Anyone who has run reports in standard Koha knows the shape of it: the guided report wizard covers the common cases, and everything past that means writing SQL against a schema you have to already understand. Neither step is unreasonable — it is a real, capable reporting system — but both assume you know roughly which tables hold what you are looking for before you can ask for it.
What changes
Instead of building the report, you ask for it. "What was most borrowed this term?" "Which titles have never circulated?" "How are overdues trending this quarter?" — typed or spoken as a question, answered as a table or chart, no SQL and no report wizard in between.
This is not a general-purpose "ask anything" system pretending to understand your entire database. It answers from a defined, tested set of report types — circulation trends, dormant stock, collection growth, patron activity, branch comparisons, acquisition spend and more — so the phrasing can vary while the underlying report stays something that was actually built and checked, not invented on the spot.
Who this actually helps
- A librarian who is not the one who learned the report wizard. The person on the desk who needs an overdue summary for a meeting in ten minutes should not need to find whoever normally builds reports.
- A one-off question that is not worth building a saved report for. "How does this branch compare to last year" asked once does not justify configuring a report you will run twice.
- Anyone who has ever stared at a Koha SQL report tutorial and closed the tab. That tab-closing moment is the actual product gap this closes.
What it is not replacing
A library with a report builder who already has forty saved reports covering exactly what the institution needs is not missing anything — those reports still work, and nothing about asking a question in plain English removes them. This is for the gap next to that: the question nobody built a report for yet, and the person who was never going to learn to build one.
A genuine example
"Which subjects have we stopped buying in the last two years?" is a real, useful collection-development question, and it is also not a report most libraries have pre-built — it needs someone to define "stopped buying", pick a comparison window and write the query. Asked as a sentence, it is answered the same afternoon instead of scheduled for whenever someone has time to build it.
Want to see what it answers for your own collection? The AI assistant page covers the full set of what it reports on, and the knowledge-base article has the exact steps to ask.