Connecting an assistant

Connect an assistant to ask questions about customers, orders and rounds, and carry out supported tasks. You choose which business it can access and what it can do.

Connecting one

Open Connections from your user menu, find the assistant and select How to connect. Follow the instructions, sign in to Bottle and choose:

• The business to connect.
• The permissions to grant.

The assistant cannot access your business until you approve the connection.

What it can and cannot do

The assistant can only use the permissions you grant, within your own role’s access. It cannot manage API keys or change who is an owner.

Read permissions let it check records such as cylinder charges, invoice balances, stock, vehicle maintenance and reports. If you grant write permissions, it can also make supported changes through Bottle’s API. Ask it to explain a change before making it, especially when creating orders, changing prices, cancelling records or publishing your shop. Do not grant write access if you only want advice.

Flame AI, the chat inside Bottle, is read-only. Connecting Claude or ChatGPT separately does not give Flame AI permission to change records.

Its requests count towards your business’s request limits.

If your role changes, its access is reduced to match. If you leave the business, the connection stops working.

Building your shop with an assistant

An assistant can build your Bottle Shop for you: its colours and fonts, home page, pages, blog posts, menus, filters and pictures. Grant it Change your shop’s drafts. You publish them when you connect it.

Everything it makes is a draft. Shoppers see nothing until you check it in Bottle Shop and press Publish. It cannot publish, discard your changes, take your shop down or change its address.

This applies to the draft-only permission. If you also grant broader shop-write access, the assistant can use supported publishing and shop-management tools. Keep draft-only access when you want to approve everything before it goes live.

Ask it in your own words, for example:

• “Build my shop from my website text”, then paste the text.
• “Write a blog post about winter gas safety and add it to the footer menu.”
• “Make an About us page with a picture and two text columns.”
• “Make the home page’s text and picture section half width, beside the call to action.”

When it has finished, it tells you what it changed. Open Bottle Shop, look through Design, Pages (your home page included) and Blog in the preview, and press Publish when you are happy. A page or blog post is published from its own editor.

What it can and cannot do with your shop:

• It can change the draft of anything in Design, Menus, Shop filters, the shop’s words and checkout settings, and your terms of sale and privacy policy.
• It can write new pages and blog posts, and change the draft of a published page. It cannot change a blog post that is already on your shop: ask it to write a new draft instead.
• It can delete a page only if that page has never been published. You can bring it back with Undo until your assistant changes something else.
• It cannot switch your shop back on after you switch it off.
• It can add pictures to your shop: from your own website, by their web address, or pictures it makes. Point it at the pictures you want, such as “Use the picture of our yard from our website”. Only give it pictures you own or may use. Up to 50 a day.

If you have Bottle Shop open while your assistant changes it, a message at the foot of the bar at the top of the screen says so. Press Reload to see its changes. Bottle will not save your open page over your assistant’s changes, and will not publish a draft your assistant changed after you looked: it asks you to reload and check first.

To put back your assistant’s last change, use the button in that message, such as Undo your assistant’s last change to your shop’s design or Bring back the page About us your assistant deleted. It puts back the most recent change only, once, and only if nothing has changed it since. If you or anyone else changed that part of your shop after your assistant did, it is not put back: undo it by hand, or discard your changes. It cannot put back an earlier change, a page or post published since, or pictures your assistant uploaded. So ask your assistant to work on one part at a time and to tell you what it changed.

Disconnecting

In Connections, select Disconnect on the assistant’s card. Access ends immediately. To use it again, reconnect it.

Changing what it can do

Select Change under the connection’s permissions, untick permissions you want to remove and save. The changes apply immediately.

To grant additional permissions, reconnect from Claude or ChatGPT and approve them on Bottle’s consent screen. Bottle cannot grant extra access without your approval.

For an overview of AI assistance in Bottle, see AI assistance on the Bottle website.