How does Assist come up with answers?

Assist Availability

Procore Assist is available to North American customers with the required toolset. They can enable additional beta features as they become available. International customers with the required toolset can enable one or both beta experiences: Assist in Global Search or additional beta features. Assist currently only answers questions in English with U.S. construction terminology. See Enable Assist to activate Assist or its beta features.

 Caution
Like all AI tools, Assist's answers might not be entirely accurate. You must evaluate any recommendations or suggestions against your own reasonable policies and procedures before taking action. We recommend human review of any AI-generated outputs.

Background

Assist leverages the latest in artificial intelligence (AI) technology, and as such its capabilities are always growing and changing. However, the way it finds information stays the same, no matter what new information it's able to access as improvements are made.

Answer

Assist is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool, and its foundation is a Large Language Model (LLM). It is capable of reading a question asked in natural language, like the kind of question you might ask a coworker. It references certain information to respond using natural language, but a lot happens in between asking your question and receiving Assist's response. Here is how Assist works behind the scenes:

  1. First, you ask a question in natural language. As opposed to the search engine technology we're used to, Assist responds much better to questions asked using full sentences, instead of just a few keywords. It needs your full thought written out to interpret the intent of what you're asking, just like a person might. It then takes your natural language question, and converts it into a sequence of numerical values on a kind of map, called vectors.
  2. Next, Assist determines the intent of your question. When we talk about interpreting intent, we mean that Assist is deciding which "skill", or database, to access to find the right information to answer your question. If your intent is to find out how to do something in Procore, Assist sends your query in mathematical form over to the skill that addresses all questions about how to use Procore. The skill looks at the numerical values from your question, and finds the closest values present in the database to determine which information should be used to answer your question.
  3. Then, information is sent from the service back to Assist.  When Assist receives the information from the relevant skill, still in numerical format, it collects it and translates it back to natural language. Finally, Assist presents the answer to you along with links to the files or items in Procore where it found the answer to your question. 

Assist does NOT know:

See Also