Where the answers come from

An assistant that answers business questions in prose is only worth having if the prose is true. So it's worth knowing how an answer is actually built here, because it isn't what people assume.

The assistant does not do the arithmetic. It picks the question apart, your own product computes the answer from your own records, and only then does the assistant write the sentence.

Three steps, and the middle one isn't AI

Ask "top 5 staff by sales last month" on the reports hub and this happens:

The reason to care about the shape is what it makes impossible. A figure the report didn't produce cannot appear in the sentence, because at the moment the sentence is written the only thing in front of the assistant is the report's own output.

The same shape, everywhere

It isn't only Reports. The calendar assistant routes your question to one of three known things — what a day looks like, who has gaps on a day, when a client is next in — runs that deterministically, and narrates the result. A paycheck explanation is handed the finished pay lines. A drawer variance explanation is handed the session's own events.

Every one of them follows the same rule: compute first, write second.

Which is why the evidence is shown, not hidden

On Reports the chart and table sit directly under the sentence, and View full report opens the report itself with the period already applied. That's deliberate. If a sentence ever looks wrong, the thing that would prove it is one glance away rather than one support ticket away.

Two habits make this pay off:

• Name the period. Without one it picks a sensible window, and a sensible window isn't always the one you meant. Most surprising answers are a period disagreement rather than an error.
• Read what it answered, not just what it said. An answer will tell you which day or which range it covered. If that isn't the one you asked about, that's your answer about the answer.

When it can't

Every one of these tools has a plain, non-AI version of itself to fall back on, and it uses it without asking: if the assistant can't be reached, or your monthly allowance is spent, you get the figures rather than the prose. A report still runs. A paycheck is still right. What you lose is the sentence.