🪄 How smenso AI works

smenso supports you with AI features for writing, structuring, summarizing, analyzing and reporting, as well as creating and expanding projects. This article gives you an overview of the AI features available, how to activate them, how they handle your data and how usage works with credits.

An overview of the AI features

You can find a separate article with detailed instructions for each feature in this section.

What the AI chat can do

You open the AI chat in the task details. It knows the open task and its project. You can ask it questions or ask it to change something for you.

Questions about the task

• Effort, due date and assignees, for example “Is the task overdue?”
• Status of the subtasks
• Dependencies: what the task depends on, what is currently blocking it and who is waiting for it to be completed
• Change history: what has changed, including the old and new value, who made the change and when

Questions about the project

• Project status and what has happened since a specific point in time
• Overdue tasks and your upcoming due dates
• Status and content of other tasks, including comparisons with the open task
• Similar or duplicate tasks, including among those already completed
• Workload: how much each person has open in the project

Changes to the task

• Change values: for example, the due date, planned effort or priority, such as with “Set the due date to next Friday”. The chat can also estimate the effort and explain how it arrived at the value.
• Title and description: rephrase, correct spelling, expand or translate them. Translations currently support 46 languages. If a language is not supported, the chat will tell you.
• Subtasks: The chat can suggest subtasks. It does not change or delete existing subtasks.

The chat applies changes directly to the task. You see them immediately and can continue editing them as usual.

What the chat does not change

• The status and assignee of a task
• Values that do not make sense together, such as a start date after the due date
• Data from other tasks

In these cases, the chat tells you why it is not making the change and leaves the task unchanged.

Follow-up questions for unclear requests

If a request is ambiguous, the chat asks a follow-up question instead of guessing. This happens, for example, in the following cases:

• Several people or tasks match your information, such as two people with the same first name or several tasks with “Planning” in the title.
• A name is not found, but there is a similar one. The chat may then ask, for example, whether you mean the person “Marco” when you entered “Marko”.
• A translation is possible in several variants, such as Simplified or Traditional Chinese.

The follow-up question appears with options to choose from. You click the appropriate option or select “Other…” and enter your own answer. If the chat has several questions, it displays them one after another, and you can go back and forth between them. If you close the follow-up question with the ×, nothing is sent. If you write a new message instead, the chat discards the follow-up question and processes your new request.

The chat completes unambiguous parts of a request immediately. For example, if you ask it to shorten the title and translate the description into Chinese, it shortens the title directly and only asks about the translation. Follow-up questions themselves use very few credits.

How the chat identifies people

• For short names of fewer than three letters, the chat only recognises an exact match. “Al” therefore means Al and not Alfred.
• If two people have the same display name, the chat distinguishes them in the follow-up question using their email address.
• If there is no matching or similar name in the project, the chat tells you.

Time periods

• The chat answers questions about the change history and what has happened for the last 90 days.
• It answers forward-looking questions, such as requests for a project overview, for the next 30 days.

If you ask about a longer period, the chat points out this limit.

Practical use in everyday work

• You can combine several requests in one message, for example “Shorten the title and set the priority to high”.
• Tasks and projects in the answers are linked and open in a new tab.
• When you hover over a name, you see the person’s profile card.
• The chat replies in the language you write in.
• If you ask the chat to summarize the task or its comments, it saves the summary to the task. If you ask for a limited summary, such as one about risks only, you receive it as a reply in the chat. The saved summary then remains unchanged.

Coming soon

These AI features are in preparation and will be made available gradually:

• AI chat in the workspace: answers questions and completes requests across projects, using all data you have access to
• AI writing assistant in additional fields, for example in the project master data
• AI search: workspace-wide search with AI
• AI project plan: AI-assisted scheduling in the chat as well as in Timeline and Gantt
• AI flavors: custom fields that AI fills in manually or automatically
• AI formula editor: support when creating formulas for calculated fields
• AI workflow builder: create automations with AI
• AI team members: AI that independently completes assigned routine tasks

Activate AI in the workspace

The AI features are initially disabled in every workspace. Only workspace owners can activate them for the entire workspace in the Admin Center. This allows your company to complete, for example, a review by its data protection, IT security or works council teams beforehand.

You can deactivate the features again at any time. As long as the AI features are not activated, they are not visible to anyone in the workspace and no credits are used.

How AI handles your data

• Only at your request. AI only becomes active when you start an AI feature. It does not work independently in the background.
• Only data you are allowed to see. AI uses only content that you have access to in smenso.
• Exclude individual fields. You can specifically block flavors from being used by AI. No AI feature uses blocked flavors.
• Processing in the EU. Processing takes place through Microsoft Azure AI Foundry, exclusively in European data centres within Microsoft’s EU Data Zone.
• No training with your data. Your content is not used to train AI models.

Apply and review results

Depending on the feature, you apply results in different ways:

• Applied directly: The writing assistant immediately inserts its text into the field. It also directly applies changes you ask the AI chat to make. You can edit everything afterwards as usual.
• As a suggestion: You can add subtasks individually or all at once. Suggested replies to comments are placed as a draft in the comment field and are only posted when you send them yourself. You can create tasks identified from comments as subtasks if needed. You review a status report draft before saving or publishing it. You set the overall status yourself.

AI can make mistakes or overlook details. Therefore, review the results before using them further or sharing them with others.

How AI credits work

Every AI action uses credits from a shared allowance for your workspace.

• Each paid seat contributes credits per month depending on the plan: 150 for Business, 250 for Business+ and 500 for Enterprise. With 20 seats on the Business+ plan, the entire team therefore has 5,000 credits available.
• The allowance is renewed every month on the day your subscription began. This also applies to annual payments. Unused credits expire at the next renewal.
• Complex actions use more credits than simple ones. Creating a project, for example, costs more than rephrasing a sentence.
• Credits are used for processing. This also applies if an action fails, you cancel it or discard the result. If the error is on our side, we will credit the credits back to you upon request.

If the allowance is used up, the AI features pause until the next renewal. Everything else in smenso continues to work normally. If your team needs more credits, you can add a monthly credit package: S with 2,500, M with 10,000 or L with 50,000 credits. As a workspace owner, you request a package in the Admin Center, and our sales team will then contact you with an offer. The package is billed together with your subscription, and the credits from it are added monthly. No automatic additional costs are incurred.

You can find all details in the article How AI credits work.

View usage

In the app, all members can see their own usage and that of the entire workspace under Workspace settings. A small indicator in the Avatar menu shows at any time how much of the shared balance has already been used. When 85% has been used, an additional notice appears in the sidebar.

As a workspace owner, you can find further analyses and options under AI usage in the Admin Center.