AI assistant overview
The AI assistant — Neo — is an embedded teammate with the same role-based access as the user talking to it.
The Onboard assistant is called Neo and is built on Anthropic’s Claude. On the web it lives as a floating button in the bottom right; in the mobile app as an "Ask AI" bubble for staff and managers. It answers questions about your data, drafts messages, runs numbers and performs a curated set of write actions on your behalf.
Neo talks to Onboard through a fixed catalog of tools — around 180 of them, spanning reservations, tables, shifts, vouchers, knowledge, menu, guests and reports. It cannot drop down to raw SQL, which is what makes its access control predictable.
Capabilities
- Answer analytics questions in natural language.
- Create, modify and cancel reservations from a description.
- Summarize trends across covers, revenue and guest segments.
- Search the knowledge base and quote directly from SOPs.
- Import menus from PDF.
- Draft response messages for reviews or guest complaints.
- Block tables, mark a service window as fully booked, apply a tag to a guest.
- Transcribe voice prompts (when configured).
Role- and surface-aware
Neo knows whether it is being addressed from the web backoffice, the staff app or the manager view, and frames its suggestions accordingly — staff get different quick actions than managers. It only suggests what is actually possible on that surface with that role.
What it cannot do
- Send messages to guests automatically — drafts always require human approval.
- Edit billing information or change the workspace plan.
- Read data outside the role of the user who is talking to it (RLS still applies).
- Refund vouchers or process payments.
- Bypass module entitlements — if a user can’t see the reports module, neither can their Neo session.
Audit trail
Every tool call lands in the ai_tool_calls table with conversation id, user id, tool name, arguments and result. Admins can replay any assistant session when investigating an unexpected change.