Ask the data

Ask the data is a widget like any other: placed, moved and sized on the board. It answers a question about this tenant’s production data on the board, next to the figures the question is about — rather than in a side panel somewhere else, which matters most on a wall panel with no keyboard in reach.

Setting it up

Field	What it does
Question	Pre-fills the box on the widget. Nothing is asked until somebody presses the button.

Leaving it empty is a normal setup: the box is then simply blank, and whoever stands in front of the board types their own question.

A preset question is a starting point, not an answer. The widget never asks anything on its own — a board that queried a model every time it loaded would spend the tenant’s budget on a screen nobody is standing in front of.

It sees what is on the board

The question travels together with what is on screen: the headings of the other widgets on this board, the tags behind them, and the values currently showing. So somebody typing “Why were the cycle times higher this afternoon?” does not have to add which board is open or where cycle time is kept.

It also sends when and where the question is asked: the time and time zone of this screen. “This afternoon” therefore means your afternoon, and an hour that has only just begun counts as incomplete rather than as a drop.

It is also why the answer comes quickly: without that context the assistant would have to look up the screen piece by piece — a screen the person is already looking at — and it can run out before it gets to answering.

Nothing is revealed that is not already on the screen. What travels is what the board displays; anyone allowed to see the board is already seeing these figures.

A very large table is shortened, and it says so — the assistant then knows it saw an extract and can read the rest, instead of making a statement about the whole.

What it may do, and what it may not

It reads. It has no confirmation card, and it never becomes the place a change is approved.

If the assistant proposes an action anyway, the widget names it and says that nothing was carried out — the proposal stays parked, and it is decided in the assistant panel, where the whole record can be read. A parked proposal nobody decides changes nothing.

Under the answer, Sources used counts what the answer was built from. If that cannot be established, the widget says the answer is text only rather than implying a source it does not have.

The answer is not stored anywhere. Reload the board and it is gone; Copy answer puts it on the clipboard while it is there.

When the widget says the assistant is not available

The assistant is a licensed stage, not a fixed part of every installation. Where it is not available, the widget says so in one sentence instead of showing an empty box — the board around it is unaffected.