AI assistant

The AI assistant is a chat on the admin home page that answers questions about your store using the store's live data. You ask in plain language, the assistant looks up the orders, products, customers and numbers it needs, and it answers with text, tables or charts. When you ask for a change, such as a refund or a new discount code, the assistant prepares it and waits for you to approve it.

The pages in this section take the questions new store owners ask most often and show how you'd ask the assistant each one. Where the assistant can't help, they point to the admin screen where you make the change yourself, and they say so plainly when Litestore doesn't support something.

Opening the assistant

The assistant lives on the admin home page in a card called Ask your store. When you open a new chat, it suggests a few starter questions, such as "How did sales go this week?" and "What needs my attention today?". Click one or type your own.

Next to the chat, the home page lists open work, such as orders to fulfill and refunds to review. When an assistant outside Litestore has prepared a change over MCP, the home page shows it there too, waiting for your approval.

If nobody has connected an AI provider yet, the card is replaced by a message with a Set up AI button that opens Settings → AI.

AI provider key

The assistant needs an API key from one AI provider. Litestore works with Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude and OpenAI, and Google is the default. The key is an environment variable on the server, so whoever runs your store adds it:

GOOGLE_GENERATIVE_AI_API_KEY    Google Gemini (default)
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY               Anthropic Claude, with AI_PROVIDER=anthropic
OPENAI_API_KEY                  OpenAI, with AI_PROVIDER=openai

Settings → AI shows whether a provider is connected, which model is in use, and how much the store has spent on AI this month. It has a test button that checks the connection. Generation covers providers and fallback in more detail.

Reading, proposing and executing

The assistant's tools fall into three groups.

Read tools look things up and return the answer straight away. Sales figures, order details, stock levels and customer histories all come from read tools, and they never change anything.

Propose tools prepare a change in the parts of the store that involve money or stock. They cover refunds, discount codes, campaigns, price changes, stock adjustments and replies to customers. The assistant shows an approval card, and the change only happens when you click Approve.

Execute tools prepare content changes, such as a new page, a product description, a search-result title, a translation or a marketing email. These also wait for your approval. They're grouped separately so that content changes get their own permission level.

The assistant can never approve anything itself. If you don't approve a proposal within five minutes, it expires, and you ask the assistant again. Each approval runs once, so clicking twice doesn't apply a change twice. Settings → AI keeps a list of recent proposals and shows whether each one was approved, dismissed or expired.

Autonomy ceiling

Settings → AI has a store-wide setting called AI autonomy ceiling that determines which of those groups the assistant may use:

When a tool is above the ceiling, Litestore doesn't offer it to the assistant at all. If you ask for something that needs a higher setting, the assistant replies that it can't make that change. The topic pages in this section mention which setting each change needs.

Permissions

The assistant works with your own permissions. If your role can't issue refunds or edit products, the assistant can't prepare those changes for you either, and it replies that your role lacks the permission. A refund is a special case: approving the assistant's proposal creates a refund request, and someone with permission to approve refunds still releases the money from the refund queue.

The assistant treats customer messages, product text and other store data as information to read. It doesn't follow instructions that appear inside them, and it receives customers' email addresses only in masked form.

Other AI assistants

An assistant outside Litestore, such as Claude Desktop, also reaches the same tools through the admin MCP endpoint. Litestore applies the same ceiling and permissions there, and any change still shows up on the admin home page for approval. Integrations explains how to set this up.

Questions by topic