The AI Assistant is the shop-level insights feed at /app/ai-assistant. The page is labeled "Shop ops" above the "AI Assistant" heading, and it exists to pull the most actionable signals out of your live shop data — inventory, today's calendar, recent revenue, customers, and outstanding quotes — into one ranked list you can scan in about 30 seconds. It's scoped to your shop only; it mirrors the same pattern used for the franchise-level assistant, but the two are separate views over separate data.
What's on the page
At the top is a stats strip with four tiles — Urgent, Watch, Opportunities, and FYI — showing how many insights fall into each severity. Below that is a highlighted card labeled "Top focus right now": this is the single insight the page thinks you should look at first, with its title, a short explanation, a severity badge, and a button that jumps straight to the relevant screen (inventory, scheduling, a customer record, etc.).
Every insight also carries a "kind" — Inventory, Customer, Revenue, Operations, or Growth — shown as a colored icon (package, people, dollar sign, calendar, or rocket) on the left of each card in the list below the hero. There's no text label for kind, so if you're scanning quickly, go by icon color rather than looking for a word. The featured "Top focus" card is the one exception: instead of a kind icon, it always shows a plain brain icon, no matter what kind the featured insight actually is.
How the top card is chosen — and why the rest of the list can look short
The "Top focus" card isn't always the single most important item on the page. The logic looks for the first Urgent-severity insight; if one exists, that becomes the hero card. If nothing is Urgent, the page just falls back to whatever insight happens to be first in the list it received — not necessarily the highest-remaining severity. So when nothing is Urgent, don't assume the featured card is automatically more important than everything below it; it may just be whatever came back first.
If there are no insights at all, you'll see an "All systems steady" card instead, suggesting you add inventory thresholds and confirm a few appointments to start surfacing deeper insights.
Below the hero, the page lists the rest of the insights by dropping the first item from the list it received — except when there's only one insight total, in which case nothing renders underneath the hero card at all. That's expected behavior, not a missing feed: everything you have is already shown up top. One thing worth knowing: the page drops that first list position, not the hero item specifically. Normally those are the same thing, so it works exactly as described above. But if the featured Urgent insight wasn't literally first in the underlying data (say it was third in the list), the true first insight silently disappears from the page — it's neither the hero nor in the list below — and the hero's insight shows up a second time in the list underneath itself. If staff ever notice a duplicate card or a signal that seems to have vanished, this is why.
One wording quirk worth knowing before you train staff on this page: the hero card's button shows the insight's full action label (for example, "Open Reorder Ceramic Film"), but the exact same action rendered in the list below has any leading "Open " trimmed off, so it just reads "Reorder Ceramic Film." Same action, different button text depending on where it appears.
Refreshing and data freshness
Insights don't update on their own — click Refresh (top right) to recompute them; the button reads "Refreshing…" and spins while it's working, and it's disabled until the fetch finishes. Per the page's own disclaimer, the numbers behind these insights come from your inventory thresholds, today's calendar, the last 7 days of payments, customer visit history, and outstanding quotes. That 7-day payments window matters: a large invoice or a slow week from more than 7 days ago won't be reflected in a revenue-related insight even if it's still relevant to you — only Refresh recomputes against current data, and even then it's bounded by that same rolling window.