Using Impact Assistant

Impact Assistant enables you to ask questions about your data in natural language and receive instant visualizations and answers—no technical expertise required.

Accessing Impact Assistant

Click the Impact Assistant icon inside Spider Impact:

Or inside any stand-alone App you've built:

Impact Assistant opens in a panel beside its icon, so you can keep your data in view while you chat. To close the panel, click anywhere outside it or press Esc. Your conversation is still there when you open the panel again.

Asking Questions About Your Data

While dashboards and reports excel at displaying predetermined information, Impact Assistant shines when you need specific answers that aren't already configured. Simply ask questions like "What was the total revenue by product category last quarter?" or "Show me the trend of customer complaints over the past year."

In this example, asking how many devices were sold last year returns a clear answer:

Clicking on the "8,231" number drills down into the Datasets section for further ad-hoc analytics:

Conversational Context

Impact Assistant maintains conversation history for contextual follow-up questions. When you say "break that down by salesperson," Impact Assistant understands you're still discussing last year's sales:

Saving Insights

When Impact Assistant creates a useful chart, use the "Copy to Organization" button to save it permanently. This allows you to reuse assistant-generated charts in dashboards and share insights with your team:

Discovering Data and Insights

Impact Assistant helps you understand your data landscape and discover meaningful insights. You can ask general questions like "What kinds of data do I have?" to see a list of datasets and what they track:

One of Impact Intelligence's most powerful features is proactively suggesting insights to explore based on your data:

Clicking on suggestions like "total sales last month" provides immediate answers:

Getting Software Help

Beyond data analysis, Impact Assistant answers questions about Spider Impact features with detailed guidance and documentation links:

Current Capabilities

Impact Assistant currently:

• Aggregates and filters data from datasets to answer specific questions
• Generates appropriate visualizations (line, bar, and pie charts)
• Suggests potential insights from your data
• Answers questions about Spider Impact features with documentation links

Impact Assistant currently provides answers from datasets only. It can't access scorecard KPI values or initiative data. For an AI-written analysis of a scorecard's KPIs and initiatives, use the “Insights” tab in the Scorecards section, which is covered in the Scorecard Insights Scorecard Insights article.

Managing Conversations

Like all AI assistants, Impact Assistant performs best with fresh conversations. If responses become less relevant or the conversation veers off track, click “New Chat” in the upper right corner of the panel to start over, rather than trying to correct the current conversation. Closing the panel doesn't end the conversation. This immediately resolves most issues and ensures optimal performance—a quick conversation restart is always more effective than attempting to redirect a confused conversation.

Configuring Impact Intelligence

Enabling Impact Intelligence

Administrators must first turn on Impact Intelligence in the “AI” panel of Application Administration. Set “Enable Impact Assistant” to “Yes” and provide information about your organization in the “Organization Context” field. This setting also turns on the “Insights” tab in the Scorecards section.

The Organization Context helps the AI understand your data and provide better responses. Include your company name, industry, the types of data you collect, and any big-picture business goals that are universal and don’t change over time. If the AI has trouble differentiating between datasets or finding specific data, additional context here often solves the problem.

Dataset Descriptions

To help Impact Assistant better understand your data context, administrators can add descriptions to datasets. These descriptions help Impact Assistant provide more relevant insights and appropriate visualizations:

When writing dataset descriptions, explain the dataset as you would to a colleague. Include:

• What each record represents
• Types of information tracked for each record
• Why you're tracking this data
• Any important relationships to other datasets

Example description:

Tracks mobile device sales with one dataset record per sale. Most customers purchase a new mobile device once every few years. This dataset has basic info about the sale like its price and date, and it's linked to the customers dataset that has information about who bought it, like the address and the point of contact info.

Good descriptions solve common confusion. For example, mentioning that a dataset tracks both "incident date" and "report date" helps the AI distinguish between them. Similarly, clarifying that "SARC Location" refers to where something happened helps with location-based queries.

Choosing Which Datasets Impact Assistant Can Use

Impact Assistant answers questions from any dataset the user has permission to see. If you keep test copies, training data, or near-duplicates alongside your real data, you can keep Impact Assistant from using them. That way, its answers don't come from the wrong dataset.

Each dataset has a “Make this dataset available to Impact Assistant” checkbox on its Edit tab. If you uncheck it and save, Impact Assistant stops using that dataset right away, even in the middle of a conversation. Check it again to make the dataset available again.

Every dataset is available to Impact Assistant until you uncheck its box. The checkbox appears only when Impact Assistant is enabled. If Impact Assistant is turned off and back on, your choices are kept.

API Keys for Self-Hosted Customers

Spider-hosted customers don't need to manage API keys—Spider Strategies handles all billing and infrastructure.

Self-hosted customers need to provide Amazon Web Services (AWS) credentials:

1. Create an AWS account and enable Amazon Bedrock
2. Generate access keys for Bedrock
3. Enter these keys when enabling Impact Intelligence

Alternatively, configure API keys at the server level by adding these JVM parameters to Tomcat:

-DawsAccessKeyId=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_HERE
-DawsSecretAccessKey=YOUR_SECRET_KEY_HERE
-Dbedrock.region=YOUR_AWS_REGION

The -Dbedrock.region parameter is optional and defaults to us-east-2. With server-level configuration, the AWS key and region fields don't appear in the interface, and you just turn “Enable Impact Assistant” on or off for each instance.