Arby

Arby is the assistant that reads your organisation's records and answers questions about them. Who is booked in March, which invoices are overdue, what the last email on a job said. It reads only what you can already see, and it changes nothing.

Opening it

The Arby button sits in the top bar beside Search. ⌘ J opens it from anywhere (Ctrl J on Windows and Linux), and the same keystroke closes it. The settings screens have no top bar, so on those the shortcut is the way in.

It opens as a sheet on the right and stays open while you move around the console, so you can read an answer and open the record it points at without losing the thread.

The sheet

The chat's name sits under Arby at the top of the sheet, and it is a menu: switch to another chat, start a New chat, or Delete chat to throw the current one away. An empty chat offers a few starter questions, filtered to the ones your role can actually answer.

Then there is the box at the bottom. Ask in plain English.

What it can answer

Anything the console holds about your own organisation:

• Bookings and enquiries, including who is assigned and what stage they sit in
• Contacts and their history
• Quotes, invoices, payments and contracts
• The calendar, availability and clashes
• Email conversations
• Reports
• The team, the packages and the settings you manage

The list is really your role's list. Arby reads through your permissions, the same ones the screens use, so a member on assigned bookings only gets answers about their own bookings, and a member without payments never gets a figure from an invoice. When a question needs something outside that, Arby says plainly that it cannot see it and offers what it can.

What it will not do

It cannot send, edit, create, delete, pay or book. Ask it to email a client and it will say so, then point you at the record so you can do it yourself. It never reads another organisation, including the other ones you belong to: the answer comes from the organisation you are currently in.

Reading an answer

Links open the record in the console. Figures come straight off the records, so the total Arby reads out is the total on the invoice, and if the records do not hold an answer it says that rather than inventing one.

While it works, the small lines under the answer say what it is looking at: Looking up bookings, Checking invoices, Searching email.

When it says no

One limit, and it is temporary. "You have reached the AI assistant's limit." There is an hourly cap on how much anyone can generate, shared with the writing assistant, and a cap on how many questions one person can have answering at once. The message says how long until you can ask again, and Retry sits under it to send the same question.

Privacy

Questions go to OpenAI's API, exactly as the writing assistant's do. A question can include the question itself, the chat so far, and whatever Arby reads to answer it: the contacts, bookings, quotes, invoices, payments, calendar, email and settings you can already see in Arbour. OpenAI states that API inputs and outputs are not used to train its models unless the API customer opts in. Arbour does not opt in, and disables OpenAI response storage for every request. The full disclosure lives on AI assistant.

Your chats are yours: nobody else in the organisation can open them. They go when you delete them, and a chat nobody has touched for 90 days is deleted for you.