This is the question people ask first, and it deserves a direct answer. If you have not met Iris yet, start with Meet Iris, your Mentorly assistant.
The short answer:
Iris sees exactly what you see, and nothing more.
She is not a second account with wider access. When Iris looks something up, she looks it up as you, using your own permissions. If you cannot open a page in Mentorly, Iris cannot read the data behind it either.
And she only reads. Iris cannot change a single thing in your program.
What Iris reads:
Iris draws her answers from four places, and she tells you which one she used.
| Source | What it covers |
|---|---|
| The Mentorly Help Center | How the product works. These articles, in both languages. |
| The mentorship guides we publish | Running a program well: preparing for a first session, setting goals, keeping people engaged. |
| Your program’s resources | The documents your program manager has uploaded to the Resources page of your program. |
| Your program’s live data | Members, matches, sessions, goals, availability. Read fresh every time she is asked, through your own account. |
The first two are public. The third is whatever your program manager chose to upload. The fourth is the one this article is really about, and it is governed by the four limits below.
The four limits built into Iris:
These are enforced in Mentorly’s code, not by instructing Iris to behave. That distinction matters: an instruction is something a cleverly worded question can sometimes talk its way around, and a check in the code is not.
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She runs as you. Every lookup carries your own login and is checked against your own permissions by the same system that decides what your screens show you. A mentee asking Iris sees a mentee’s data. A mentor sees their own mentees. A program manager sees their program.
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She can only read your program. Every lookup is checked before it runs and refused if it would change anything. Iris cannot book, cancel, match, unmatch, invite, archive, or edit a profile. The one thing she can send is a message from you to the Mentorly support team, when you ask to talk to a person. That goes to us, never into your program.
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She is pinned to the program you are in. Iris answers about the program you have open and refuses to reach into another one, even for a Mentorly staff member who has access to many. She will not list the programs on the platform. If no program is selected, she asks which one you mean rather than guessing.
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Private stays private. Some things in Mentorly are deliberately visible only to one person, and Iris honours that rather than routing around it. A mentee’s private progress notes on a goal are the clearest example: a program manager or mentor asking Iris about that goal is told how many notes exist, never what they say, which is exactly what they would see on the screen.
What this looks like in practice:
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A mentee asks "have I made any progress since I started being mentored?" and gets their own goals and sessions. The same question from the same account cannot surface another mentee’s goals.
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A mentor asks "can you tell me about my mentee and their progress?" and gets the mentees they are matched with. Not the rest of the program.
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A program manager asks "how many mentees are not yet matched?" and gets a number for their program, because a manager can already see that in the dashboard.
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Anyone asking about a different program is refused, regardless of who they are.
Where your conversations are stored:
Your conversations with Iris are saved to your Mentorly account so you can close the panel and come back to them. You can see them all under History.
Two things to be aware of:
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Conversations are stored in Mentorly, alongside the rest of your program’s data, and they are covered by the same security and privacy commitments. See the Mentorly Enterprise Security FAQ.
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The Mentorly team can review questions and answers. We do this to help when you contact support, and to find where Iris is getting things wrong so we can fix her. Iris is new, and this is how she gets better.
Where Iris runs:
Iris is built on Azure OpenAI Service, running inside Mentorly’s own cloud environment rather than a public chatbot. Your program’s data is not used to train AI models.
Anything confidential:
Iris is a good place for questions about your program. She is not the place for anything you would not put in Mentorly in the first place.
Do not paste passwords, banking details, health information, or anything similarly sensitive into the panel. That is the same advice that applies to any other field in the product, and for the same reason: once it is typed, it is stored.