Use the AI Assistant

If your program has the assistant turned on, a round button appears in the bottom right corner of every staff page for advisors, assistants, observers and admins. Guests do not see it. On a phone, the button is in the bar at the top of the screen, next to the notification bell. Open it and ask in plain English. The assistant answers from your program's own records.

What It Can Do

• Look up students. Ask "find Maria Lopez," "which seniors are still pending," or "who was added this week?" and it searches the current program year. Ask "was Maria Lopez ever one of our students?" and it searches every program year at once, telling you which years each match was enrolled in. Ask about "my students" and it narrows to your own caseload. Ask for another advisor's caseload by name, or for "students with no advisor assigned," and it can answer those too. Results are links, so one click opens the profile.
• Answer questions about a specific field. Ask "who has FAFSA completed but hasn't been contacted in 30 days?" and it checks your program's own profile and APR outcome fields. For an outcome question, such as "how many of the class of 2026 enrolled in college?", it uses the fields your program's APR uses and tells you which field it read. Any count it gives from a question like this is an informal, quick look tally, never the official federal APR number; the assistant labels it that way and points you to the APR report for the number that counts. Ask "who still needs data for last year's APR?" and it checks that year.
• Ask about a past program year. Name the year and it answers for that year: "a list of students from the 25-26 year who had a high school diploma but did not enroll" gives you those students, with a link that opens the Students page already filtered to them, where the CSV export is. Filters that count days back from today, such as "not contacted in the last 30 days," describe only the current program year, and the assistant says so.
• Build lists. Ask for "all served students" and it gives you a link to the Students page, filtered, with the count of what the link opens. When the list came from conditions on fields, the link carries those conditions too: the page opens with them showing in the Advanced Filter, so the number on the button is the number on the page, and you can adjust or clear them from there. Following that link closes the assistant panel so you land on the list; hold Cmd (or Ctrl) while you click to open it in a new tab and keep the conversation. The Students page has the CSV export if you need a spreadsheet. When nothing matches, it tells you so in words instead of handing you a button to an empty list. If your program renamed students to something else, the assistant uses your name for them everywhere, including on that button.
• Open one student's full picture. Ask about a student by name, or say "this student" while you are on their profile, and it shows their status and APR fields for every program year they were in, what is still missing for reporting in the current year (or in their most recent year, if they have no record in the current one), their recent documents, and their latest contacts with the note text. Ask for more history and it can pull up to fifty past contacts for that student.
• Draft contact logs, even for a group. Say "log a FAFSA call with Maria Lopez from yesterday," or name several students at once and it prepares one draft covering all of them, using your program's own contact types and modalities. Nothing is saved until you review the draft and choose Log Contact. The saved contact is recorded as your action, exactly like one you typed into the form.
• Prepare a text for you to send. Say "text my served students that FAFSA night is Thursday at 6pm," or name one student, and it prepares the text on a card: how many will get it, who will not and why (no mobile number, no opt in on record, or opted out, with how to record a student's consent), the message as a real student will read it, how many message parts it uses, and how much of your monthly allowance is left. Nothing is sent until you choose Send on the card. Keep Send Now, or choose Send at a Time and pick a time in your program's time zone, then choose the button below them, such as Send 12 Texts Now or Schedule 12 Texts. During your program's quiet hours the card offers Schedule for the time they end instead of Send Now. The card sends it the same way Bulk Texts does, with the same checks, so the rules in Send a Text to Many Students apply: a student with no consent on record never gets it, and when you name only that student, the assistant prepares no card and tells you how to record their consent. It works only when your program has texting turned on and your role includes the Bulk Texting permission in your program; if either is missing, the assistant says which one and who can change it, and it never suggests a way around it, such as exporting phone numbers. Ask it to change the wording or the group before you send. A web address of more than 50 characters is sent as a short go.triopilot.com address, as on Bulk Texts, and the card says so and counts the short address.
• Answer how do I questions. Ask "how do I log a contact?" or "how do I run the APR?" and it answers from TRIOPilot's own help articles, the same ones in the Help Center. It reads long articles section by section, so it can answer from any part of them.
• Break it down. Ask "how many students per high school last year?" and it counts each value, including how many students have nothing recorded.
• See how things changed. Ask "how has FAFSA completion changed over the last three years?" or "how have our contacts changed month to month?" and it answers up to six program years, or every month, in one step, one line each. A student who was in two years counts in both, so the lines are not added together. Questions with several conditions work too, such as "each year, how many students had a diploma but did not enroll?"
• Count your team's contacts. Ask "who logged nothing in the last two weeks?" and it names the staff with no contacts in that window. A question that says "we," "us" or "our," such as "how many FAFSA contacts did we log last week?", counts the whole program's contacts; "I," "me" or "my" counts only yours, and the answer says so.
• Check document evidence. On EOC programs, ask "who is missing FAFSA evidence this year?" and it counts who has a document filed against each APR objective. Talent Search and Veterans Upward Bound each have one such objective, and the other program types have none. TRIOPilot does not record a document type, such as a consent form, so it cannot filter on one and says so.
• Take you places. It can link you to the APR report, the Needs Attention report, the Schedule, Events, settings pages, and student profiles. It links only to pages your role can open; for any other page, it says who can open it.
• Find where you were mentioned. Ask "Where was I mentioned this week?" and it lists where a colleague mentioned you over the time you name (the last 30 days if you do not say), in a comment, a contact note, an event or an appointment's staff notes, with who wrote it and for which student, and a link to each entry. It does not show the note itself.

