MYOB Acumatica AI Assistant: What It Answers, Who Can Use It and How to Set It Up Safely

The MYOB Acumatica AI Assistant is a chat window inside MYOB Acumatica, shipped in release 2026.1.1, that answers plain-language questions from the generic inquiries an administrator has exposed to it. It returns tables, charts and pivots with links back to each record, creates nothing and posts nothing, and as at 29 October 2026 it needs a licensed feature switch, an AI Assistant User role and an eligible licence type.

At a glance

• Who it is for: finance managers, credit controllers, sales managers and the system administrator of an Australian mid-market business on MYOB Acumatica 2026.1 or later who want staff to ask the system questions instead of waiting for a report to be built.
• Problem it solves: the twenty-minute detour through three inquiries and a pivot to answer “which customers over 60 days still have open orders”, and the backlog of small report requests that sits with one administrator.
• Platforms: MYOB Acumatica 2026.1.1 and later (AI Assistant chat; 2026.1.201 widened the licence types, 2026.1.3 added payroll administrators). Not available in earlier releases.
• Trigger: a person. The assistant answers when asked; it does not run on a schedule or watch anything.
• Inputs read: only generic inquiries that are published to the UI, ticked Expose to AI Assistant on the Generic Inquiry form (SM208000) and processed on AI Assistant Data Processing (ML503010), plus the business-language descriptions you add for each inquiry, field and parameter.
• Systems: MYOB Acumatica itself. The chat, the inquiries and the conversation history stay on the platform; MYOB states customer data is stored in Australia and may be processed in Australia or through its named global AI providers.
• What it drafts: answers as text, tables, lists, charts and pivot tables, with record IDs rendered as links, and on request a dashboard widget or pivot placed on a new dashboard.
• Approval gate: none needed for reading. Anything the user then does with the answer (a credit hold, a price change, a journal) is done by that person on the normal form with the normal approvals.
• Audit trail: each chat stores its questions and answers and can be deleted; token use is visible on the AI Units line of License Maintenance (SM201510). The help pages do not describe a per-question audit log beyond the chat history itself.
• Typical cycle time: seconds to an answer, three to five minutes to check the drill-downs before acting on it.
• What it never does: create or update records, run an approval, send an email, answer from an inquiry you have not exposed, or answer for a user without the role and licence type.
• Typical cost: the feature is licensed and metered in AI Units; MYOB publishes no price as at 29 October 2026, so ask your partner for the current sales policy. Exposing and describing a first dozen inquiries is typically one to two days of administrator time.
• Typical timeline: one to two weeks from feature switch to a rollout for one team, if the generic inquiries already exist.
• Last verified: 29 October 2026 against MYOB’s AI Assistant release note for 2026.1.1, the 2026.1.201 release note, the 2026.1.3 payroll release note, the Exposing Generic Inquiries to AI Assistant user guide topic and MYOB’s AI page.

The question we hear from MYOB Acumatica finance teams has changed this year. It used to be “can we have AI”. Now it’s “what does the AI Assistant actually do, and what is it allowed to see”. The second one is the better question, because the answer is entirely in your hands, and most of the marketing skips it.

What does the MYOB Acumatica AI Assistant answer?

MYOB’s 2026.1.1 release note describes the AI Assistant as “a chat window inside MYOB Acumatica where you can ask questions in plain language and quickly explore your data”. The worked examples in the note are the kind of thing you would ask a colleague: what is this month’s total income, list the ten open invoices modified most recently. Answers come back as text, tables, lists, charts or pivot tables, and any record ID or name in the answer is a link that opens the record in the main working area, not in the chat.

Two details in the release note matter more than the chat itself. First, for some answers the assistant offers to turn a chart into a dashboard widget or to generate a pivot table and place it on a new dashboard, which means a question asked once can become a report that stays. Second, every answer is grounded in generic inquiries. The assistant does not query the database freely. It works from “a defined set of generic inquiries and their descriptions”, and by default MYOB seeds that set with the most popular inquiries. If the figure you want is not in an exposed inquiry, the assistant cannot see it, and that is a feature.

That design puts the AI Assistant squarely in the read-only category we described in our guide to MYOB Acumatica’s eight AI features. It answers; it does not act. Creating a record, releasing a document or changing a credit limit is still a person on the normal form, with the normal approval map. For the workflow side, where a prompt generates text or routes an approval, MYOB has a separate feature, AI Automation, which we walked through in how an AI Automation prompt hands the work back to a person.

Who can use it, and what do they need?

This is where the three 2026.1 releases add up, and where most rollouts stall. The feature has to be switched on, the user needs a role, and the user’s licence type has to be on the list.

A few practical consequences. If you are on 2026.1.1, your warehouse and sales users cannot have the chat yet, so plan the rollout for after the 2026.1.201 update. The AI Assistant User role grants the chat window only, not the configuration screens, so you can hand it out without handing out the Generic Inquiry form. And because the licence line meters AI Units, someone should own the Usage figure the way someone owns the API call count today; a chat that staff enjoy will consume units faster than a report nobody opens.

How do you set it up without exposing the wrong data?

The setup is four steps, and the governance lives in the first one.

• Choose the inquiries. On the Interface Options tab of the Generic Inquiry form (SM208000), tick Expose to AI Assistant. The inquiry must already be published to the UI. We start with a short list the business already trusts: aged receivables, open sales orders, stock on hand by warehouse, open purchase orders, unreleased documents. Anything that joins payroll, cost prices or margin by customer waits for a second pass with the owner of that data in the room.
• Describe them in your own words. The Description for AI tab on the same form takes a short explanation of what the inquiry is for; the Results Grid tab takes a Description for AI per column; the Parameters tab takes an instruction per parameter, such as “select the date up to which open invoices are included”. These are optional, but they are the difference between the assistant understanding “overdue” the way your credit controller does and guessing.
• Process them. On AI Assistant Data Processing (ML503010), click Process All or process the selected inquiries. A changed inquiry shows as needing processing again, and a predefined schedule, AI Assistant GI Schema Upload, re-runs the processing weekly. After an upgrade, MYOB’s payroll note says the same batch must be run before standard payroll inquiries answer.
• Assign the role and watch the meter. Give the AI Assistant User role to the first team, confirm their licence types are eligible, and note the AI Units figure on SM201510 before anyone asks a question so you have a baseline.

