AI Assistant

The AI Assistant is the first entry of the left rail. It is a chat docked next to your map, and it is the one ALIGN agent that lives inside the Map Builder. Its counterpart in the App Builder is called the AI Builder, and it writes applications rather than maps.

Everything the Assistant does, you can also do by hand. It accelerates the work, it never locks you out of it.

Two modes

The mode picker sits in the composer, next to the send button.

Mode	What it does
Ask	Answers and explains. Nothing changes on your map.
Edit	Acts on your map: adds data, styles layers, configures widgets, runs analysis.

Start in Ask when you want to understand your data, switch to Edit when you want something done. Every change Edit makes goes through the same store as your own clicks, so it renders immediately, shows up in the panels, and is undoable.

What the Assistant can do in Edit mode

The Assistant works through a fixed set of tools, the same surfaces you use in the rails. It can:

read your map: list layers and their fields, read the current view, read the layout, read the diagnostics when something failed to load;
bring data in: from your Datastore, from the Data Hub, from a public WMS, WFS or WMTS URL, or by authoring a small GeoJSON layer itself;
stream Overture Maps: places, buildings, roads, land and water anywhere in the world, filtered on what you ask for (all the cafés of a city, only the railways). The Assistant first reads which categories exist in the area on screen, then adds the filtered theme as a live layer: nothing is copied into your Datastore, and the layer stays filtered when you save the map;
limit a streamed layer to places: name a commune, a region or a country (“the buildings of Uccle”), or up to five of them, side by side or apart (“the cycleways of Uccle and Saint-Josse”), and the Assistant finds their administrative limits, then shows only what lies inside them. Each limit is added as its own layer (“Limit · Uccle - Ukkel”), listed in the Layers panel and the Legend: hide it, restyle it or remove it like any layer, the filter stays. You can add or remove a place later. It is a display filter: nothing is downloaded, the layer keeps streaming, and the filter is saved with the map. Features that cross a limit stay visible, and the limits’ credit stays on the map, the published one included. A large area keeps its limit lightly simplified so the map stays fast, and the Assistant tells you when it is. Downloading the data of that place stays a separate step, on your request;
style layers: a flat color, or an attribute driven choropleth or category map with a chosen palette and classification, including the class labels the legend shows, or polygons extruded in 3D by a height field (and back to 2D). The Assistant knows the usual map colors (water in blue, vegetation in green, roads ranked by importance, land use and buildings by function) and uses them where they fit, with the legend in the order of the hierarchy, unless you ask for other colors. A layer streamed from Overture shows from the zoom level Overture publishes each theme at (roads from zoom 4, places from zoom 14), and its classes are read from what is loaded in the view;
configure popups: turn one on, set its title template, choose the fields, on streamed Overture layers too;
place and configure widgets: show, hide, move or parameterize anything in the Gallery, and compose the Layout;
run analysis: any algorithm of the ToolBoxes by id, SQL over your attributes, or Python in the browser sandbox.

Ask it what it did and it will tell you which tool it called. Each tool call in the conversation is a foldable block showing its arguments and its result, so a surprising outcome is always traceable.

Mentioning your layers

Type @ in the composer to mention a layer by name. The Assistant then works on that exact layer instead of guessing from your wording, which matters when two layers have similar names.

Conversations

Conversations are kept, so you can pick a thread back up later. The list button in the panel header opens them; the plus button starts a new one. A new conversation opens on the two mode cards, so you choose how the Assistant should behave before you write the first message.

The panel is resizable: drag its inner edge to give the chat more room when you are reading a long answer.

Credits

Assistant turns consume your plan’s AI credits. When your organization is close to its limit, or has reached it, a banner appears at the top of the panel and tells you which is the case. Reading the map costs nothing extra: the cost follows the conversation, not the number of layers.