Ask Your Prophet 21 Data in Plain English

Conversational AI for Prophet 21 is an assistant that answers questions about your live P21 data when you ask in plain English — no reports to build, no SQL, no screen-hopping. You type a question the way you'd ask a colleague — 'What did we pay this vendor last month?' — and it identifies the right area of Epicor Prophet 21, runs a read-only query against your live data, and answers in seconds. It covers AP, AR, inventory, purchasing, pricing and GL, resolves vague names like 'Dodge' to the actual vendor record before answering, and can show the exact query behind every result. ESS demos it live against sample P21 data.

Live data — the assistant queries Prophet 21 directly in real time, and nothing is copied or replicated into a separate reporting database. There is no overnight sync and no data-warehouse lag, so answers reflect the current state of orders, inventory, AP, AR, pricing and GL at the moment you ask. If a receipt was posted five minutes ago, the answer includes it. That immediacy is the point of talking to your ERP data instead of running yesterday's report: purchasing, collections and stocking decisions get made on what P21 knows right now, not on a snapshot.

No — the assistant is strictly read-only and cannot post, edit or delete anything in Prophet 21. Every plain-English question is turned into a validated, row-capped query before it runs, so there is no path from a chat message to a changed record. It can look, never touch: asking about open POs, vendor payments or item availability reads live P21 data and nothing more. That hard boundary is what makes it safe to roll out beyond the IT team — a CSR or buyer can ask anything they're permissioned for without any risk to the ERP.

Every answer can show its work: the exact query the assistant ran against Prophet 21 is available on demand, so you can verify precisely which records, filters and date ranges produced the result. That transparency makes answers auditable rather than a black box — if a number looks off, you inspect the query instead of guessing what the AI did. The assistant also resolves ambiguous names before answering, confirming which vendor or customer you meant, so the query targets the right P21 records in the first place. Trust comes from the receipts, not from promises.

Access is permissioned by functional area and by the P21 modules you've licensed. A user cleared for inventory questions can't pull accounts payable data, and the assistant only reaches the modules you actually own — it won't answer GL questions if GL is outside your license. Permissions mirror how you already segment responsibility in Prophet 21, so rolling out conversational access doesn't loosen any control you have in the ERP today. ESS configures the permission model with you during setup, so every team gets plain-English answers scoped to exactly the data they're supposed to see.

Yes — your conversations and your P21 data are not retained and are never used to train AI models. The assistant is hosted in our environment, runs read-only queries against your live Prophet 21 data, and keeps nothing afterward: questions, answers and query results are not stored for training or shared beyond your session. Combined with validated, row-capped queries and module-level permissions, that means talking to your ERP data introduces no new data-retention exposure. ESS walks through the security model in every demo, so your IT team can verify the boundaries before anything connects to production P21.