Turning on AI

AI in Waymarq is bolted on, never load-bearing. The whole app — projects, boards, timelines, budgets, clients, reports — works with none of it configured. Nothing you create depends on it, and switching it off later breaks nothing.

Setting it up

Organisation settings → AI → Set up AI. It walks through three questions: which provider you have an account with (Anthropic, OpenAI or Google) and which model, your API key, and how you'd like AI to write.

The key is validated the moment you save it — a bad key is rejected there and then rather than failing silently later. It's encrypted at rest, never sent back to your browser, and never shown again after you save it.

You bring your own key deliberately: AI usage is billed by your provider at their prices, and Waymarq doesn't resell it or add a margin.

The key step also asks whether to switch AI features on at the same time. Leave that unticked and your key is stored and verified but nothing changes anywhere until you turn it on from the AI tab.

Per-project control

Each project can override the organisation setting (Project settings → Features). Leave it inheriting, or switch AI off for one project — useful for a client whose contract says their material doesn't go near a third-party model.

What it costs, and staying in control

Every AI call is recorded: which operation, which model, tokens in and out, and an approximate cost. You'll find it on the project overview, on the task that triggered it, and account-wide in the AI usage report.

Cost control is designed in rather than bolted on:

• Nothing generates on page load. Everything is an explicit click.
• Summaries regenerate only when the underlying work has actually changed.
• Prompts carry a small digest — titles, statuses, dates, counts — not your whole project.
• The model is asked to phrase, never to count. Figures are calculated in code and handed over finished, so numbers you might read aloud to a client can't be invented.
• Before importing a large document, Waymarq estimates whether it fits and warns you rather than silently escalating to a pricier model.

Writing style

The last step of setting up asks for a language and tone for your organisation, so output reads the way you write — British rather than American spelling, formal or plain. Change it any time from the AI tab. Separately, set a detail level per project: concise, balanced, or strict (derived only from the source document, no embellishment).

What AI can do here

• Turn a brief into a first-pass plan — see Turning a brief into a plan.
• Ask clarifying questions about a spec, and turn the answers into proposed changes.
• Write a plain-English progress summary for a phase or a project.
• Suggest what to watch on a phase.
• Break a large task into subtasks.
• Triage incoming support requests.
• Suggest a project's name from the brief you drop in, when the filename gives nothing to go on.

Every one of them proposes; none of them applies anything on their own.

When AI stops working

Your provider account is yours — we never resell access to it — so if it stops accepting calls, the fix is on their side and Waymarq's job is to tell you clearly which of three things has happened.

• Out of credit. The most common one. Top up your balance with the provider and everything starts working again immediately. Your key is fine; nothing here needs changing.
• Key rejected. Keys stop working when they're revoked or regenerated. Save a new one on the AI tab.
• Rate limited. The provider is throttling how fast the account can call it. This usually clears within a few minutes on its own.

You'll see the reason as a banner on Organisation settings → AI, and on any plan that failed part-way through. Where retrying can't possibly help — an empty balance, or a rejected key — you're pointed at settings rather than offered a retry button that would only fail again.

One quirk worth knowing: Google reports an exhausted balance, a daily free-tier cap and a short rate limit identically, so for Google we say the quota is exhausted without claiming to know which. If it hasn't cleared in a few minutes, check the quota on the key.

If you save a valid key on an account that's out of credit, Waymarq saves it anyway and tells you about the balance — rather than claiming the key couldn't be verified and sending you off to regenerate a credential that was never the problem.

If you're on a trial

A trial lends you our provider key with a credit limit and an end date, so you can try AI planning before deciding whether to bring your own key. It ends on whichever runs out first — the credit or the clock, and those are worth telling apart: a trial can end with almost all of its credit unspent simply because its time was up.

Either way you'll see a banner saying which, and opening the AI assistant on a project explains it there too, with the ways forward: add your own provider key and carry straight on, or get in touch and we'll look at extending the trial. Nothing you've already planned is affected — phases, tasks, briefs and everything else stay exactly as they are, and you can keep planning by hand or point a coding agent at the API, neither of which needs AI from us.