AI Strategist

The AI Strategist is a built-in AI advisor. It understands your organization’s context inside ProcessPlan and helps you think through your business: where to focus, what to improve, and what to do next.

Starting a strategy session

You can talk to the AI Strategist in two ways:

• Full page - open the AI Strategy Session from the navigation bar for a focused conversation.
• Side panel - the Strategy Session button on Strategist pages opens the conversation in a panel on the right side of the screen, so you can keep the page you’re working on visible.

Every entry point opens the same conversation, so a discussion you start from your AI Daily Briefing carries through your day - continue it from anywhere in the app and it picks up where you left off. After about 12 hours away, the next session starts fresh: the Strategist still knows your business and your priorities, it just opens a new conversation rather than resuming the old one.

The Strategist speaks first in each new session: it opens with a short briefing of what it has done since you last spoke, what those actions earned, and anything waiting on your decision. Give it a moment to prepare that opening, then take the conversation anywhere you like - or just start typing without waiting.

What it can help with

• Analyzing your business situation and surfacing opportunities.
• Proposing and refining strategic initiatives - and helping you prioritize them. See Strategic Initiatives.
• Answering questions about your processes and suggesting improvements. That includes how reliably a process is running: ask “how reliable is our onboarding process?” and it works the answer out from your real runs - how long they typically take, how often one hits a problem, whether the process is running steady or has shifted recently - and tells you honestly when there is not enough history yet to say.
• Working out how your numbers are actually distributed. Ask “what does our order-value spread look like?” or “how long does fulfillment take, best case and worst case?” and it computes the answer from every matching run: the typical value, the spread, the slowest 1 in 20, and the shape of the distribution. If you build simulation or forecasting models, ask it which probability distribution to use for a variable (cycle time, order value, any numeric field) and it fits the candidates to your real data and names the closest match, along with the parameters to plug in - and it says plainly when there is not enough history to name one.
• Bringing your pending decisions to you. When the Strategist mentions something waiting on your call - a proposed improvement to approve, a question it needs answered - ask it to open the item and it appears in a panel beside the conversation, ready to act on. Approve, answer, or dismiss it right there, then pick the conversation back up where you left off.
• Building the changes you agree on, right from the conversation. The Strategist can create a new process or data table, add steps or outcomes to an existing process, change who a step is assigned to (a specific person, a team, or every member of a team individually), and launch or schedule process runs. It can also change the data a process captures: add fields, rename them, make them required or optional, reorder them, add dropdown choices, and point an existing process table lookup at a different table or narrow which of its records the field offers. It always shows you the exact change first and asks for your confirmation before anything is saved.
• Handing work over when someone leaves or is out. Tell the Strategist “Priya has left, move her open tasks to Dana” and it does it, rather than pointing you at an administrator. Name particular tasks or ask it to take everything one person still holds (optionally just on one process), and it shows you the list first: which tasks would move, who has them now, and any that cannot be moved along with the reason - a task that has already been answered, or a step whose design does not allow reassignment. Nothing changes until you say yes. The new assignee is notified exactly as they would be for any other assignment. Moving existing tasks does not change where the next one goes, so the Strategist will also offer to change the step’s assignment, which is usually what you want for a permanent handover. You need permission to change task assignments, the same as reassigning a task yourself.
• Putting an AI agent to work on a step. Ask it to have AI handle part of a process - drafting the reply, summarizing the document that came in, researching the request, classifying it - and the Strategist sets that up for you in the conversation rather than telling you where to configure it. It shows you exactly what it will put in place first: which step, what the agent will do, and which field its answer will be written into so you can read and edit it. Say yes and the automation is live immediately, running the next time that step’s task is assigned. The agent does the work and then completes the step, choosing the response that fits what it found - the success route when the work came out clean, the failure or exception route when it did not - so your team sees both that the work is finished and how it turned out. The run then carries on down whichever route that response leads to, exactly as your diagram lays it out. Tell the Strategist which response should be chosen in which circumstance and it writes that into the agent’s instructions; if you want a person to check the agent’s work before the run goes further, that is a review step after the agent’s step, which the Strategist can add in the same conversation. If a step already has an AI agent on it, the Strategist tells you what is running there instead of adding a second one. Setting this up requires edit access to that process. See AI Agent Action Type for everything an agent can do and how to build one yourself.
