What the Assistant Can and Can't Do
Knowing the assistant's boundaries saves you time — here's what to expect.
What it can do
- Answer data questions — sales summaries and trends, top items/categories/brands, inventory balance and valuation, reorder and dead stock, collections and refunds, profit & loss, customer activity, purchase orders and goods receipts.
- Look up live stock for one item — "How much Blue Widget do I have in store 2?" — with a per-location breakdown. See Adding a Catalog Item by Asking.
- Answer how-to questions about the portal, backed by the Help guides — see Getting Answers from the Help Guides.
- Create and update customers through the propose-and-confirm flow — see Creating and Updating Records by Asking.
- Add catalog items through the same propose-and-confirm flow — see Adding a Catalog Item by Asking.
- Work through a request in steps. If your question needs more than one lookup — narrowing an item name down to one item and then reading its stock, for example — it does that within the same answer instead of making you ask twice.
What it can't do
- Answering never changes data. Questions are read-only; asking it to "delete last month's orders" won't do anything.
- Record changes only cover customers, catalog items, and QuickPicks today. Stores, orders, and other records are still managed from their own screens.
- Nothing is saved without your confirmation. A proposal that expires or is discarded leaves no trace.
- It only remembers the chat you're in. Follow-ups like "and the month before?" work within the current chat (your last six questions). A new chat, a page refresh or a closed tab starts fresh, and re-reading a past conversation doesn't let the assistant refer back to it. It remembers what was asked and answered, not the figures — it looks numbers up again when a follow-up needs them.
- It can't produce a PDF or a file. It shows figures on screen; exporting is done from the matching report screen.
- Charts and interactive views only show figures it looked up in that answer. It won't chart a figure it can't vouch for — for example, the period-over-period change on a trend, or ledger amounts held in cents — and shows the data card instead.
- It doesn't split figures by store yet. The data it can reach is for all stores together, so ask the matching report screen for a per-store view.
Input rules
- Keep each message to plain language and roughly a paragraph (up to 500 characters).
- Don't paste links or anything that looks like code or database commands — the request is rejected as invalid input.
Access and privacy
- The assistant can only reach what your role can reach. It is held to exactly the same permissions as the screens: if your role can't open the Sales vs Purchases report, asking the assistant to compare sales against purchases won't produce the numbers either — it will tell you your access doesn't cover it. The same applies to stock lookups and to adding items.
- Because of that, two people on the same team can get different answers to the same question, and the ready-made prompts each person sees under Templates differ too — you're only shown the ones your role can actually run.
- If you think you should have access to something the assistant refuses, ask an administrator to check your role on Management → Permissions.
- AI features are plan-gated as well. Without them the sidebar entry doesn't appear; without the AI Agent specifically you get the ask-only chat — no conversation panel, no attachments, no action templates, and an instruction is answered as an ordinary question.
- Chat history is stored only in your own browser for the current session — teammates can't see it, and it clears when the browser session ends.
Accuracy
As the footer under the message box says: iotoms AI can make mistakes. Please verify important data. For decisions that matter — reconciliation, finance, stock write-offs — confirm the numbers in the corresponding report before acting. This is also why every change goes through a proposal card you have to read and confirm.