The AI Assistant

The AI Assistant answers questions about what is going on in your account and can carry out small jobs for you. Ask it things like “which of my tasks are overdue?”, “how many orders are still waiting on approval?” or “what is holding this process up?” and it works the answer out from your real data.

Where to open it

• From the side bar - under AI Tools, choose AI Assistant for a full-screen conversation.
• From the screen you’re on - the Ask AI button opens the Assistant in a panel on the right side, without leaving the page. It appears on process and task lists, on a process diagram, and on a few other screens.

When you open it from a particular screen, the Assistant already knows what you are looking at, so you can ask “what is the hold-up here?” without spelling out which process you mean.

It remembers your conversation

Your conversation stays where you left it. Close the panel, move to another screen, or reload the page, and everything you have already said is still there when you come back - so a question you were part way through asking is not lost because you clicked away.

Each thing you ask about keeps its own conversation. Open the Assistant on a process and that conversation belongs to that process; open it on a template, or from the side bar, and each of those picks up where you left off too. Going back to a process resumes what you were saying about it, and nothing you discussed about one process turns up in the middle of a question about another.

Conversations start fresh the next day. One is left behind once you have been away from it for about twelve hours, so you never come back to yesterday’s questions still on screen.

Starting over

To start a new conversation before then, use the refresh button at the top of the chat - Start a new conversation. This really does end it: the Assistant forgets what was said before that point, and those messages do not come back the next time you open the panel. Use it when you move on to an unrelated question and would rather the Assistant did not carry the old thread of the conversation into the new one.

Ask about a customer, supplier or site

When your processes reference another record through a lookup field - a customer on an invoice, a vendor on a purchase order, a site on a service visit - you can ask the Assistant about that record itself: “what is our history with Clampett Oil?”, “should I be chasing this account harder?”, “anything I should know before I call this supplier?”

It pulls together everything your own processes know about them:

• How long you have worked together, and how many times they come up across every process.
• Which processes they appear in, how many of each, and how many are open right now.
• Their rhythm - how often they normally come round, and whether they are overdue by their own usual pattern rather than by a date somebody guessed at.
• How things have gone - ratings, hold-ups and how long their work usually takes, each compared with what is normal for that process, so you can tell an unusual number from an ordinary one - and whether things have been getting better or worse lately, not just where they stand today.
• What is in flight now, how old it is, which step it is sitting on, and who it is waiting on.
• Anything raised about them before, and how it turned out.

It only shows you what you are already allowed to open - both whole processes that are restricted to other people, and individual runs that have been limited to named people. Anything left out on that basis is left out of the totals too, and it tells you when that has happened.

It reads your process records - it does not read emails, messages or the contents of attached documents, so it will say so rather than let a quiet file look like a clean record.

Attaching files

You can attach files to a message with the paperclip button, or by dragging them onto the chat - up to five per message. Documents, spreadsheets, images and PDFs all work, so you can ask the Assistant to read something and act on it.

The AI Assistant and the AI Strategist

They are different. The AI Assistant answers your questions and helps you get through today’s work. The AI Strategist is an advisor that watches your business over time, raises what it finds, and works with you on where to improve. See AI Strategist.