The question most AI tools skip: where does the question go?
When someone asks an AI assistant "which Year 9 students are away without a note?", the assistant reads the attendance records and sends them, with the question, to an AI model to work out the answer. With most assistants that model runs overseas, usually in the United States. Every question about a student, patient or customer is then personal information leaving Australia, even if the records themselves are stored here.
BE Teammate is built so that does not happen: the systems it reads, the bot itself and the AI model that does the thinking all run in Australia.
What Australian privacy law asks of you
- Sending personal information overseas (APP 8). Before personal information goes to a recipient overseas, you must take reasonable steps to make sure it is handled to the standard of the Australian Privacy Principles, and in most cases you stay accountable for what that recipient does with it.
- Sensitive information. Health information is sensitive information under the Privacy Act, with stricter rules on how it is collected, used and disclosed. Health service providers are covered by the Act whatever their turnover.
- Notifiable data breaches. If personal information is lost or accessed without authority and serious harm is likely, you must tell the people affected and the OAIC. The fewer places the data travels, the fewer places it can leak from.
- Automated decisions, from 10 December 2026. Privacy policies must say when a computer program uses personal information to make, or substantially help make, decisions that significantly affect people. An AI that proposes, a named person who approves, and a log of both is straightforward to describe.
- Schools and state agencies. Government schools and agencies answer to their state or territory privacy law, and often to departmental rules on where student data may be kept. Independent and Catholic schools are generally covered by the Privacy Act.
This is general information, not legal advice. Check your own obligations with your privacy officer or adviser.
Where each part of BE Teammate runs
| Part | Where it runs |
|---|---|
| The bot engine, its memory and the audit log | Binary Elements infrastructure in Australia |
| The AI model that reads your data and answers | Hosted on GPUs in Australia. Your questions and records are not sent to an overseas AI provider. |
| Credentials for your systems | An encrypted vault in Australia, entered through a one-time link, never the chat |
| Its Linux computer and browser | A sandbox in Australia, one per bot |
| Microsoft Teams chat | Your Microsoft 365 tenant, under your existing Microsoft agreement |
| If you need it on your own premises | Your own servers or cloud |
What it does not do with your data
- Your data is not used to train AI models.
- It reads only the systems, and the parts of them, that an admin has granted to that bot.
- Shared notes are scanned, and anything that looks like a password or key is refused.
- Nothing goes to a customer, patient or family until a named person approves it.
Schools and clinics
Schools. Grant the front-office bot attendance and the office inbox, read-only, and nothing else. It can tell a year coordinator who is away without a note and draft the notice to families, and the text goes only when the coordinator approves it.
Clinics. Grant the reception bot the appointment book and the waitlist, not the clinical notes. It fills cancellations and answers booking questions without reading a patient's history.
See what that looks like, industry by industry.
Questions about data privacy and BE Teammate
- Is our data stored in Australia?
- Yes. The bot engine, its memory, the audit log, your credentials and its sandbox all run on Binary Elements infrastructure in Australia.
- Does the AI model run in Australia too?
- Yes. BE Teammate uses an AI model hosted in Australia, so the records it reads to answer a question do not leave the country.
- What about Microsoft Teams itself?
- Teams messages are handled by Microsoft under your Microsoft 365 agreement and data residency, the same as any other Teams chat.
- Does it help with the December 2026 automated decision rules?
- Every proposal, approval and action is logged with the named person who approved it, which gives you the record you need to describe automated decisions in your privacy policy.
More on BE Teammate BE Teammate overview How it works, by industry Australian data privacy BE Hub MCP tools SAP Business One AI IT support bot Copilot Studio alternative How it works, by industry