What It Never Does

• It never saves, changes, deletes, or sends anything on its own. It touches a record only through the contact draft you confirm, and it texts students only when you choose Send on a text card it prepared. It cannot send email.
• It cannot mention a colleague or notify anyone. If you ask it to, it says so and still drafts the contact for the student you named (or whose profile is open), without the mention. To bring a colleague in, log the contact from the draft, then edit the contact and pick them from the @ list. See Mention a Colleague.
• It never calculates the official APR numbers, and it never states a federal reporting rule from memory. Report math for filing always comes from the reporting pages; anything the assistant tallies for you along the way is an informal count, clearly labeled, never a substitute for the report. For a rule, it tells you what TRIOPilot's report does and points you to your APR instructions.
• It never offers a way around something it declined. If it will not send student phone numbers or email addresses outside TRIOPilot, such as to a personal email account, it also will not build a list of them for that purpose or point you to the CSV export to get them.
• It cannot see grant money. TRIOPilot records no spending, balances or carryover, so it says so instead of guessing.
• It only sees what you can see. Your role and program permissions apply to every question, so it cannot show you anything you could not open yourself.

Good to Know

• It tells you how it read your question. When a question could mean more than one thing, it looks up the most likely meaning first and says how it read it, for example "I read since the spring as since March 1." If another reading gives a different answer, it gives both numbers and asks which you want. It asks before looking only when it cannot start without you, such as a contact draft with no student named. A word with two meanings in a TRIO program gets both named: "how many applications did we get?" answers for applications to your program and offers to count the college applications your students submitted.
• It names the program year it used. When you do not name a year, it uses the current one. Just after a new program year begins, before students are added to it, the current year has no records, so it answers for the most recent year that does and says so. Early in a year, when the current year still has fewer records than the last one, it says so when a count looks small.
• Conversations are not saved. Reloading the page, closing the tab, signing out, or moving between an admin page (such as Reports or Settings) and the other staff pages (such as Students) clears the chat.
• A question can be up to 4,000 characters. Past that, the box says how long your question is and Send waits until you shorten it, so paste a long email in parts.
• On a phone, the assistant opens full screen. Return starts a new line in your question, so tap Send to send it.
• Your questions and the records the assistant looks up are processed by an AI provider to generate the answer. They are never used to train AI models, and the provider deletes them automatically within 30 days.
• Each program has monthly limits on assistant use, set by TRIOPilot: a number of questions and a spending allowance. When your program reaches either one, the assistant says so and stops answering until the count starts over at midnight UTC on the first, which on your program's clock is the afternoon or evening of the last day of the month, or, in Guam and the western Pacific, the morning or midday of the first. The AI Assistant card in Settings shows that time on your program's clock.
• If the assistant says it is not available right now, the TRIOPilot team has already been told; try again later. If it says it is busy right now, wait a minute and ask again.
• If an answer looks wrong, open the linked record. The record is the source, and the assistant links it so you can check.

For Admins

To turn the assistant on or off, go to Settings, open the Features tab, and press the switch on the AI Assistant row. It is off until you turn it on. The row shows how much of this month's limit your program has used, and Manage shows the detail. Long or complex questions use more of the allowance than short ones, so it can say the limit is reached before the request count reaches its number. Email support@triopilot.com if you need a limit changed.