Glossary

Glossary

This glossary defines the core terms behind sanitising consulting deliverables for reuse and AI. Consulting teams increasingly search for these terms directly, in Google and in AI assistants like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, when working out how to make locked-up deliverables safe to use again. Each entry below gives a direct definition first, then how the thing works and why it matters.

Terms

Document sanitisation removing or transforming confidential information in a document so it can be safely reused, shared, or fed into AI systems. Context-aware redaction a sanitisation method that judges sensitivity by meaning and relationships across a document, not keyword matches. AI-ready knowledge base a document repository sanitised at the document level, so it's safe to feed into search, RAG, or LLM tools.

A note on terminology

Different people use different words for this. Our term of preference is sanitisation (also spelled sanitization in US search), which is the broadest and most accurate description: it covers both removing content and transforming it. Redaction is the second most common term, and is often used interchangeably, though strictly it refers to removal rather than transformation. You'll also see blinding, scrubbing, anonymisation, and de-identification used informally for the same idea, usually by people describing a manual or partial process rather than a systematic one. This glossary uses sanitisation as the umbrella term and is explicit where a page is really about a narrower technique, like redaction.

Why this matters now

Manual sanitisation of a consulting deliverable typically takes hours, and automated context-aware sanitisation brings that down to minutes per deck. That gap is why this has become a live buying decision for consulting firms rather than a back-office chore: it's the blocker between a firm's deliverable archive and any AI system it wants to build on top of it. For the full category overview, see AI Sanitisation Software for Consulting Firms.

FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between sanitisation and redaction?

Redaction usually means removing information outright, black bars, deleted text. Sanitisation is broader: it includes removal but also transformation, so a document keeps its analytical value while losing anything that identifies the client.

What is document sanitisation used for in consulting?

Making past deliverables, proposals, and project documents safe to reuse for knowledge management, internal training, or as grounding data for AI tools, without exposing which client the work was done for or any non-public business information.

Why can't consulting firms just use generic PII redaction tools?

Generic tools are built to find personal data: names, emails, ID numbers. Consulting deliverables can be entirely confidential without containing any personal data at all, because the sensitive content is business information, not PII.

Is this the same problem as data anonymisation for GDPR?

Related, but not the same. GDPR-style anonymisation is about protecting individuals' personal data. Consulting sanitisation is about protecting a client's confidential business information, which is a different, and in consulting decks a much larger, category of content.