Questions Ask Alex declines, and why
An AI that answers every question will sometimes answer one it cannot support. Ask Alex is built to say no when your HubSpot and Xero records cannot back a figure, and to say why.
By Manny Sidhu · Practical guide · Published · Updated
Requests for advice or decisions
Questions asking what to do, what to fix, or what to prioritise are declined. Ask Alex says it cannot recommend actions, and that it can present supported facts and comparisons so you can make your own judgement.
Questions asking which employees to dismiss, replace, or promote are declined too. Ask Alex offers recorded sales performance instead, and says the decision remains yours. If any part of a question asks for advice or an employment decision, the whole question is declined, even when other parts are factual.
Questions outside your company data
Questions that are not about your connected sales and accounting data, such as general research, are declined as out of scope. So are instructions to ignore the rules, reveal system details, run database queries, or invent figures.
Measures it cannot calculate yet
Some measures are not supported yet: forecasts and scenarios, hiring models, quota or target attainment, sales activity attribution, channel attribution, one named customer or sales rep on its own, explanations of why something happened, and whether particular deals turned into payments. For these, Ask Alex says it does not yet support the evidence or calculation needed.
Profit is declined because it needs verified income and expense evidence, and invoiced sales alone are not profit. Questions about which customers are profitable get a narrower measure instead, revenue minus costs linked to each customer in Xero, which has its own guide.
Counts of newly created CRM contacts are declined too, because invoiced customers and new CRM contacts are different measures.
Questions that need your input first
Runway, burn, tax and payroll obligations, and fundraising timing are not calculated straight away. Ask Alex says it cannot verify them yet, lists the evidence it would need, such as which bank accounts are available to spend and which period represents normal operations, and asks you to confirm it. It does not choose those assumptions for you.
An illustrative example
Illustrative example, not customer data: with dates set for July to September, a question asks for net invoiced sales and for profit. Ask Alex answers the net invoiced sales in full, with its receipt. For profit, it says it cannot calculate profit yet and explains why, instead of leaving that part out without comment.
When it asks you to clarify
Ask Alex asks a question back when the wording leaves the measure open, for example a question about cash that could mean customer collections or a bank balance, or a broad question about business performance. It asks you to name one measure and lists the ones it can examine.
It also asks you to set dates in the date controls when a question names a month or a quarter, to ask about at most three measures at a time, and to choose between 1 and 20 when a list of customers is requested.
When the records cannot support an answer
A supported question can still be declined when the records fall short: dates that run past the synced history, more than one currency, more records than one check can verify, or payments that cannot be tied to their invoices. In each case Ask Alex gives the reason rather than an estimate, and days that were not synced are not counted as zero.