What is Conversational Insights?

Conversational Insights is an AI-powered assistant built into IBM Apptio. It lets you ask questions about your data in plain, natural language—no need to build reports or know where every metric lives—and returns answers drawn directly from your Apptio environment. The result is a faster, more intuitive way to explore your Costing, Billing, and Planning data and get to the insights you need.

What is Expert Guidance?

Expert Guidance is an AI-powered assistant built into IBM Apptio AI Assistant that helps users ask questions about how to use IBM Apptio in plain, natural language. It provides contextual product guidance, best practices, examples, and links to relevant documentation, helping users learn the platform, complete tasks, troubleshoot common issues, and find trusted answers faster.

Unlike Conversational Insights, which helps users ask questions about their organization’s Apptio data, Expert Guidance helps users understand how to use IBM Apptio and apply ITFM practices more effectively. 

Which Apptio applications support it?

Once the AI Assistant is enabled (both functionalities come in the same chat experience), you’ll see the AI button in the top-right corner of the following Apptio applications you have access to:

•     Costing and Billing

•     Planning

Which regions is it available in?

Conversational Insights is available in all commercial AWS regions during Public Preview. It is not yet available in Azure or Government (Gov) environments. Azure will come with GA in Q3, and FedRamp + IRAP will come in Q4.

Expert Guidance follows a separate release plan, but it is also available in all commercial AWS regions during Public Preview. FedRamp + IRAP and Azure rollouts are still TBD.

Release Matrix

How do I enable the AI Assistant?

In Planning

There are two ways for your administrator to provide access to individuals or groups of users from Frontdoor:

• For provisioning to individual users:
  • Assign the Conversational Insights Access role
• For provisioning to groups of users:
  • Assign the following permission to a custom role that should have access:
    • conversation_insights.access

In Costing

• First, confirm your environment is up to date. Your environment must be upgraded to release r12.11.23 or later.

In Costing, administrator can grant one of three access levels:

• Admin: has access to query the entire cost model and all report collections the user has access to
• End User: has access to query the all the report collections the user has access to
  • This mirrors the data access available to non-admin user
• Power User: has access to query the entire cost model and all report collections the user has access to
  • CAUTION: USE THIS ROLE IF you want a Non-Admin user to be able to query your cost model

Administrators can grant access to individual users or groups of users from Frontdoor:

• Admin
  • For provisioning to individual users:
    • Assign the Admin role AND
    • Assign the Conversational Insights Access role
  • For provisioning to groups of users:
    • Ensure users have the Admin role OR a custom role with at least the following permissions (AccessProd, AccessStg, ViewAllData) AND
    • Create or edit a custom role containing the following permissions, and assign that role to any groups being provisioned with access:
      • conversation_insights.access
      • MCPFullAccess
• End User
  • For provisioning to individual users:
    • Ensure users have at least one of the following roles:
      • Business Owner
      • Business Unit Owner
      • Business User
      • Executive User
      • Finance
      • Analyst
      • Project Manager
      • Service Manger
      • View Only
      • Business Consumer
      • Datalink Admin
    • AND Assign the Conversational Insights Access role
  • For provisioning to groups of users:
    • Ensure users have one of the roles above OR a custom role with at least the AccessProd permission AND 
    • Create or edit a custom role containing the following permissions, and assign that role to any groups being provisioned with access:
      • conversation_insights.access
• Power User
  • For provisioning to individual users:
    • Assign the Power User role AND
    • Assign the Conversational Insights Access role
  • For provisioning to groups of users:
    
    • Ensure users have the Power User role OR a custom role with at least the following permissions (AccessProd, AccessStg, ViewAllData) AND
    • Create or edit a custom role containing the following permissions, and assign that role to any groups being provisioned with access:
      • conversation_insights.access
      • MCPFullAccess

Finally:

• Start asking questions. Enabled users will see the AI button appear in the top-right corner of the supported applications listed above.

Permission Matrix

Role Matrix

For those coming from Private Preview?

We will be decommissioning the cloned environments by the end of July. We encourage you to upgrade to R12.11.23 and provision users to continue using Conversational Insights in your main environment.

What does it cost during Public Preview?

During Public Preview, Conversational Insights is available at no charge. To keep the preview running smoothly for everyone, usage limits apply over each time period on a per user basis.

These limits are calculated from a combination of factors, including:

•     The number of prompts submitted

•     Token usage

•     The complexity of each question

Usage currently resets every week on Sunday 13:00 (1PM) UTC. Because Public Preview helps us learn how customers use the feature, both the usage limits and the reset period may change as we better understand real-world usage patterns.

Tips

Default Projects in TBM Studio

Please set your default project to anything but AdminDB. That is the one that is set out of the box, and it messes up Conversational Insights initial context when a user asks questions as there is none of your data in that Costing project.