end this month.
• Quarter-close review: Ask whether anything in your region's approval chain needs attention.

Read more: Aptly Assistant brings decision rights into Microsoft Teams, for people and AI agents.