Optional AI
Simply360 has two AI surfaces: Ask Simply for your signed-in team, and conversation widgets for the people you serve. Both are optional, both run under the same permissions as everyone else, both show their work, and both know when to hand the conversation to a person. That last part is not a limitation — it is the design.
Two flavors, one philosophy
AI in Simply360 is not a chatbot bolted onto the side — it is the same platform, made conversational. Which is why it inherits the things you already trust: permissions, workflows, verification, and audit.
For Team Admins and Team Users: ask about your data in plain language and get cited answers, drafted follow-ups, and proposed changes — previewed and approved by a person before anything happens. It works everywhere in the webapp and in the Simply Anywhere mobile app.
A branded, embeddable assistant for donors, members, families, clients, and visitors: honest answers grounded in the content you connect, real actions through your verified public workflows, and a human handoff built in — on your hosted site or any site you already have.
Flavor one — Ask Simply
Ask Simply runs as the signed-in user. It gets no service account, no special role, no secret access — if you cannot see a record, neither can your assistant. Ask in plain language; it answers with sources, drafts with previews, and acts only after you approve.
Permissions are enforced by the platform, not by the AI’s good manners.
The number, the trend, and the donors behind it — in plain language with the live report linked, ready for the board packet.
Stewardship gaps become a question instead of a spreadsheet audit — with a drafted, personal check-in for each name if you ask.
Ask Simply proposes the view, shows exactly what it will include, and shares it with your workspace when you approve.
Schema changes become a sentence, a preview, and an approval — the settings-screen afternoon, done in the time it takes to describe.
It pulls the right people from live records and drafts the message in your voice — you approve before anything sends.
Ask Simply explains your own permission setup in plain language — the question that usually means twenty minutes of clicking through roles.
There is a deeper mode for Team Administration: Ask Simply can explain and propose changes to schema, views, wizards, workspaces, websites, and permission grants — the configuration work that used to be an afternoon of settings screens. Sensitive settings like billing, credentials, and security stay explain-only or high-friction on purpose.
It drafts inside Website Studio too: pages, copy, and imports start as drafts in your style kit, and nothing publishes itself.
Ask Simply, mid-answer
On the go
Ask Simply is built into Simply Anywhere, the mobile app for teams on Simply360. The walk to the board meeting, the donor lunch, the site visit: ask the question, get the cited answer, approve the follow-up — without opening a laptop.
Flavor two — conversation widgets
Your constituents — donors, members, families, participants — ask predictable questions at unpredictable hours. A conversation widget answers them from the views, knowledge articles, and workflows you connect, completes real registrations and payments with the same verification as the rest of your site, and brings your team in the moment a person should take over.
Answered from your published program and impact content, honestly and specifically — with your real donation flow offered when they are ready.
It finds the actual workflow and walks them through it in the conversation — a completed, verified record instead of a Monday-morning voicemail.
Matched to the real roles you publish and signed up through your real form — intent captured the evening it appears.
Handoff to your team is built in, with the conversation attached. The assistant is honest about being an assistant — faking a person is how trust dies.
Customization and control
Widgets are configured, not coded: what each one knows, how it sounds, what it may do, and when it must step aside.
Voice and tone, words to use and avoid, escalation manner, and example answers — behavior training, not fact training. Each widget can run a deeper or faster AI model.
Each widget knows only the public views, knowledge base, and workflows you link. Semantic search understands that “learn a brass instrument” means trumpet lessons — but it searches your content, not the open internet.
Visitors act only through your public workflows and carts — the same verification, eligibility, and payment gates as everywhere else on your site. The AI cannot invent a write path.
Live handoff to your team, a message form for offline hours, and self-escalation when the assistant is unsure. Conversations land in your inbox with everything attached.
Admins can see what each answer consulted, test the assistant safely before publishing changes, watch satisfaction scores, and mine unanswered questions for content gaps.
Audience gates and data-access levels decide what each widget may touch — a widget for the public and a widget for signed-in constituents can know very different things.
The boring safety story
None of this is fine print — it is the architecture, and it is the same whether you use AI a lot, a little, or not at all.
Ask Simply inherits the signed-in user’s permissions, and approvals re-check access at the moment they execute. Widgets see only what you connect. There is no “AI role” with special access anywhere in the system.
AI runs on AWS through Amazon Bedrock, inside the same infrastructure as the rest of Simply360. Your data is not used to train AI models, and visitors never see internal tool machinery — just the answer and its sources.
Paid plans include monthly AI credit value, usage is metered visibly, and spending caps are on by default. Live conversation widgets carry a flat monthly price. Every number is published on the pricing page — none of it is quote-only.
AI usage, tool calls, proposals, and executed changes are logged. When someone asks “what did the AI do?”, the answer is a record, not a shrug.
Honest answers
Every AI feature is opt-in, feature by feature and widget by widget. Some teams will run their whole operation on Ask Simply; some will enable one widget for one busy season; some will decline the whole page — all three are using the product correctly.
The relationships this software exists to serve — with donors, members, families, clients — stay yours. The AI fetches, drafts, and answers so your team has more room for them, and it hands over the moment a human should be in the conversation.
Every product in the Simply app family includes these same two experiences, explained for the people who use it—from school offices to camp registrars to membership teams.
Show us the spreadsheet, the system you have outgrown, the portal wish list, or the intake process. We will map it to Simply360 and show the calmest path forward.
