AI Assistants Overview
Two families of contextual AI Assistant — one built for acting on table rows, one built for interpreting dashboard metrics — both powered by the same Agentic writer-engine settings.
What is AI Assistant?
TotalApp gives almost every screen its own AI Assistant — a contextual panel that understands the data on that specific screen and can act on it or explain it in plain English. Rather than one generic chatbot bolted onto the app, there are two purpose-built families, each shaped for the kind of screen it lives on.
Every AI Assistant, regardless of family, is powered by the same underlying Agentic configuration (see Agentic → Overview) — the Writer Engine you choose in Settings (Ollama, In-Browser/WebGPU, or Cloud LLM) is what actually answers the assistant's requests. This is why every AI Assistant in TotalApp respects your chosen engine instead of silently calling a cloud API: the client-side code checks the active Writer Engine before making any request, so switching to a fully local or in-browser engine keeps every assistant working without a single behavior change.
The core split
Table/List screens get an assistant built for row-level action. Dashboard screens get an assistant built for metric-level insight. Same underlying AI, two very different jobs.
Screen preview
A quick look at the screens. Use the toggle in the corner of each preview to switch between the dark and light themes.
— Headcount grew 12% to 48 employees
— Turnover rate: 8.3% (— from 6.1% in Q1)
— —— Risk: 3 senior roles open >60 days
— Leave utilisation: 71% of annual budget used
Native AI assistant
The native AI Assistant panel with screen context
1. Acme Corp — $240K (85% prob) · active 2d
2. TechStart Inc — $180K (62% prob) · quiet 14d
3. Global Ltd — $320K (78% prob) · active 1d
4. Northwind Group — $95K (54% prob) · active 5d
5. Bluepeak Retail — $150K (48% prob) · quiet 9d
⚠️ TechStart shows low recent activity—recommend outreach.
Embedded AI Assistants across eight domain screens
Table Assistants vs. Dashboard Assistants
| Aspect | Table & List Assistants | Dashboard Assistants (Insight Generator) |
|---|---|---|
| Where it appears | Any table/list screen — Asset Registry, My Projects, Purchase Orders, Employees, and more | Chart-heavy dashboard screens — starting with the MTBF/MTTR Reliability Dashboard |
| What it does | Acts on the rows in front of you — selects, edits, cleans up, filters, summarizes, converts | Reads the charts for you — summarizes metrics, explains trends, recommends next steps |
| Example action | "Set status to Approved for these 5 records and create a work order" | "MTTR spiked in Q3 — driven mostly by the Boiler System H8 asset group" |
| Output shape | Bulk edits, filtered views, exported files, inline suggestions | Executive summary, root-cause explanation, actionable recommendation |
One Shared Panel, Everywhere
Every assistant in TotalApp is built on the same panel, so what you learn on one screen works on all of them. The panel follows your AI Assistant settings — width, font size, history depth, suggestion chips — and takes its accent colour from the module you are in. Every panel has the same controls: suggestion chips on an empty chat, chat history and New Chat, full-screen mode, Save as Report and Add Knowledge.
Select rows, then ask
On table screens, tick the checkbox at the start of any rows. The panel lists them under Selected (n) and offers Analyze selected and Summarize selected — one click sends the ticked records to the assistant with a ready-made prompt. If you type your own question instead, the selected rows are used as its context. With nothing ticked, the assistant looks at the whole list. The checkbox look (shape, colour, size) is set in Settings → Appearance.
Learn More
Table & List Assistants
Multi-select bulk actions, data cleanup, natural-language filtering, quick summarization, and inline smart suggestions on every table screen.
Dashboard Assistants (Insight Generator)
Natural-language executive summaries, root-cause and anomaly detection, and actionable recommendations for every chart-heavy dashboard.
Dashboard Assistants Are Arriving Now
Table/List Assistants already exist across many screens today. Dashboard Assistants — the Insight Generator — are the newest addition to this family, rolling out across TotalApp's chart-heavy dashboards starting with the MTBF/MTTR Reliability Dashboard in Maintenance Operations, with the Manufacturing OEE Dashboard and other analytics screens close behind.
Same concept, screen by screen
Because every Dashboard Assistant is scoped to its own dashboard's own screen and data, rolling it out to a new dashboard is a matter of wiring up that screen's metrics — not building a new AI concept from scratch.