I'm building private document Q&A for our company. What managed service would you pick?

If you want a managed service for private document Q&A, I’d usually pick based on your cloud stack:

My default pick

AWS: Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases
Best if you’re already on AWS and want something relatively straightforward for RAG over private docs with managed ingestion, embeddings, retrieval, and model access.

Why I’d pick it:

• Managed end-to-end for document Q&A
• Private/VPC-friendly architecture options
• Good fit for enterprise security/compliance needs
• Can use multiple foundation models
• Less infrastructure to operate than rolling your own

Strong alternatives

Azure: Azure AI Search + Azure OpenAI

Best if your company is Microsoft-heavy.

Why:

• Very strong enterprise identity/security integration
• Great for hybrid Microsoft environments
• Azure AI Search is a solid retrieval layer for Q&A
• Easy to pair with GPT models via Azure OpenAI

Google Cloud: Vertex AI Search / Agent Builder

Best if you’re on GCP or want a more opinionated managed search/Q&A product.

Why:

• Good managed retrieval/search experience
• Less assembly required
• Nice for content discovery and Q&A use cases

If you want the simplest possible “buy, not build”

Consider a vendor product rather than cloud primitives:

• Glean
• Coveo
• Elastic Cloud + AI features
• Atlassian Intelligence / Confluence-oriented setups if most docs live there

These can be faster to deploy for internal knowledge search, especially if your docs are spread across Drive, Slack, Confluence, SharePoint, etc.

How I’d choose

• Mostly AWS → Bedrock Knowledge Bases
• Mostly Microsoft 365 / SharePoint / Teams → Azure AI Search + Azure OpenAI
• Mostly GCP → Vertex AI Search / Agent Builder
• Need fastest internal knowledge product across many SaaS sources → Glean/Coveo-type product

One important caveat

For private document Q&A, the hard part is often not the model—it’s:

• permissions-aware retrieval
• document syncing
• source-of-truth governance
• audit logging
• answer citation/traceability

So I’d prioritize a service that supports document-level ACLs and citations.

If you tell me:

1. your cloud provider,
2. where the docs live (SharePoint, Drive, S3, Confluence, etc.),
3. and whether you need strict per-user permissions,

I can give you a much more specific recommendation.