Ava Insights

Unit4 Advanced Virtual Agent (Ava) lets you ask questions about Unit4 ERPx business data in plain language in Microsoft Teams.

ℹ️ Note: Ava Insights is currently available for early adopters only.

ℹ️ Note: Ava Insights is available only if your organisation has activated it and the required data is available for your tenant. Your administrator can confirm this.

The early adopter release focuses on project managers in professional services organisations. Project and project finance questions are the best-supported area. Other data areas depend on what your organisation has enabled.

What is Ava Insights?

Ava Insights answers questions with data from your Unit4 ERPx system. You do not need to build a report or know where the data is stored.

Use Ava Insights for questions about your own business data, such as what projects you have or how much a project has cost.

What can I ask Ava Insights?

The following examples show the types of questions that Ava Insights supports. In these examples, X10 is a company code, and X1010026 is a project number. Use the codes from your organisation.

Projects, work orders and deadlines

• List all the active projects I manage in company X10.
• Break down the projects I manage in company X10 by customer.
• Do I have any active projects I manage across all my companies that end before 1 January 2027?
• Which are the active work orders I manage?

Resources, hours and timesheets

• Which resources are planned on project X1010026 in 2026?
• How many hours is Tamaka Nakamoto planned for on project X1010026?
• How many timesheets for project X1010026 are still in the approval workflow?

Invoicing and payments

• How much is unbilled for project X1010026?
• How much is billable for the projects I manage? Break down by project and invoice element.
• Do I have overdue customer payments on any of the projects I manage across all my companies?

Budget, cost, revenue and margin

• How much is the total budget for project X1010026?
• What is the forecasted cost of project X1010037?
• Which of the projects I manage has a cost overrun compared to budget?

ℹ️ Note: Financial questions can refer to a baseline, revised budget or forecast. State the version when it matters, for example, What is the revised budget for project X1010026?.

How do I use Ava Insights?

1. Open your chat with Ava in Microsoft Teams.
2. Type your question in your own words.
3. Review Ava's answer.

Ava responds in your selected Ava language. Ava Insights is tested in English. It also works in other languages, but Unit4 has not measured their quality.

Ava normally uses your default company unless you name another company in your question. Ava names the company in its answer. To include all the companies you can access, say so, for example, across all my companies. If you have access to more than one company, Ava may offer to check the others.

When Ava asks you to choose

Sometimes Ava can read a question in more than one way. Ava can then show two options as buttons before it answers. For example, the question may ask both how a feature works and which records match it.

Select an option or type what you want instead. Ava continues without showing internal names.

Asking follow-up questions

Ava keeps the conversation context. You can refine an answer without repeating the whole question.

• Break down unbilled by resource.
• Break it down by invoice status.
• Which of these projects have unbilled values?

For example, ask How much is unbilled for project X1010026?. Then ask Break down unbilled by resource.

What happens while Ava is working

Some questions take a few seconds. Ava shows progress messages while it works, such as Looking for the most relevant information..., Fetching data... and Preparing a response.... The wording can vary.

How results are shown

• Ava provides answers as plain language text.
• When an answer has more than one column, Ava shows it as a table with column headers.
• Ava shows up to 100 rows. If more rows are available, Ava tells you and asks you to narrow your question.

Getting better answers

• Use full names instead of abbreviations or short codes.
• Name the company when you want data outside your default company.
• To ask about your own projects, say projects I manage.
• Give a clear time range.
• State whether you mean the baseline, revised budget or forecast.
• Ask one thing at a time, then use follow-up questions.
• If Ava cannot find an attribute value, ask your administrator to check that your Ava Insights role has access to the required objects.
• If Ava cannot find data, rephrase the question with the full name or a different time range.

What Ava Insights cannot do yet

• Ava Insights only reads data. It cannot create, change or delete anything in Unit4 ERPx.
• You cannot export or download results.
• You cannot page through a long list. Narrow the question instead.
• Ava Insights does not show charts or graphs.
• Ava does not show the question details behind an answer.
• If Ava cannot find data, it cannot tell you whether the data does not exist or you do not have access to it.
• Totals and counts cover only the data available to you. A person with wider access may see a different value.
• Answers are AI-generated. Check important figures before you act on them.
• Ava uses up to its 20 most recent messages as context and keeps that context for 24 hours. After that, Ava starts a new conversation. Repeat the full details in your question.

Data and privacy

Ava Insights uses your identity and access rights for every question. It shows data from the companies and data areas that your Ava Insights role gives you access to.

Ava Insights applies company access and object access. It does not apply attribute-based Data Control, column restrictions or filters that limit results to your own records.

Ava Insights does not show internal technical details about how it prepares an answer.

User queries and the SQL responses may contain personal data. These inputs and outputs will be logged in Azure App Insights (in Europe) during the EAP in order to assess quality and identify areas for improvement, though they will not be linked to any individual users. Inputs and outputs will not be logged once the feature is generally available.

When you rate an answer, Ava also stores your rating, comment, question and Ava's answer so the team can investigate it.

Giving feedback

After each answer, rate it with a thumbs-up for a positive experience or a thumbs-down for a negative experience. You can add an optional comment.

Rate the answer on the same day. You can still send a rating later, but it no longer includes your question or Ava's answer, so the team cannot investigate it. For details, see Ava Insights: giving feedback.

Further information

For more information about Ava, see Unit4 University4U and Docebo.