The Companion

The Companion is Autopilot's built-in AI assistant. It lives in a panel on the right side of the dashboard and the sales log. You can ask it anything about your dealership's data, your team, or how to do something in the app.

Open it

Click the Companion icon in the right-hand panel toggle (sparkle icon). It pops out as a side panel; you can keep working on the main screen with it open.

What it can answer

Three rough categories:

Live data questions

• "How many deals does [a salesperson] have this month?"
• "Who's behind target?"
• "Show me cold deals."
• "Who's #1 on the leaderboard this quarter?"
• "Which deals are still awaiting customer signature?"
• "What's our team's gross profit so far this month?"
• "What Tiggo 4s did we sell last week?"

The Companion queries your live data and answers in plain English. If you ask a "show me" question, it includes a button to open the relevant filtered view of the sales log.

How-to questions

• "How do I set monthly targets?"
• "Where do I change the deal numbering?"
• "How do I invite someone?"
• "Can I hide gross profit from salespeople?"

It points you to the right setting and explains briefly. Same as our docs but conversational.

Process questions

• "What's our policy on discount approval?"
• "What's the fastest way to enter a deal?"
• "What does 'profiled' mean?"

It uses your dealership's current settings + Autopilot's general docs to answer.

What it doesn't do

• Doesn't write deals for you. It can deep-link to the new-deal form but can't fill it.
• Doesn't change settings. It can tell you where to go but doesn't flip toggles on your behalf.
• Doesn't email customers. Deliberately scoped — automation lives in the Messages module, not in the Companion.

How role-based visibility works

The Companion respects your permissions. A salesperson asking "how much GP did the team make this month?" — when GP is hidden from salespeople — gets a polite "you don't have permission to see that" rather than the number.

Financial answers are guarded before they reach the AI. Internal database values are converted into explicit dollar fields, like grossProfitExGstDollars or vehiclePriceInclGstDollars, and raw cents fields are stripped from tool results. If a permission check says financials are hidden, the Companion must not quote the figure.

For vehicle/date questions, the Companion uses a sold-deal search tool that understands New Zealand-local dates, Monday-start weeks, fuzzy vehicle text, and common typos such as "Togo" for "Tiggo". It excludes cancelled and draft rows before answering.

Dealer-native vocabulary

Companion mirrors your dealership's terminology. If you've named a sales channel after the brand you sell rather than calling it "New Cars", it'll use that name. If your conditions are "Pre-Reg" / "Demo" / "Used", it uses those labels. Don't fight the assistant on names.

Where it appears

• Dashboard — right-side panel.
• Sales log — right-side panel (same instance as dashboard).
• Anywhere else — the floating chat icon at the bottom-right of every screen opens it.

The full /chat page

If you'd rather a full-screen chat interface (more room, full conversation history visible), open /chat directly. Same conversations, same data, just bigger.

Privacy

Conversations are processed by Anthropic's Claude API — we use the no-retention tier so they aren't kept after the response comes back. We do log a hashed snippet for "feature request" capture (when the Companion sees a query it can't satisfy, we log that pattern so we know what to build next).

If you want a conversation that doesn't get logged at all, just don't ask it the dealership-specific question — the Companion isn't a substitute for messaging your manager directly when something's sensitive.