AI, ARIA assistant, document scan & draft, and AI setup

ARIA — the AI assistant

What it is. ARIA is a conversational assistant that understands your ERP data. The screen pairs a chat surface with a Skills panel (each skill can be ON or OFF) and a Provider panel showing the active model, provider, and online status. It offers starter prompts so users know what to ask.

How to use it. Open ARIA from the top of the navigation and type a question, or click a suggested prompt such as "Show this month's top 5 customers by revenue", "Which contracts expire in the next 30 days?", "Generate a summary of overdue invoices", or "Which assets are available for rental?". The skills panel shows what ARIA can do — in the demo, PDF reports, Email draft, Contract draft, Document scanner, and Summaries are enabled, while Forecast is off. Press Enter to send (Shift+Enter for a new line) and choose a model from the selector.

Use it wisely. Treat ARIA as a fast analyst, not an oracle — verify any number it gives you against the source report before acting on it. Enable only the skills your users actually need; fewer, well-understood skills are easier to govern. Phrase questions concretely ("top 5 customers by revenue this month") rather than vaguely, and keep demo conversations on demo data.

Document scan

What it is. Document Scan (the Doc Scanner in the navigation) turns documents — invoices, receipts, and similar files — into structured data you can review before it becomes a record.

How to use it. Open Doc Scanner, upload a clean demo file, and let the scanner extract the fields; review and correct the extraction, then commit it to the appropriate record. The scan step always produces a draft for human review rather than posting silently.

Use it wisely. Always review extracted values — especially amounts, dates, and tax — before committing; OCR is a head-start, not a substitute for a checker. In demos use only clean, non-confidential sample documents.

Document draft

What it is. Document Draft turns a prompt and a template into the first version of a business document, so users start from a sensible draft instead of a blank page.

How to use it. Open Document Draft, choose a template, describe what you need, and let the assistant produce a draft you then edit and finalise. The output is explicitly a draft, not a final document.

Use it wisely. Use drafting to remove the blank-page problem, not to skip review — read every generated clause, particularly in contracts. Keep a small set of good templates so drafts start from your house style.

AI Settings — provider, models, skills, hardware, privacy

What it is. AI Settings is where an administrator configures the tenant's AI: the provider and model, the available skills, the hardware tier, session history, and the privacy/consent posture. It is organised into tabs — Provider, Models, Skills, Hardware, Sessions, and Privacy — and links to the guided setup wizard.

How to use it. On the Provider tab pick a provider (for example Anthropic Claude), choose or enter a model, set the endpoint and optional API key, then Test connection before saving. Use Skills to toggle individual capabilities, Hardware to review the detected machine tier, Sessions to see conversation history, and Privacy to control data handling and consent.

The same configuration is also reachable from the global Settings area:

Use it wisely. Always Test connection before relying on a provider, and keep the API key in secure configuration — never paste it into a shared screen or screenshot. Match the model to the hardware tier the Hardware tab reports; a model larger than the machine can serve will be slow or fail.

The AI Setup Wizard

What it is. A guided, five-step path that takes an administrator from nothing to a working assistant: 1 Detect hardware → 2 Choose provider → 3 Choose model → 4 Skills & confirmation → 5 Test & finish. Step one inspects the machine (CPU, cores, RAM, GPU) and recommends a provider tier; for a CPU-only machine with limited RAM it will, for example, recommend llama.cpp with a small model and warn that only small models are supported reliably.

How to use it. Click Run Setup Wizard from AI Settings and follow the steps in order, accepting or overriding the recommendations, then test activation on the final step. The wizard is the fastest way to a sane first configuration.

Use it wisely. Run the wizard once per environment before opening AI to users, and heed the RAM/GPU advisories — picking a model the hardware cannot serve is the most common cause of slow or failing AI. Re-run it after a hardware change.

Consent, safety, and ARIA handoff

AI in ColorsX74 ERP is built to be governable. User data is only sent to a model where the tenant has granted data consent, scanning and drafting produce drafts for human review rather than silent automation, and sessions are recorded so AI activity is auditable. When discussing the in-app ARIA assistant, emphasise human confirmation, permissions, and job history over invisible automation.

Use it wisely. Make consent an explicit decision per tenant, keep a human in the loop for anything AI drafts or extracts, and in public demos use only demo data and sandbox/test credentials. Treat the Privacy tab and consent setting as the front gate to every other AI feature.

Enabling cloud AI (the "enable cloud content" prompt). Local providers (llama.cpp, on-prem Ollama) need no consent. Cloud providers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini, and OpenRouter — only become selectable, testable, and usable once an administrator grants this company's AI data consent. Turn it on from AI Settings → Privacy, or directly in the setup wizard's provider step; that single toggle clears the "enable cloud content / consent required" message and unlocks the cloud provider cards. Data is still only sent to the cloud for a tenant that has granted this consent — it gates both setup and every actual request.

OpenRouter. OpenRouter is a unified, OpenAI-compatible gateway (one API key reaches OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, and more). Pick OpenRouter on the provider step — the endpoint is prefilled to https://openrouter.ai/api/v1 — paste your OpenRouter API key, and choose a model id such as openai/gpt-4o-mini or anthropic/claude-sonnet-4.6. Test & finish validates and activates it.