Foreman Assistant Overview

Learn how to use Foreman Assistant, an AI chat tool that connects to Autodesk Construction Cloud data to answer project questions, run checks, and generate artifacts securely within your permissions.

Experimental feature. Foreman Assistant can produce inaccurate or incomplete results. Always verify important outputs — especially before acting on data the AI reports about members, permissions, or project state.

What Foreman Assistant can do

Foreman Assistant is a conversational assistant that wraps Claude (Anthropic) with direct access to your Autodesk Construction Cloud data via Foreman's MCP tools. Ask it questions in plain English and it will:

Look up projects, hubs, and folders in your Forma hubs.
Search files across projects and summarise what it finds.
List project members, their roles, and admin access.
Check access requests, scheduled jobs, and storage analytics.
Run and interpret QA checks, explain violations, push findings to Forma Issues.
Help you configure attribute extracts and walk through setup.
Look up help articles and cite them in its answers.
Generate downloadable files — CSVs, JSON configs, scripts, mermaid diagrams — as artifacts in a side panel.
Accept project mentions (@alias) that pin the conversation to a specific MCP-enabled project, skipping the lookup step.

Every tool call is scoped to your account and honours your existing permissions. The AI can only read what you can already see in Foreman.

Two ways to use it

Full-page

Open the dedicated route at /foreman-assistant (or click AI Chat under the AI & API section in the sidebar). The full-page view gives you:

A permanent Conversations sidebar with search, pinned, and archived tabs.
A roomy chat area that scrolls independently from the sidebar.
A resizable artifact side-panel for viewing generated files, code, and diagrams.
A Minimize button in the top-right that collapses the AI into the floating widget without losing context.

Floating widget (opt-in)

A small chat bubble that floats at the bottom-right of every page. Turn it on once and it follows you around:

Go to Account → Manage → Profile.
Tick Enable the floating mini-widget.
Save.

Once enabled, click the bubble (or press Ctrl + Shift + K) to open the widget on any page. It has three size modes — Compact, Expanded, and Full height — accessible via the cycle button in its header. The floating widget is automatically hidden while you are on the /foreman-assistant full-page route so the two surfaces never overlap.

Both surfaces share the same session state — jump between widget and full-page without losing your place in the conversation.

Core interactions

Action	Widget	Full-page
Send message (Enter)	✓	✓
Newline in message (Shift+Enter)	✓	✓
Stop generating	✓	✓
Upload attachment	✓	✓
Copy message	✓	✓
Edit & regenerate user message	✓	✓
Try again (regenerate assistant reply)	✓	✓
Start new chat from here (fork)	✓	✓
Delete message	✓	✓
Slash commands (`/new`, `/qa`, …)	✓	✓
Project mentions (`@alias`)	✓	✓
Rename the active conversation	✓ (click title in header)	—
Pin / archive a conversation	✓ (row hover)	✓ (row hover)
Export chat as Markdown	✓ (header button)	✓ (`/export`)
Browser notifications when tab inactive	✓	—

When to use AI Chat vs direct tools

AI Chat is best for conversational exploration — "summarise this project's access requests", "draft a CSV of members by role", "explain what changed in the latest QA check". For precise, repeatable operations, the native Foreman pages are faster and less error-prone.

If you already use Claude Desktop, Cursor, or another MCP client, you can also connect Foreman MCP directly to those hosts from the MCP Settings page. The AI you use there calls the same tools — Foreman Assistant is just another client, running inside Foreman.

Data handling

Attachments are stored under your tenant's shared storage quota (see Attachments in AI Chat).
Conversations and messages are retained per-session and can be deleted from the sidebar at any time.
Artifacts (code/CSVs/diagrams the AI generates) are stored alongside the assistant message that produced them and are downloadable from the side panel.
Every tool call and token count is tracked for billing and auditing — see Usage, limits, and costs.