Use this article when the AI assistant in your shop is picking the wrong product category, defaulting odd attributes, or sounding off-brand, and you want to teach it your house rules. After this you will know what Guidance is, where it lives in Estimate Setup, the five rule types you can write, and what the rules do and do not change.
What Guidance is
Guidance is a rules overlay inside Estimate Setup → Settings → Guidance. It shapes how the AI assistant interprets what a person asks for — which product category to map a request into, which attributes to default, what to suggest when a field is empty, what to say in chat, and in what tone.
Guidance rules apply at the request-interpretation step, before any quote math runs. They do not change formulas, routing logic, or which machine gets selected on Calculate. They change what becomes a quote spec from a free-text request, and what the assistant says back.
Each rule is scoped to one of two contexts: Internal Team — for estimators working inside GelatoConnect — or Storefront, for end customers placing requests on the shop's storefront experience. The same rule written for Internal Team has no effect on Storefront and vice versa.
The five rule types are:
Category Guidance — pick the right product category from the spec (for example, "poster sizes go to Large Format, never to Folded Leaflets").
Product Guidance — fill in missing product attributes the requester did not mention, such as orientation or colour count.
Suggestions Guidance — influence what the assistant offers when a field is empty, drawn only from values that exist in the shop's setup.
Knowledge Guidance — FAQ-style answers for recurring non-spec questions (contacts, certifications, delivery policies).
Communication Style Guidance — set the tone, length, and formality of the assistant's replies.
A worked example
Northgate Press prints posters on Canon Wide and leaflets on the XL105. Estimators kept seeing requests like "we need 500 A2 posters" routed into Folded Leaflets because A2 sits inside that category's size range.
An estimator opens Estimate Setup → Settings → Guidance and adds a Category Guidance rule for the Internal Team context: when a request mentions "poster" at A2 size or larger, route it to the Large Format category, not to Folded Leaflets.
After Save Changes, the next time an estimator types "500 A2 posters" into the assistant, the request becomes a Large Format quote spec with Canon Wide as the press option set. The same request typed on the storefront is unaffected, because the rule was written only for Internal Team.
If Northgate Press later wanted the same routing for storefront requests, the team would add a second Guidance rule with the Storefront context.
What this affects
AI assistant interpretation — how a free-text request becomes the fields of a quote spec: category, product, attributes, suggested defaults.
AI assistant replies — what the assistant says back to the user, including suggested next steps, tone, and FAQ-style answers.
Context isolation — only the context the rule is written for. A rule scoped to Internal Team does not run on Storefront requests.
What this does not affect
Routing math and machine selection — the engine still picks the press, finishing, and binding by matching the quote spec to the live machine setup. Guidance changes the spec that arrives; it does not change which machine the engine picks for that spec.
Price formulas and Calculate — make-ready, run, substrate cost, markups, pricing rules, and rebates all run from the deterministic estimation engine. Guidance never changes a price; it shapes how a request becomes a quote.
What's available in the shop — Suggestions Guidance can only offer what already exists in the setup. A rule that tells the assistant to suggest a brand or substrate that is not in the substrates table will produce no suggestion.
Related task articles
Configure a Guidance rule
How AI Configurator works