Augur Intelligence: AI connector for Prophet 21
Augur Intelligence connects Prophet 21 to AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT. A question asked in plain language, the way it would be put to a coworker, comes back answered from the data in P21.
There is no SQL to write and no report to wait on. A five-minute question often waits two days until the one person who knows where to look can get to it. Asked here, it is answered in minutes, read from P21 itself.
What it does today
Plain-language queries
A question in plain English, answered from hundreds of Prophet 21 tables. It finds the right fields and joins on its own.
Inventory and run rate
On-hand, allocated, and available by location, with run rate over any window. It can flag one branch running short while another sits on months of stock, and suggest a transfer.
Suggested buy
Recent demand against what is on hand and on order, sorted by priority, so the next purchase order starts with what matters most.
Orders and quotes
History by customer, item, and date. Which quotes never became orders, which accounts have slowed down, how one quarter compares to the last.
Customer and contract pricing
What a customer actually pays for an item, from the same contracts, price libraries, quantity breaks, and company defaults Prophet 21 uses. Contract prices included, with the dates they run between.
Reports and dashboards
Any answer becomes a chart, an Excel export, or a dashboard the assistant builds from the conversation and refreshes on demand.
Service history from a photo
A photo of a service tag, read on the spot. It pulls the serial number and returns the full service history from Prophet 21.
On the desk or the floor
The connector is hosted by SimpleApps, so the same questions work from a laptop at a desk or a phone in the warehouse.
Read-only by design
It reads Prophet 21 and never changes it. A suggested buy or transfer is a recommendation for a person to act on, not something it places.
Past the chat window
An answer does not have to stop at the screen. A question can be saved and asked again next week against a different customer or item. Dashboards and in-house tools can pull the same numbers from Prophet 21 at the moment they ask for them. Some distributors work this way now: they ask their way to the right answer once, then put it behind something their own team uses daily.
What people ask it
Real questions, asked in plain language:
- What should I be ordering today for location 100?
- Give me the run rate for this item at each location over the past 90 days.
- Which customers were quoted this item but never ordered it?
- Which accounts haven't purchased in the past six months?
- List the customers on credit hold with their year-to-date sales.
- How many orders have been completed each week since the first of the year?
- Which items should I be cycle counting more often?
- Give me the service history of this item. (with a photo of the tag)
How it works
Augur Intelligence is a connector between an AI assistant and P21. The assistant works out what to ask, a dedicated query server pulls the matching data, and the answer comes back in plain language. That query server reads the live production Prophet 21 database directly. It uses the same connection path into Prophet 21 that Augur Microservices uses for our websites and apps, from a single static IP. Each query pulls only the data a question needs, so it stays light on the database. That is enforced in the query server, not the AI: a query that would run too long or return too much is refused. And the query server retains nothing: data passes through to the assistant and is not stored, for any reason.
Querying a production system is where care matters most, so the query server is read-only at the database level. That will never change. It works the same on-prem or in the Epicor Cloud, where Epicor grants read-only access on request. Because the read side never touches the Prophet 21 APIs, those APIs are not required to ask questions.
The assistant writes its own queries, so it is not limited to a fixed set of screens or reports.
Bring your own intelligence
The AI is the distributor's own, and so is the data relationship. With a Claude or ChatGPT subscription, data handling is governed by the agreement already in place with that provider. With a local model, the AI runs on the distributor's own hardware. Either way, Augur Intelligence is the connection to P21, and the assistant does the work. The assistant is the intelligence. When a better model ships, the same connection uses it. Nothing changes on the distributor's side.
Where it's headed
Augur Intelligence is live today and in active development. Right now it answers freely across the business, so it goes to the owners and C-suite who are already trusted with the whole picture. Connecting is gated by a dedicated user list: only users a distributor has created can reach it at all. The access controls that open it up to more of the team are built, and are expected to be fully in place and tested in the second half of 2026. The limits live in the query server, not the AI, so a person only gets back what their role allows, however the question is asked. Once those controls land, any user a distributor approves can have it.
After that comes the agentic side: careful write-back into P21. It happens one step at a time, and a person always approves the change. The first of these is targeted for late 2026. Those changes go through the Prophet 21 Entity APIs and follow Epicor's standards for updating the ERP, so they will need those APIs in place. Reading never will.
“Augur Intelligence has provided unparalleled visibility to my P21 data without customizing on my own. Basically, it puts the power of Claude behind your P21 data without costly customized integrations, portals or dashboards.”
President, Direct Supply Inc
“Augur is why a customer’s 8am web order is on our purchasing buy list by 9, with nobody typing it twice.”
IT Manager, American Products, Inc.
“We’ve taken thousands of manual spreadsheets going back more than 15 years, legacy ERP data, and customer and vendor catalogs and turned them into a massive part-number cross-reference that our team can actually use.”
Director of Sales and Marketing, Fittings Unlimited
See it in action
Some of this sounds too good to be true. That is fair, so the honest answer is to see it rather than take our word for it. A short demo runs Augur Intelligence against a real Prophet 21 database, working through real questions, so the answers are real, not staged.
Recorded videos each cover a different area, start to finish.
Request a demo