AI Assistant

The AI Assistant is the first entry of the left rail. It is a chat docked next to your map, and it is the one ALIGN agent that lives inside the Map Builder. Its counterpart in the App Builder is called the AI Builder, and it writes applications rather than maps.

Everything the Assistant does, you can also do by hand. It accelerates the work, it never locks you out of it.

Two modes

The mode picker sits in the composer, next to the send button.

Mode	What it does
Ask	Answers and explains. Nothing changes on your map.
Edit	Acts on your map: adds data, styles layers, configures widgets, runs analysis.

Start in Ask when you want to understand your data, switch to Edit when you want something done. Every change Edit makes goes through the same store as your own clicks, so it renders immediately, shows up in the panels, and is undoable.

What the Assistant can do in Edit mode

The Assistant works through a fixed set of tools, the same surfaces you use in the rails. It can:

read your map: list layers and their fields, read the current view, read the layout, read the diagnostics when something failed to load;
bring data in: from your Datastore, from the Data Hub, from a public WMS, WFS or WMTS URL, or by authoring a small GeoJSON layer itself;
style layers: a flat color, or an attribute driven choropleth or category map with a chosen palette and classification, including the class labels the legend shows;
configure popups: turn one on, set its title template, choose the fields;
place and configure widgets: show, hide, move or parameterize anything in the Gallery, and compose the Layout;
run analysis: any algorithm of the ToolBoxes by id, SQL over your attributes, or Python in the browser sandbox.

Ask it what it did and it will tell you which tool it called. Each tool call in the conversation is a foldable block showing its arguments and its result, so a surprising outcome is always traceable.

Mentioning your layers

Type @ in the composer to mention a layer by name. The Assistant then works on that exact layer instead of guessing from your wording, which matters when two layers have similar names.

Conversations

Conversations are kept, so you can pick a thread back up later. The list button in the panel header opens them; the plus button starts a new one. A new conversation opens on the two mode cards, so you choose how the Assistant should behave before you write the first message.

The panel is resizable: drag its inner edge to give the chat more room when you are reading a long answer.

Credits

Assistant turns consume your plan’s AI credits. When your organization is close to its limit, or has reached it, a banner appears at the top of the panel and tells you which is the case. Reading the map costs nothing extra: the cost follows the conversation, not the number of layers.