SENSAI Apps went into Preview on 1 September, any customer running an AIMMS application can trial the new technology.
What is SENSAI Apps
Planners are able to open a conversation inside the application and type questions in everyday language.
- "Which customers in the Nordics had more than 5% unmet demand last week?" The assistant reads the current optimization results and gives back the numbers you asked for.
- "Our Düsseldorf warehouse just lost a shift. Cut its daily throughput capacity by 30% and re-optimize." The assistant changes the input, runs the model again, and reports the effect on cost and service level across the affected part of the network.
- "Compare our current plan with one where we consolidate the Berlin and Prague distribution centres. Show me the cost difference and any customers below 95% fill rate." The assistant runs both plans, compares them, and describes the trade-offs.
Every action the assistant takes is shown in the conversation. It can only see and do what the signed-in user is allowed to interact with.
What you get as a developer
You log in to the AIMMS Cloud and open the Chat UI in the AIMMS IDE. Next, you add annotations that tell the assistant which parts of the model it can allow business users to interact with, which data it can read, and which procedures it can run. You set this for each identifier, and you mark which actions need the user to confirm them first. Nothing in your model is available to the assistant until you add it.
New since the last post: there is an assistant in the AIMMS IDE that helps you do this annotation work. It can also create and edit identifiers and procedures in your model. That second capability is at an early stage, and most of our development effort for the rest of the year goes into it.
What the Preview includes
The Preview is free for 60 days. It comes with an allowance of 3,000 requests for the whole account. One request is one message. Developers and end users draw on the same allowance, and there is no separate developer licence. We will tell you when you are close to the limit and when the 60 days are nearly up.
What the workshops changed
We have now completed several workshops on real customer models, across several industries and regions. The problems they raised were the ones that only appear at full production scale: very large data sets, how much background information the assistant needs before its answers are useful, and the gap between what a planner expects a question to do and what the model can answer. Each of those led to evolution in the product.
How to get involved
If you build or maintain AIMMS applications and have a workflow in mind, talk to your AIMMS contact or reply here. Good candidates are tasks that take several steps, take a long time by hand, or are spread across several screens. We are still running hands-on workshops to accelerate development teams in realizing the value of AI assistants for their business users.
Learn more about SENSAI Apps in the AIMMS Documentation, or read our Press Release.