About Assist

what Assist can do

Assist can answer questions about your project's RFIs, Submittals, Drawings, Specifications, and Documents. It can also answer questions about how to do something in Procore based on information from Procore's support site.

To learn more about what kinds of questions Assist can answer, and what information it can reference in your project to provide answers, see What can I ask Assist?

how it works

Assist is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool, and its foundation is a Large Language Model (LLM). It is capable of reading a question asked in natural language, like the kind of question you might ask a coworker. It references certain information to respond using natural language, but a lot happens in between asking your question and receiving Assist's response. Here is how Assist works behind the scenes:

1. First, you ask a question in natural language. As opposed to the search engine technology we're used to, Assist responds much better to questions asked using full sentences, instead of just a few keywords. It needs your full thought written out to interpret the intent of what you're asking, just like a person might. It then takes your natural language question, and converts it into a sequence of numerical values on a kind of map, called vectors.

2. Next, Assist determines the intent of your question. When we talk about interpreting intent, we mean that Assist is deciding which "skill", or database, to access to find the right information to answer your question. If your intent is to find out how to do something in Procore, Assist sends your query in mathematical form over to the skill that addresses all questions about how to use Procore. The skill looks at the numerical values from your question, and finds the closest values present in the database to determine which information should be used to answer your question.

3. Then, information is sent from the service back to Assist. When Assist receives the information from the relevant skill, still in numerical format, it collects it and translates it back to natural language. Finally, Assist presents the answer to you along with links to the files or items in Procore where it found the answer to your question.

how to ask a question to get the best results

As opposed to the search engine technology we're used to, Assist responds much better to questions asked using full sentences, instead of just a few keywords. It needs your full thought written out to interpret the intent of what you're asking, just like a person might.

Ask questions using full sentences, and include as much context and detail as you can. Simple questions about a single piece of information yield the best results.

At this time, Assist can answer one question at a time. It can't yet answer follow up questions. It does not understand your project's history, or your role on the project. Be sure to provide Assist with any context that would be helpful if you asked an intern to find the same information.

View Sample Questions in the next chapter.