Using AI Assistants

Once your assistant is connected, you can ask it billing questions in plain English. This page covers what works well, how the assistant sees your data, and how to keep your connections tidy.

What to Ask

With reporting KPI access, the assistant can answer aggregate questions:

“Show invoice totals by month for this year.”
“How is our overdue debt spread by age?”
“How many Direct Debit collections failed last month, and for how much?”
“How does this quarter’s customer growth compare with last quarter?”
“What share of payments came in by card rather than Direct Debit?”

With individual record (read) access, it can also work with specific records:

“Find the customer account for Smith’s Bakery in Leeds.”
“List their unpaid invoices, largest first.”
“Which customers added in the last 12 months have overdue invoices?”
“Show me any open tickets for account 10234.”

With write access, it can act, using the platform’s own workflows:

“Email that invoice to the customer’s accounts contact.”
“Add a note to the account summarising this conversation.”
“Create a TODO for me to review their tariff next month.”
“Suspend that number.”

Good assistants will confirm significant actions such as drops, write-offs and refunds with you before performing them, and will ask which effective dates you want rather than assuming. The platform steers them to do exactly that, but it cannot force a badly behaved client, so word your requests precisely when acting on records.

With call data access, it can answer traffic and cost questions:

“How many calls did we carry last month, and what did they cost us wholesale?”
“Break international minutes down by month for this year.”
“Which dealers sent the most traffic last quarter?”
“Show the calls on that invoice, longest first.” (needs full per-call detail)

Aggregate summaries can be grouped by period, call direction, call type, rating period, number type, dealer or site, over a range of up to 366 days. Summaries for a specific customer, number, service, feature, invoice or transaction also need individual record access. Both call grants are read-only, so an assistant can report on calls but never change or delete them.

Working from a list

An assistant can look up many values at once rather than one request per row, which makes list-shaped questions practical:

“Here are 80 numbers from a porting notice. Which customers do they belong to?”
“Check these 50 account numbers and tell me which have unpaid invoices.”

Up to 100 values can be checked in one go against customers, numbers, services, features, invoices, payments, payment instruments, contacts, tickets and notes. Results stay grouped against the value you supplied, and where a value matches more than one record the assistant is given the alternatives to resolve rather than a silent guess.

Number lookups behave like SmartSearch: formatted and protected numbers are understood, displayed and CDR variants are both searched, and exact matches come first.

Checking what a connection can do

Assistants can ask the platform who they are acting as and what they are permitted to do, so a well-behaved one will tell you it lacks an access category rather than guessing at why something failed. If an assistant reports a missing capability or a problem, it can also send that feedback to the platform maintainers directly.

How the Assistant Sees Your Data

A few things worth knowing when results look abbreviated:

Summaries first. Record lists return a compact headline view (account number, name, status, and similar); the assistant fetches full record detail only when needed.
Result caps. KPI queries return up to 200 rows by default (500 at most); record lists return up to 25 records by default (100 at most). Responses tell the assistant when results were truncated, and it can page through for more.
Personal customers may be out of scope. Unless the connection was granted Personal Customers, individual records are limited to customers classified as businesses, so an account you can see in the platform may not appear in an assistant’s results. Aggregate KPI figures still include everybody.
Your permissions apply. The assistant sees only what your own account can see, including customer scoping, and only within what your platform’s MCP settings allow. If it reports that access is not enabled, your data controller needs to grant the relevant Access MCP flag, or the connection needs re-approving with that access ticked. See What you can grant.
Headline results follow list permissions; full detail needs view permission. A batch lookup can therefore tell you a record exists and give you its headline fields while still withholding the detail, if that is what your permissions say.
Everything is logged. Actions taken through an assistant appear in the platform’s activity log against your user, flagged as MCP activity so they are distinguishable from your interactive and API activity.

Managing Your Connections

Open the AI Assistants (MCP) page from the Advanced menu. The Your Connections table lists each connection your account has approved, showing when it was authorised, when it was last used, the access it holds, and its status (Active, Expired, or Revoked).

To cut off an assistant, choose Revoke next to the connection. Revocation is immediate: the assistant can no longer access the platform with that connection, and reconnecting requires a fresh approval with your login and 2FA.

A connection that has not been renewed for sixty days expires by itself.

If You See a Connection You Do Not Recognise

You receive an email whenever a connection is approved or revoked with your account. If you receive an approval email you did not initiate, or spot an unfamiliar connection in the table:

Revoke the connection immediately.
Reset your password and 2FA, since someone may have your credentials.
Tell your data controller or support so they can review the activity log.

AI Assistants overview - what a connected assistant can do and how access is controlled
Initial setup - connecting Claude, ChatGPT, or another assistant
KPI Module - the reporting data behind the assistant’s aggregate answers