What the help pages do not say in so many words is whether a chat answer is filtered by the row-level restriction groups a user already has on the underlying inquiry. The payroll note says access is “limited by licence type and user roles” and that ESS and MSS users are excluded, which is a role-level control. Before you expose anything with customer-specific or entity-specific data, log in as a restricted user and ask the assistant for a record that user should not see. Two minutes of testing settles a question no vendor page answers for your tenant. Our AI approved-tool list and permission review post has the review cadence we use once the first team is live.

Where does the data go?

MYOB’s AI page answers this more directly than most ERP vendors. It states that MYOB Acumatica stores customer data in Australia, that depending on the feature data “may be processed either within Australia or through global enterprise AI infrastructure” from providers it names as Anthropic, AWS and Microsoft, that those providers can process data to generate responses but cannot store it or use it to train their models, and that business context and conversation history stay on the MYOB Acumatica platform in Australia. The 2026.1.3 payroll note repeats the training point for payroll data.

That is enough to write the privacy paragraph in your AI usage policy, but not enough to skip it. Customer names, contact details and balances in an exposed inquiry are personal information under the Australian Privacy Principles, so the list of exposed inquiries is a disclosure decision as much as a reporting one. Record it: which inquiries, who approved exposing them, and when they were last reviewed.

A worked example from a credit desk

Here is the pattern as we’d set it up for a Queensland building products distributor on 2026.1.2 whose credit controller builds a spreadsheet every Tuesday morning. The administrator exposes three inquiries: aged receivables by customer, open sales orders with order totals and requested dates, and customers on credit hold. Each gets a one-line description, “Days past due counts from the invoice due date, not the invoice date” among them, and the parameters get instructions. Processing on ML503010 takes minutes.

On Tuesday the credit controller asks: “Which customers over 60 days past due have open sales orders this week?” The assistant returns a table of nine customers with the overdue balance and the open order value side by side, each customer name a link. She clicks through to two of them, finds one balance is a disputed invoice already noted on the case, and puts the other eight on hold herself on the Customers form, where the hold follows the usual approval. Then she asks for the same answer as a chart and pins it to a dashboard, so next Tuesday the question is already answered.

Nothing in that pattern is automated beyond the answer. That is the point. The assistant removes the spreadsheet, and the judgement about the disputed invoice stays with the person who knows the customer.

“Every finance team I meet has one person who can build the inquiry and twenty people who wait for them. The AI Assistant moves the question to the twenty. What it doesn’t move is the decision, and I’d be nervous about any tool that tried.”

Bill Alvarez, Practice Manager, Auboros

What are the failure modes?

The answers are grounded, but the model still has to map a question onto an inquiry, and that mapping can miss. If two exposed inquiries both carry a customer balance, say aged receivables and a customer statement, the assistant may pick the one you did not mean, and the totals will differ. Clear descriptions reduce this; removing the inquiry you never wanted exposed removes it entirely.

A second failure is stale processing. Edit an inquiry and forget ML503010, and the assistant answers from the old schema until the weekly schedule catches up. Put the processing step in the change checklist for any exposed inquiry.

The third is the licence meter. Because answers consume AI Units and MYOB publishes no price, a popular rollout can produce an invoice nobody budgeted. Baseline SM201510 before launch and review it monthly, the same way we suggest for running costs of any AI agent.

Finally, the assistant does not replace the inquiry builder. It answers from what exists. Teams that expect to ask for a report nobody has built will be disappointed, which is why our guide to dashboards and generic inquiries in MYOB Acumatica is still the first thing we hand a new administrator. The better your inquiries, the better the chat.

Where does it sit next to an agent?

The AI Assistant is conversational ERP in its safest form: a person asks, the system answers under that person’s access, nothing is written. For the pattern across platforms, see our post on conversational ERP and whose login the assistant answers under. The step beyond it, where something reads the same inquiries every morning and drafts a credit hold or a reorder for a person to approve, is an agent built beside MYOB Acumatica through its REST API, and that is the work our AI agents for ERP in Australia practice does. A business that has exposed and described its inquiries well has already done the hardest part of that project, because an agent needs the same clean, named data the chat does.

If your questions are “what is happening”, switch on the assistant. If they are “do something about it every day”, you want an agent with an approval gate, and the assistant is a good way to find out which questions are worth automating.

Goes well with

• MYOB Acumatica AI: what finance teams can switch on today: the other seven AI features and what each one drafts, flags or suggests.
• Dashboards and generic inquiries in MYOB Acumatica: how to build the inquiries the assistant answers from.
• An AI usage policy for ERP-run businesses: the one-page policy that records which data staff may put in front of a model, and who approved it.

---

Switching on the AI Assistant without switching off your controls

Auboros is a MYOB Acumatica partner in Brisbane, listed in MYOB’s partner directory, and we set up the AI Assistant the same way we set up an agent: a short list of exposed inquiries, descriptions written with the people who use them, a restricted-user test before anyone outside finance gets the role, and a baseline on the AI Units meter.

If you are on 2026.1 and want the chat rolled out to one team first, book a free consultation. We’ll tell you which inquiries to expose, which to hold back, and whether your licence types are ready for it.