# The IndustryMax AI assistant

The assistant is a read-only helper that sits on top of the screen you already have open and answers questions about your own data — what is in stock, what a supplier has quoted before, which approvals are waiting, what an order says. It reads; it never writes. It can only see what your own role and your own company access already allow you to see, and it runs on a model hosted on our own hardware rather than being sent to an outside AI service.

*Last reviewed 2026-09-12. Canonical HTML: https://industrymax.co.in/modules/ai-assistant*

## What it can answer

It has twelve read-only lookups it can use, and it uses at most two rounds of them before answering. Between them they cover:


- Items — find one, see where it is stocked, what it has been consumed at, and what it has been bought at before.
- Reorder alerts — what has fallen below its level.
- Purchase orders — recent ones, and the detail of one in particular.
- Deliveries — what is ordered and still outstanding.
- Suppliers — who they are and what we know about them.
- Approvals — what is waiting on you.
- Payables — which supplier bills are outstanding.
- Documents — find one by number.


It also knows which screen you are on, so "why is this line red" is a question it can take literally rather than asking you to describe where you are.


## What it cannot do, and why that is the design

**It cannot write anything**
: Every lookup is a read. There is no tool that creates, edits, approves, cancels or sends. The assistant explains; it does not act. A write-capable tool would need its own permission and a human confirmation step, and none exists.

**It cannot cross a company**
: Your customer account is fixed from your signed-in session and is never something the model can choose. Where a customer runs several legal entities, the assistant is held to the ones your login may see — the same rule every list screen follows.

**It cannot outrank your permissions**
: Each lookup mirrors what the equivalent screen requires. If your role cannot open the supplier-bill register, the assistant will not answer a question about outstanding bills either. It must never answer something you could not have found by opening the page yourself.

**It does not decide anything**
: It does not approve, it does not choose suppliers, it does not give financial, tax or legal advice, and nothing it says triggers an action in the system.


> **Note:** Data that comes back from a lookup is treated as data, not as instructions. An item named to look like a command is still an item name.


## Language

It answers in English and in Hinglish — Hindi or Marathi written in Roman letters — because that is how a lot of shop-floor and purchase conversation is actually typed. Questions written in Devanagari and other Indian scripts are routed to a different model that handles them coherently, but usually replies in English. That limitation is known and stated rather than hidden.


## The other AI in the product

The assistant is the visible one. Several smaller helpers sit inside forms:


- A summary of the supplier quotations on a comparison, for the person approving it.
- Duplicate detection when an item is being added, so the master does not fill up with three spellings of the same thing.
- Reorder suggestions from consumption history.
- Document extraction from an uploaded supplier document — the model transcribes what it can read, and ordinary deterministic code decides what to do with it. The model is never the one that decides.
- Suggested items on an indent form, and matching a described item to one in the master.


## Where it runs

- On a self-hosted model server, not a third-party AI service.
- It is a licensed feature, so it can be switched off for a customer entirely.
- Requests are rate-limited per minute, and document extraction more tightly than chat, because vision work is slow and shared.
- Usage is logged and can be reported on, including which people are using it most.


## Questions

### What does the IndustryMax AI assistant do?

It answers questions about your own ERP data from the screen you are on — stock, items, suppliers, purchase orders, outstanding deliveries, pending approvals and outstanding bills. It is read-only.

### Can the assistant change data or approve documents?

No. Every lookup it has is a read. There is no tool that creates, edits, approves or sends anything, by design. If that ever changes it will need its own permission and a human confirmation step.

### Does the assistant respect user permissions?

Yes. Each lookup requires what the equivalent screen requires, and your customer account and company access come from your signed-in session rather than from anything the model chooses. It must never answer what you could not have found by opening the page yourself.

### Is our data sent to an external AI provider?

No. It runs on a self-hosted model server rather than a third-party AI service.

### Can the AI assistant be turned off?

Yes. It is a licensed feature and can be switched off for a customer entirely, independently of the rest of the product.

## Related

- https://industrymax.co.in/security
- https://industrymax.co.in/modules/inventory
- https://industrymax.co.in/modules/procurement
- https://industrymax.co.in/faq