AI Assistant
Use the AI assistant to research, manage data, and draft communications.
Overview
The AI assistant is a conversational tool built into Aggrandize that helps you research opportunities, manage your CRM data, and draft emails — all through natural language. It understands your contacts, deals, companies, and email history, so you can ask questions and take actions without navigating through multiple screens.
Two features make it markedly more effective, each with its own page: the Prompt Library gives you ready-to-run, reusable prompts (and a /command shortcut to call them), and the Company Profile teaches the assistant about your business so its advice fits your trades, service area, and fit rules.
Opening and closing the assistant
Click the assistant icon in the top navigation bar or press Alt + A. The assistant slides in as a panel on the right side of the screen.
Ask me about your contacts, companies, deals, or emails.
Alt + A is also the close keystroke. Press it again to slide the panel back out of the way and reveal the page content behind it — your conversation isn't cleared. Hit Alt + A once more to pop the panel back into view exactly where you left off. This is the key habit: keep the assistant docked when you need it, dismiss it when you need the full width of the page, then bring it back without losing context.
Your conversation also persists across page navigations and browser refreshes — switch between Contacts, Deals, and Email tabs without losing your place.
The panel anatomy
The panel has four functional zones:
- Header — assistant icon, "CRM Assistant" title, Clear (trash icon) and Close controls.
- Messages — your conversation history. Hover any assistant message for Copy and (on the latest message) Retry.
- Composer — multi-line text input at the bottom. Press
Enterto send;Shift + Enterfor a new line. - Toolbar above the composer — model toggle (Standard / Advanced), context-token counter, and a Compact button (visible once the conversation has used some context).
Show me Devon Walsh's open deals.
Devon Walsh has 2 open deals:
- Riverpoint Tower — Phase 2 · $1.8M · Proposal
- Mesa Center Renovation · $420K · Discovery
Both are in the Sales Pipeline.
Move Mesa Center to Qualification.
Model modes — Standard vs Advanced
The model toggle lets you pick how much horsepower the assistant brings to a given conversation.
- Standard — 200K token context. Best for quick lookups, single-step tasks, and most day-to-day questions. Lower per-message cost in AI credits.
- Advanced — 1M token context, premium model. Best for complex sessions that require cumulative decision-making across many tools (e.g., bulk classification with edge cases, multi-deal research, working through a long thread of email + records). Costs more per message; switch back to Standard when you're done.
You can change modes mid-conversation, but you can't change while a message is in flight.
Find every contact at Acme that doesn't have a primary company set, and tell me which deals they're on.
The context counter — Normal vs Extended
The ring around the Send button shows how full your current context window is. As you ask longer questions, paste in data, or accumulate tool results, the ring fills up.
The ring works in two laps:
- Normal context (0 → 200K tokens) — the first lap, drawn in teal. This is the bulk of what you'll use day to day. Standard pricing.
- Extended context (200K → 1M tokens) — the second lap. Once you cross 200K, the ring re-zeros and continues in yellow to indicate you're now in the premium-pricing zone (roughly 2× input cost per token). The ring turns red as you approach the 1M ceiling.
Most conversations never leave the first lap. Cross into the second only when you genuinely need the bigger window — long analyses, multi-record bulk work, or research sessions that need to keep many tool results in view at once.
Classify all unclassified contacts.
Done. 138 classified, 4 left unclassified (insufficient signal). The borderline cases are saved to a draft list if you want me to walk through them one by one.
Walk every deal in Proposal and tell me which ones are missing a Decision Maker contact.
7 of 18 Proposal deals are missing a Decision Maker. Want me to draft a reminder to each deal owner with the gap flagged?
Compact — keep the conversation, shrink the context
The Compact icon (Shrink glyph, next to the model toggle) appears once your conversation has any context usage. Hit it to summarize older messages in place — the conversation continues and older detail collapses into a brief summary. You keep the running thread; you don't lose the work.
Compact is cheaper than starting a new conversation when you've gathered useful context but the ring is filling up. Cost a small token amount to run, but typically pays back many times over by shrinking the context for every subsequent message.
Clear — start a brand-new conversation
The trash can icon in the panel header throws away the entire conversation and resets the assistant to its empty state. Use Clear when you're switching to an unrelated task — there's no benefit to keeping context from a previous topic, and dragging it along just spends extra credits.
OK that is done. New question about something else…
Compact vs Clear — when to use which:
- Reach for Compact when you still want the assistant to remember what it just did (e.g., you're going to ask a follow-up about the same set of deals).
- Reach for Clear when you're done with that topic and starting something unrelated.
- If you find yourself wanting to keep half of a conversation and drop the other half, that's a sign to Compact first and then continue.
