Public affairs software: the platform that links bills, amendments and debates back to their source

The material is public, but scattered across dozens of portals — which is exactly what makes manual monitoring so costly. The Assemblée nationale, the Sénat, Légifrance, the official journal, every regulatory authority, the EU institutions: each has its own site, its own search engine, its own export format and its own publishing hours. The monitoring officer who does the rounds conscientiously spends the first hour of every day on it, and has still produced nothing analytical.

The peak is harder to absorb than the average. On a sensitive bill, several hundred amendments can land overnight: no human can read them all before the next morning's meeting. So you triage on sight — by author, by article, by instinct — and accept that a discreet provision will slip through. It is rarely the most commented amendments that move a threshold or a tax base; it is often the shortest ones, filed late.

Video remains the most expensive blind spot. A committee hearing ends late in the evening; the written record, when there is one, sometimes arrives several days later. In the meantime the footage is online: three hours of proceedings, and no way to search the spoken word. The only way to know whether your issue came up, and in what terms, is to watch all of it. Nobody watches.

Then comes the invisible cost: defensibility. A public affairs memo is only worth what it can prove. When its author has reconstructed from memory what a rapporteur said in the chamber, it holds until the first precise question. Public affairs software that produces summaries without references does not solve that problem, it moves it: it is a black box, impossible to quote and impossible to defend in front of a management team.

Useful scope is not judged by the length of a feature list, but by the questions a professional asks every week. Six of them come back every time.

Beyond those six building blocks, a complete scope includes the parliamentary agenda with amendment filing deadlines, stakeholder profiles and their positions over time, the register of interest representatives, and cross-source document search. But the choice between two platforms almost never comes down to that list.

It comes down to three non-functional criteria, the ones that decide whether the tool survives six months of use. Traceability: every claim must be clickable through to its source, without exception. Exportability: your tables must come out in Excel, Word or CSV, otherwise your deliverables stay locked inside an interface. Legible coverage: you need to know which institutions are actually connected and which are not, rather than accept an unverifiable promise of exhaustiveness. Ask as well where the data is hosted and under which regime it is processed — that is a compliance question, not a comfort one.

Polyfact is an AI monitoring tool for public affairs: bill and amendment tracking, timestamped transcripts of debates, legislative alerts and stakeholder mapping, from the Assemblée nationale to Brussels. Three design choices set it apart, and each one can be checked from the outside.

First, video. It is the layer most monitoring tools ignore, because it is heavy to process. As of 31 July 2026, over 27,000 institutional and media videos are indexed, more than 16,000 of them transcribed and timestamped; for the chambers alone, that means over 17,000 videos from the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat and the European Parliament, more than 10,000 of them transcribed. Every transcript is indexed by speaker: you quote the exact remark, not a corridor rumour.

Second, line-level sourcing. No black box: every sentence the AI produces — in a morning brief, in an amendment impact analysis, in an answer from the analyst — points back to the official document, the amendment, or the exact second of video it came from. That is what makes a memo defensible, and it is also what lets you contradict it: you see straight away what it rests on, so you can reject it when it gets something wrong.

Third, coverage, and honesty about its limits. Polyfact collects the Assemblée nationale, the Sénat, Légifrance and the official journal, French regulators and independent authorities, EU institutions, the press and X. As of 31 July 2026 that is 60 institutions and sources connected out of 489 catalogued, across ten countries where collection is already running. We do not promise exhaustiveness: the exact state of collection is published source by source on the coverage page. A vendor that will not publish its scope is asking you to take its word for it.

Then there is the volume that actually gets used. More than a million tracked amendments and over 4 million indexed documents can be queried in the same search as the video, without switching tools. The AI analyst works on that material: you ask a question in plain language, it builds the ranking, cross-checks positions and returns a written answer instead of a list of links. Data is hosted in Europe and processed under the GDPR.

The same software is not put to the same use depending on which chair you sit in. Three configurations come up repeatedly.

In a consultancy, the constraint is parallelism: five clients, five perimeters, five deliverables to produce without multiplying the hours by five. One monitoring profile per file or per client, shared with the team, keeps the perimeters watertight while pooling the collection work. The deliverable — a dated, sourced brief that can be sent as is — is what gets billed.

In an in-house public affairs team, the constraint is twofold: anticipate, then convince internally. You need to see an amendment coming before the committee stage, to know which MP spoke about your sector and in what terms, and finally to turn all of it into a memo an executive committee without the context can read. The chain of alert, timestamped video proof and sourced memo is exactly that path.

In a trade federation or a union, the constraint is how representative the signal is: you have to cover an entire sector, not a single bill, and answer members asking where the file stands. Stakeholder mapping and a topic-filtered feed replace the hand-made press review, and the history stays available when the text comes back through the shuttle between chambers.