Search & answers
Ask Oscar
Ask your CRM in plain English
Ask Oscar answers questions about your CRM in plain English. Ask the way you would ask a colleague — "which customers complained about delivery?" — and he searches by meaning rather than by the exact words you typed, across leads, quotes, orders, invoices, service cases, projects, tasks, notes, email, documents, people, products, suppliers and purchase orders. Every claim is numbered and links back to the record it came from, so you can check him.
He only ever looks at records you are already allowed to see. Sections switched off for your account stay invisible here, and a record you could not open in the app will never appear in an answer.
Two modes: on your server, or with your own AI provider
This is the part worth understanding, because it decides whether anything leaves your server at all. Ask Oscar works out of the box with no AI provider. Adding one changes what you get back — not what he can find.
Default · nothing leaves
Local search
Beagle turns your records into a searchable index on the server your CRM already runs on, using a small language model that runs there too. No account, no API key, no third party — and your records are not sent anywhere to make it work.
You get a ranked list of matching records with a link to each one. What you do not get is a written reply — the reading is still yours to do.
Optional · you bring the key
Written answers
Connect your organisation's own Anthropic or OpenAI key and Oscar will also write the answer in prose, citing the records he used. For questions that need more than one step, your model can use the same tools as the local mode — look up a customer, total their invoices, check their open tasks — and you see each step as it happens. Every figure still comes from your server and is shown beside the prose, so an answer never depends on the model getting a number right.
To do that, your question and the matching records are sent to your provider, under your account and their terms. Beagle never sends them to a provider of ours.
Adding a key is not the same as switching it on
These are two deliberate steps, and both are needed before anything is sent. Saving a key stores the credential. Turning on Sending records for enrichment is the moment your organisation agrees that its records may go to that provider, and Beagle records who agreed and when. Until that switch is on, Ask Oscar keeps working in local mode and nothing leaves the server.
An admin can turn it on — or off again at any time — under Settings → AI summaries. Switching it off takes effect on the next question, not the next day.
Asking a good question
What he is good at
Finding records that say something — a complaint, a promise, a risk, a request. "Who mentioned they were reviewing other suppliers?" works because someone wrote it down somewhere and Oscar can recognise it however it was phrased.
Totals and rankings
"What is my best selling product?" is answered exactly, not from a sample. Questions shaped that way are recognised and calculated over every record on your server: best or top selling products, biggest or top customers, the value of your pipeline, how much is owed or outstanding, and how many tasks were completed. The numbers come back in their own panel, headed with the period they cover, and it says so underneath: every invoice, order and task counts, not just the ones a search happened to find.
Say "last 12 months" or "this quarter" in the question to change the window — the default is the last three months — and "top 3" to shorten the list. A question phrased any other way is treated as an ordinary one and answered from the closest records instead. These figures follow the same permissions as Reports, so they are for Admins and Agents with Reports switched on, and a Look in or From chip is a request to search records — with either one on, you get records rather than figures.
One caveat worth knowing before you check a figure against a list. “Exactly” here means every record counts rather than a sample — it does not mean up to the minute. These five answers read the same overnight summary that Trends does, which covers up to and including yesterday, so an invoice raised today is not in them yet. Ask Oscar for a ranking and reconcile it against Reports → Trends, not against the Overview tab or a live list.
Questions about one customer, product, rep or job
"How much has Acme spent this month?" gets the figure — invoiced, paid, credited, owed now and when they were last invoiced — computed on your server, with or without an AI key. The same works for a product ("how many SDS drills did we sell last month?", "who buys the SDS drill?"), quotes and orders ("how many quotes did we send Acme this quarter?"), deals ("how many deals did Sam win this month?", "what's in Sam's pipeline?", "which deals have gone quiet?") and work ("open tasks for Acme", "any open cases for Brightwell?", "how's the Riverside job going?").
"This month" means the calendar month so far, not the last thirty days. If a name matches more than one record equally well, Oscar asks which you meant instead of guessing — pick one and he answers for it. Follow up with "and last month?" or "what about Beta?" and he keeps the rest of the question. These answers follow the same permissions as the records themselves: if you can open Acme and its invoices, you can ask about them; if invoicing is switched off for you, he says so.
Narrow the search
The Look in row limits a question to one area — People, Sales, Service, Work, Conversations, Products or Purchasing. Useful when a word means different things in different places. Tap the same chip again to search everything.
Where to find him
Ask Oscar in the sidebar, or start typing in the Cmd+K search palette and choose "Ask Oscar about…" to carry your search term across. Related records also appear alongside service cases and inbox messages without being asked.
Ask a follow-up
Once he has answered, you can keep going without repeating yourself. "What about last year?" or "and what if it happens again?" are answered against the subject you just asked about — Oscar shows you which one underneath your question, so you can see what he assumed. If a follow-up names a period, the matching From chip lights up so the window he searched is never hidden.
Naming a new subject starts a fresh question, so "what about the Chelburn account?" is treated on its own rather than bolted onto the last one.
Watching him write
Without a multi-step question the answer appears a few words at a time, so you can start reading while he finishes; when he is working through steps, you see each one as he does it. The sources underneath, and the thumbs for telling us whether it helped, appear once he has stopped — there is no point rating half an answer.
Suggested changes
With an AI key, an admin can also turn on Let Oscar suggest changes under Settings → AI summaries. Then, when you ask for it — "add a note to Acme that I called them", "make me a task to chase their PO" — Oscar suggests the change and shows you exactly what it will do. Nothing is saved until you press Confirm, a suggestion expires after five minutes, and notes he suggests are always internal: never sent to a customer, never shown on the portal. It is off by default, and only people who could make the change themselves are offered it.
If he finds nothing
"Oscar could not find anything close enough" means exactly that — nothing in your records was a near enough match. He will not invent an answer to fill the gap, which is the behaviour you want from something you are going to act on. Try rephrasing, or describe what was said rather than who said it. Newly added records are searchable within a minute or two, not instantly.