Talking to AIRA

AIRA has a chat panel alongside the steps. It is not a general-purpose assistant — it is scoped to your project, and it can read the project's context, programme and adjacency.

What you can ask

• Questions about the project — *"why is the clinic on level two?"*, *"what is the total circulation area?"*
• Programme changes — *"add a 40 m² server room to IT"*, *"increase the ward area by 15%"*
• Clarifications about its own reasoning — *"what did you assume about the setback on the north edge?"*

Answers cite the study. A figure AIRA takes from Project Context or the programme carries its source in brackets, the way the board's chips do — *[Project brief]*, *[Site geometry]*, *[Mapbox · measured from map data]*, or for an estimate its confidence, the section it rests on and a link to the governing document when the authority was verified against the regulatory registry. A value read out of a file you uploaded is cited to that file wherever it is used — *[Document · rfp.pdf, p.3]* — on the board's rows, beside each project requirement, and in the chat. A link in an answer is only ever one of those verified addresses; anything else AIRA writes as an address stays plain text.

How a change request works

AIRA never silently rewrites the programme underneath you. When you ask to add something the programme does not have yet — a new department, an unsized room — it records the request against the project and offers to re-run the affected step, so the addition goes through the same review-and-accept loop as everything else.

When you ask to change what is already there — resize, rename or remove a department, link two departments or unlink them, move one to another level, or add a sized room to a department that exists — AIRA shows you exactly what it read before anything happens: the department it resolved your words to, the number it would replace, and the links and stacking bands that would follow. It applies the edit in place only when you confirm, and nothing re-runs. If a name could mean two departments, or the step is still awaiting review, the card says so and waits.

The transcript

The conversation is part of the project, not your browser session. Collaborators see the same transcript, and it persists across reloads — so a question a colleague asked last week, and the answer, are still there.

When it refuses

AIRA declines questions unrelated to the project. That is deliberate scoping rather than a fault. For product help rather than project help, use the Help & Support page in the app, or this documentation.