What the assistant can do
| Group | Capability | Example phrase | Needs approval? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search & read | Find contacts, companies, deals, or tasks by name, email, filter, or stage | "Find all active deals over $100k" · "Show me contacts at Acme Construction" | No |
| Read full profile + recent activity + linked records | "Tell me about Jane Doe" | No | |
| Search planning records and entities (Leads) | "Find permits in your area over $1M" | No | |
| List pipeline stages | "What stages does the Sales pipeline have?" | No | |
| Search and read emails — threads, messages, full bodies | "Search emails about the State St project" · "Open Jane's most recent thread" | No | |
| Create | Create a contact, company, deal, or task | "Create deal 'State St Office Tower' at $250K in Prospecting" | Yes |
| Update | Update fields on any contact, company, deal, or task — including a deal's project start/finish dates and moving it across pipelines and stages | "Move State St Office Tower to Proposal and bump priority to High" · "Set State St to start Jul 1 and finish Dec 15" | Yes |
| Update many deals at once — owner, priority, close date, or project dates | "Set a start of Aug 1 and finish of Dec 31 on every deal in Negotiation" | Yes | |
| Pipelines & stages | Create a pipeline, add or rename stages, and reorder or remove them | "Add a 'Permitting' stage to the Construction pipeline after Qualification" | Yes |
| Delete | Remove a contact or company (for cleanup) | "Delete the spam contact foo@example.com" | Yes |
| Link | Attach a contact or company to a deal, or a company to a contact; attach an email thread to a deal | "Link Jane Doe to the State St deal as Decision Maker" · "Attach the latest Acme thread to the State St deal" | Yes |
| Unlink any of the above | "Unlink Jane Doe from State St" | Yes | |
| Leads workflow | Shortlist or dismiss planning records (single or bulk) | "Shortlist all permits over $1M filed this month" · "Dismiss anything outside my service area" | Yes |
| Promote a planning record to a deal | "Turn the selected permit into a deal called 'Civic Center Renovation'" | Yes | |
| Compose | Draft a new email, or a reply / reply-all / forward to an existing message | "Draft a reply to Jane's last email confirming the Friday walkthrough" | Drafts save automatically; you send them manually |
| Enrich | Look up missing contact details from external sources (phone, email, job title, company, LinkedIn) | "Enrich Jane Doe's contact info" | Yes — uses additional AI credits |
Read-only actions (the top five rows) never need approval. Anything that creates, updates, deletes, links, or enriches data shows you a preview first — see Approval flow below.
The relational graph
Under the hood, Aggrandize maintains a relational graph — the web of connections between your contacts, companies, deals, and email threads. This graph is what gives the assistant its intelligence.
You can also see the graph on the Advanced and Enterprise plans. Open Relationships from the sidebar (or click Graph on any contact, company, or deal detail page) to launch a 3D force-directed view of your CRM. Each entity becomes a glowing node, and every junction-table link becomes an edge with traveling particles.
Node shapes encode the entity type:
- Contacts are blue spheres (people are organic)
- Companies are purple boxes (institutions are structured)
- Deals are amber octahedrons with a stronger glow (deals are gems)
- Location hubs are cyan icosahedrons (cities and states that cluster nearby entities)
Click any node to fly the camera in and surface its Connections in the right-hand panel. Other parts of the graph dim so you can scan one entity's neighborhood at a glance:
The left filter panel lets you toggle each entity type, search by name, dial the connection-count range, and turn geographic hub clustering on or off. The graph adapts its rendering quality to your data size — small orgs get full bloom and particles; larger ones drop to simpler geometry to keep things smooth.
Why it matters
When you ask the assistant "Tell me about Jane Doe," it doesn't just pull up her contact card. It traverses the graph to find her company, the deals she's involved in, the email threads linked to those deals, the other contacts on those deals, and the tasks associated with them. This connected view is what makes the assistant fast and useful.
The richer your graph, the more the assistant can do. A contact with no links to companies or deals is just a name and email address. A contact linked to a company, two deals, and several email threads gives the assistant the full picture.
Keep the graph healthy
Always ask the assistant to maintain relationships when making changes. This is especially important for:
- Creating deals — ask the assistant to link the relevant contacts and companies, not just create a bare deal
- Adding contacts — ask it to associate the contact with their company and any relevant deals
- Bulk operations — when importing or creating multiple records, ask the assistant to build out the relationships between them
For example, instead of "Create a deal called State St Office," say "Create a deal called State St Office and link it to Jane Doe and Acme Construction." The assistant will create the deal and wire up all the relationships in one step.
The assistant uses the graph automatically
Every time data in the system changes — a new contact is created, a deal moves stages, an email is linked — the assistant references the relational graph to understand the context. This is how it can:
- Anticipate which contacts to associate with a new deal
- Suggest companies when you mention a person
- Surface related email threads when you're researching a deal
- Identify gaps ("This deal has no linked contacts — would you like me to add some?")
The more consistently you use the assistant for data entry and updates, the more complete your graph becomes, and the more valuable the assistant's suggestions get over time.
Approval flow
For every capability in the table above marked "Yes" under Needs approval?, the assistant pauses and shows you the proposed action before doing it.
Create a $250K deal called State St Office Tower in Prospecting and link Jane Doe to it as the Decision Maker.
Create deal
Create deal "State St Office Tower" worth $250,000 in Prospecting stage and link Jane Doe as Decision Maker?
- Click Approve to execute the action
- Click Decline to cancel — the assistant acknowledges and moves on
Search and read actions never prompt; they run inline and return results in the conversation.
How credits are consumed
- Conversations and search — every message to the assistant consumes a small amount of AI credits based on the length of the conversation and the model mode (Standard is cheaper than Advanced)
- Contact enrichment — uses additional credits for external data lookups
- Compact — costs a small amount to summarize, but typically pays back many times over by shrinking the context for subsequent messages
- If your credit balance reaches zero, the assistant is unavailable until credits are added
See AI Credits for details on managing your balance.
Tips
- Be specific — "Find deals in the Proposal stage worth over $500k" works better than "show me some deals"
- Ask follow-ups — the assistant remembers your conversation context, so you can drill deeper ("Now show me the contacts on that deal")
- Compact before you Clear — if you've gathered useful context but the ring is filling up, hit Compact first; only Clear if you're switching to an unrelated task
- Use Advanced for cumulative work — bulk classification, multi-deal research, working through a long thread of emails — these are the cases where the 1M context window earns its price
- Build relationships, not just records — always ask the assistant to link contacts, companies, and deals together when creating new data. A well-connected relational graph makes everything faster
- Dismiss with
Alt + A— when you need the full page width back, tapAlt + A. The assistant remembers exactly where you were when you bring it back