AI in the Product Builder
Building a product in TimberCloud means setting up its options, its price, and the rules that keep customers from ordering something you can't make. Three AI helpers live right inside the Product Builder to speed up exactly those jobs — so you spend your time reviewing instead of typing.
Availability: Commerce and up (paid plans). These tools are included in your subscription — there is no separate AI add-on and no per-use charge — and they work during the 14-day trial.
The three AI features you'll meet while building a product are:
| AI helper | What it does | Where it lives |
|---|---|---|
| AI Photo Matcher | Pulls product photos out of a PDF catalog and attaches them to the right attribute options | A saved attribute in the Attribute Builder → Import Photos from PDF |
| AI Pricing Assistant | Writes a step-based pricing formula from a plain-English rule | The Pricing tab → AI Assistant |
| AI Advisory Generator | Writes a configuration warning rule from a plain-English description | The Advisories tab → Generate with AI |
The golden rule: Every one of these tools proposes a draft you review. Nothing is saved to your product, priced, or applied to your catalog until you accept it. You can always edit the suggestion or reject it.
Each has its own full guide; this page shows how they fit together as you build one product.
AI Photo Matcher — option images from a PDF catalog
Most cabinet and millwork suppliers publish a PDF catalog with a photo next to every door style, edge profile, or finish. Rather than saving and uploading each image by hand, the AI Photo Matcher reads that PDF, pulls the photos off the pages, and attaches each one to the right attribute option in your product.
The key idea: the AI matches by the printed name next to each photo, not by what the picture looks like. So if your "Shaker" option and the catalog's "Shaker" photo share a label, they get paired — even across dozens of look-alike door fronts.
How to reach it
- Open a product and go to its Attribute Builder.
- Save the attribute first — its options need to exist before photos can be matched to them.
- On a dropdown-style attribute, click Import Photos from PDF.
- Drop in the supplier PDF, optionally set a label position and a matching hint, then let the AI match.
- Review the grid of your option names with their matched thumbnails, keep the ones that look right, and Apply. The photos upload in the background and appear on your option rows.
Tip: Two small controls make matches far more accurate: label position (tell the AI whether the catalog prints the name above, below, left, or right of each photo — Auto usually works), and the matching hint (for example, "The catalog labels these 'A Profile', 'B Profile' — in our system they're 'A Mould', 'B Mould'. Profiles are on pages 1–10.").
For the full walkthrough — including label position, hints, and reviewing matches — see Match option photos from a PDF catalog.
AI Pricing Assistant — a formula from a sentence
Once a product has its attributes, it needs a price. Open the Pricing tab and click AI Assistant to describe your pricing rule in plain English — "Charge material price per square foot, plus $25 if the finish is Premium" — and the AI writes a real, step-based pricing formula already wired to that product's fields, with a plain-language explanation and any warnings.
You can Accept it, hand it to the Advanced Formula Builder with Edit Manually, or keep Revising it conversationally ("add a 10% rush surcharge"). It works both when the product has no formula yet and when you want to change an existing one.
For the full guide, see AI Pricing Assistant. To understand the pricing engine it writes into, see Pricing and the Formula Builder.
AI Advisory Generator — a warning rule from a description
The last piece of a well-built product is guidance: rules that speak up when a customer (or your own staff) configures something risky. In the Advisories tab, click Generate with AI and describe the rule in a sentence — "If a door is over 48 inches tall with only one panel, warn about warpage and suggest adding a second panel" — and the AI returns a validated advisory: a severity level, a title-and-body message, and one or more suggested fix actions. Review the preview and click Add to advisories.
For the full guide, see AI Advisory Generator and the broader Advisories reference.
Steering all three company-wide
Beyond the per-task context each tool accepts (the Photo Matcher's hint, the per-upload instructions on the Order Assistant, and so on), you can set a single company-wide Global AI Instructions prompt that teaches every AI feature your terminology, brand voice, and defaults — so you don't repeat the same guidance each time.
Availability: Editing Global AI Instructions is a Build-tier feature (Settings → Catalog → AI Settings). The AI tools it steers work at Commerce. On Commerce, give the AI context per task; on Build, set it once for the whole company. See AI Settings.
Next Steps
- Match option photos from a PDF catalog — the full Photo Matcher walkthrough.
- AI Pricing Assistant — write pricing formulas in plain English.
- AI Advisory Generator — write product warning rules from a sentence.
- Create a Product — the standard product-building flow these tools plug into.
- Attributes — the attribute and option model the Photo Matcher fills in.
- AI Overview — every AI capability in TimberCloud and which plan unlocks each.