Introducing Ask TAMI: An AI Assistant That Knows Your Whole Training Operation

Today we are shipping Ask TAMI, an AI assistant built into TryTami. Ask it a plain-English question about your instructors, schedule, students, clients, or margins and it answers in seconds from the data already in your account, with a note on exactly what it counted. It is included in every plan, and it is read-only: it can tell you who is free next week, but it will not book anyone.

This post is about why we built it, what it does, and, just as important, what we decided it should not do.

The question that takes hours

When we ran DevelopIntelligence, the technical training company Pluralsight acquired, the hardest questions in the business were not hard questions. They were simple questions with scattered answers. Who is free to teach AWS the week of the 14th? What did we actually make on that client last quarter, after instructor cost? Which of the open-enrollment classes next month are going to run and which should we cancel now, while there is still time?

Every one of those had an answer. The answer lived in three spreadsheets, a shared calendar, the billing system, and one person's head. Finding an available, qualified instructor meant emailing the bench, waiting for replies, and tons of back and forth. It could take hours and sometimes days. Everything else meant digging, or walking over to the person who had done the job longest and asking. When that person was on vacation, the question waited.

We heard the same thing this year on nearly every discovery call with a training provider. The bottleneck is not the tooling. The bottleneck is that operational knowledge is spread across systems or lives in people. Ask TAMI is our answer to that.

What you can ask

Ask TAMI sits in a side panel on every screen in TryTami. Type a question the way you would ask a colleague. A few from our own testing:

• Which is the best instructor to teach an AWS course for Acme in October?
• How many total courses am I running in September?
• List all of my instructors with their skills and rates.
• Who is registered for Monday's Python class, and who has not confirmed?
• What did we make on Walmart this quarter?
• How could I optimize instructor utilization for September and reduce instructor cost?

That last one is the interesting kind. TAMI does not just report. When we asked it about September utilization, it noticed that two AWS Advanced Networking sessions were assigned to our most expensive AWS-qualified instructor while a cheaper AWS-qualified instructor was sitting at 29% utilization, and it proposed the swap with the saving per day spelled out. Whether to make the swap is your call. It will open the screen for you.

It also knows what you are looking at. Ask “why is this flagged?” from a course page and you get the reasons for that course: no trainer assigned fifteen days out against a twenty-one-day threshold, materials not uploaded. Ask “across all courses” and it widens the view.

Every answer says what it counted

This is the design decision we care most about, and the one that took the longest to get right.

A number with no provenance is a liability in a training operation. If TAMI tells you September profit on a client is $18,430, you need to know whether that includes the two courses that have no instructor cost recorded yet, because those make the number look better than it is. So every answer ends with a short note: how many records were counted, which were excluded, and why. “Counted 14 delivered courses, 1 Jul to 30 Sep. 2 more were left out: no trainer cost recorded yet. Archived courses excluded.”

Under the hood, the figures are computed by TryTami, not by the language model. Totals, margins, and utilization are calculated in code and handed to the assistant finished. The model explains the number and writes the note. It never does arithmetic on rows it fetched. When the evidence is thin, it says so: a 5.0 rating that rests on one review is reported as a 5.0 that rests on one review.

If TryTami does not record something, TAMI tells you it cannot answer rather than estimating. It does not know your break-even seat count for a public class, because that is not a number the system stores. It will say that, and stop.

What it will not do

Ask TAMI is read-only. It cannot book, cancel, move, or edit anything. It can note a task for you and open the screen that does the job, but the change is always yours to make.

We went back and forth on this. An assistant that reassigns the instructor for you is a better demo. It is a worse product for a training operation, where one wrong booking is a client conversation and an instructor who turns up to the wrong city. We would rather TAMI be the colleague who knows everything and touches nothing.

Two other commitments. It only sees what your user role can see. And your data is never used to train models, for us or for anyone else. It answers your questions and nothing more.

Where it goes from here

Ask TAMI is live today for every TryTami customer on every plan. Open the panel from any screen, start with one of the suggested questions, and flag anything that looks wrong with the “This isn't right” link under the answer. Those flags come straight to us and are how we will decide what to teach it next.

If you are not a customer yet and want to see it answer questions about your own instructors and schedule, request a demo. Bring the question that takes you hours today. Details on the Ask TAMI product page.