• Checking its own work before it changes anything. When it proposes a change to a process diagram, it tests the change against your live process first and tells you if the result would not hold together - for example if removing a step would leave later steps with nothing leading to them. Nothing is saved while it checks, so a change that would not work is caught before your process is touched rather than after. A few things it will always decline: changing an existing field’s type (the values already recorded in it could not be carried across), deleting fields, and repointing an aggregate field such as a Sum or Count, because the figure it totals belongs to the table it reads today.
• Setting up processes. While your account has little running yet, any strategy session can turn into a short setup interview: the Strategist learns how your business runs, remembers what you tell it, and designs new processes with you. Confirm a design in the conversation and it builds the process on the spot, live and ready to run.
• Estimating what an automation will cost to run. Describe a job you would like an AI Employee to take over and the Strategist works out what it would cost each month, before anything has been built and before it has ever run, so you never have to convert your team’s hours into a bill yourself. It breaks the job into its real steps, works out which parts need an AI Employee working a screen and which can be handled by AI reading documents and data instead, and gives you a range rather than a single figure. It also shows you the assumptions it had to make, so you can correct any that are wrong and get a sharper number straight away. Ask it directly (“what would it cost to check every invoice against its purchase order?”) or let it raise the number itself when a job worth automating comes up. For work that needs a screen recording, it gives you a rough setup range as well; the exact one-time fine-tuning price is quoted from your own recording, before you commit to anything. See Recording a Process.
• Keeping your company profile current. Mention your company’s size, industry, revenue range, or location in conversation and the Strategist offers to record it (always confirming first). It may also ask for a missing detail itself - at most one per conversation, at a natural pause, always explaining what knowing it improves - because the profile sharpens its analysis, tunes what it watches in the outside world, and shapes how your business is compared with similar companies. If your profile is still mostly empty, the Strategist raises an insight inviting you to fill it in through a short conversation; dismiss that invitation and it stays quiet for several months before checking back in.
• Managing its own team. Ask what it is watching and what else it could watch, and put new focus areas to work right in the conversation: it resolves the details from your data, plays the plan back, and sets the analyst up once you agree - observe-first, always. Everything about an analyst is settable by asking, and nothing about one has to be set up on a settings screen: pausing and resuming, renaming, retargeting, how often it checks, how conservative or aggressive it is, which records it follows (it runs the filter and shows you what it selected before saving), who hears about its findings, and what should happen when it finds something - including having it start one of your processes and fill in the details of the finding, either for your approval or, once it has earned that, on its own. Ask how any analyst is currently set up and it tells you the whole picture, standing guidance included. See Focus Areas.
• Remembering your direction. Tell it a standing fact or rule about your business - “December is our busy season”, “we never contact customers directly” - and it offers to record it, confirms the exact wording with you, and honors it in every future analysis. Direction aimed at one analyst lands as that analyst’s standing guidance the same way.
• Learning who to go to. To act on something it often needs to reach the right person, and a list of names does not tell it who handles what. So when it needs to raise something and cannot see who owns it, it asks you at that moment and says why: “I need to ask about product pricing and I can’t see who owns that. Who should I ask?” Tell it, and it notes down what that person does and stops asking. It works out who to approach in order of how certain it can be - a user role you have named, then the owner of the process in question, then the part of the business someone works in, then their job title or department, then their supervisor - and it tells you which of those it matched on, so you can correct it when it guesses wrong. Occasionally an administrator may get a single message asking what a few people do; it only ever asks about people it actually works with, it asks once about any given person, and you can ignore it safely. If you would rather not wait to be asked, an administrator can set Functional area and Seniority level on anyone’s record under Administration > Users, and export the whole list to check who is still missing them.
• Tuning what it pays attention to. Tell it a process is retired and, with your confirmation, it marks the process retired and stops watching it: no more suggestions or proposals about it. This works in any strategy session, and also right while reviewing one of its recommendations. Nothing is deleted, the process and its history stay put, and you can bring it back anytime. Dismissals steer it too: analysts don’t re-raise findings equivalent to ones you dismissed, and when several dismissals share a pattern the Strategist checks in once to ask whether it should adjust its judgment - never adjusting without your say-so.

Giving it the fullest picture

The Strategist’s understanding of your business comes from the work that runs through ProcessPlan. Every process, task, approval, and handoff it can see adds to that picture. The more of your day-to-day work flows through the platform, the fuller its view of how your business actually operates, and the more impactful and specific its recommendations become.

If the Strategist’s suggestions feel thin or generic in some area, that is usually a sign it can’t see much there yet. Bringing the surrounding work into ProcessPlan (the requests, approvals, and handoffs around it) gives it the context it needs. There is nothing to configure: everything that runs in ProcessPlan feeds its picture automatically.

Teaching it what a good outcome looks like

The Strategist measures process outcomes through AI Strategist Signals - favorability ratings you set on task responses when designing a process. Rating the responses at your processes’ decision points tells the Strategist which results are wins and which are losses, so it can find where your processes are losing value and recommend changes that steer toward better outcomes. See AI Strategist Signal for how to set the ratings.

Proving improvements worked - and keeping them working

When you approve an improvement the Strategist proposed (a process change, a new automation, a recommended action), it does not declare victory and move on. It records how the process actually ran before the change, keeps measuring afterward, and only calls the improvement verified once the numbers have moved by more than that process’s normal ups and downs - a small wobble is reported as “within normal variation”, never dressed up as a win. Your briefing tells you which improvements have been verified this way.

The watching does not stop there. If a verified gain later starts slipping - the numbers drifting back toward where they were before the change - the Strategist notices and raises it while there is still time to find what crept back in. And when a gain holds steady for months, it says that too: the improvement has become the process’s new normal. There is nothing to configure; this happens automatically for every improvement you approve. (The Improvement Watch entry administrators see on the Focus Areas page is this at work.)

Getting the briefing by email, on your own schedule

The Strategist can email you its briefing: what is going on right now, what is waiting on your decision, and what to do first. It arrives first thing in the morning, your time, and it stays quiet whenever nothing has changed since the last one you read - so choosing a daily briefing does not mean a daily email.

You choose when it arrives. Tell the Strategist in a strategy session and it sets it up there and then:

• “email me the briefing every morning”
• “just weekdays”
• “every Friday”
• “Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays”
• “every other Tuesday”
• “the 15th of every month”
• “the first Monday of the month”

It will read the schedule back to you along with the next few dates it will arrive, so you can correct it on the spot if that is not what you meant. If you ask for something it cannot set up, it will say so plainly and offer the closest thing it can, rather than quietly settling for something near enough.

Your profile settings carry the common choices too, under AI Strategist Briefing. That choice appears once Send AI Strategist Emails is switched on, since a schedule cannot arrive while email from the Strategist is off. A schedule you arranged through the Strategist stays exactly as it is when you open that screen, even if it is not one of the listed options.

A briefing about what you care about

By default everyone gets the same company-wide briefing. If you would rather hear about one particular corner of the business, ask for your own: “I want to keep an eye on how onboarding is going”, or “just brief me on the finance processes”. The Strategist sets up a briefing that belongs to you and watches what you described.

Your own briefing only ever covers work you already have access to. If your account is limited to certain processes, your briefing is limited to the same ones - it will tell you about your area, not the whole company.

You can change what it pays attention to any time by telling the Strategist.

It only ever goes to people who asked

Email from the Strategist is off until somebody turns it on. It may offer once - if you ask it for a rundown, or mention you keep missing decisions waiting on you - and if you say no, or simply move on, it drops the subject.

Nothing signs you up on your behalf. Being on an analyst’s watcher list does not sign you up, and neither does anybody else’s subscription.

Telling the Strategist to stop is enough, any time, and it stops without asking why. To stop all email from it and keep hearing everything in the product instead, turn off Send AI Strategist Emails in your profile, or just say so in a strategy session. Nothing is lost either way: the briefing, the decision journal and a strategy session are all there whenever you want them.

If you would rather someone set this up for you, they can: anyone who can edit user information - an assistant, an administrator - can arrange it from your profile, or ask the Strategist to do it for you by name.

Permissions

Access to the AI Strategist is controlled by user permissions, so administrators decide who in the organization can use it.

Learn more

New to the Strategist? Start with Getting Started with the AI Strategist. For the full story of what it does and why, see The AI Strategist on our website.