AI suggestions

The Suggest button asks an AI model for a draft of a field: a summary for a document, tags for a picture, alt text for an image. You read the draft and choose to use it, change it or throw it away. Nothing is saved, applied or published by the AI. This page shows you what you can ask for, what the AI sees, and how an admin follows the cost.

Before you start

• AI suggestions are switched on in your workspace. If you do not see any Suggest buttons, an admin has not given the CMS an API key, or has switched suggestions off for the workspace. See Create a workspace and Install the CMS.
• You can edit the document or the file. Suggest buttons are hidden while a field is read-only, for example when someone else holds the edit lock.

What you can ask for

A document needs enough text before the AI can help. “Not enough text yet. Write a little more in the document, then ask again.” means the text is shorter than 20 characters.

Use a suggestion

1. Click into the document or file you are working on. Your latest changes are saved first, so the AI reads what you see.
2. Choose Suggest next to the field. A small panel opens and says “Writing a suggestion…”.
3. Read what comes back. At the bottom the panel says “Suggested by AI. Check before you use it.”
4. Choose what to do:
   • Use puts the text in the field.
   • Edit puts the text in the field and moves the cursor there, so you can change it.
   • Dismiss closes the panel and keeps your field as it was. While the answer is still coming, the same button says Cancel.

Expected result: the field holds the text you chose, and autosave stores it as part of the draft like anything you type. Publishing is a separate step (Publishing).

An answer takes a few seconds. If the AI does not give a usable answer, the CMS tries once more by itself before it tells you.

Summaries and titles

You get up to three options, each with its length. Pick the one closest to what you want, and use Edit to fix the details. Titles lose a final full stop. A summary should still be one or two sentences (Writing documents).

Tags

Tags appear as buttons in the panel.

• Choose a tag to add it. A tag you have added shows a check mark and is greyed out.
• Choose Add all, or Add the rest when you have already added some, to add everything at once and close the panel.
• A tag marked new is not used in this workspace yet. The AI is shown the workspace’s own tags, the 200 most used, and is told to prefer them, so most suggestions reuse your spelling. A suggestion that matches an existing tag ignoring case takes the existing spelling.
• Tags are added to the end of your list, without duplicates, up to the limit of 20.

See Folders and tags.

Alt text and captions

For an image, the panel shows the alt text with Use and Edit. Below it may be a caption with Use caption; after you use it, the button says Caption added. Alt text is never put in without your choice, and a caption is used only when you ask for it.

The AI follows the same rules as the alt text hint: it does not start with words such as “image”, “picture”, “photo” or “screenshot”. It still can be wrong about what matters. Check names, numbers and what the picture is for before you use it. See The media library.

Alt text and tags for an image come from one request. After you press Suggest for the alt text, pressing Suggest for the tags of the same image within 10 minutes costs nothing, as long as the image, title, caption and tags have not changed.

Suggest tags for many files

In the media library you can ask for tags for a whole selection.

1. Select two or more files (The media library).
2. Choose Suggest tags in the toolbar. The dialog Suggest tags opens. It says how many files will be asked. One request is made for each file.
3. If you selected more than 50 files, only the first 50 are used: “Suggest tags handles up to 50 at a time.” An admin can change this limit with Suggestions:MaxBulkTagFiles.
4. Choose Suggest tags for 5 files. A bar shows “Asked 2 of 5 files…”. A few requests run at a time. If the AI service asks the CMS to slow down, a file says “Waiting for the rate limit, trying again in 8 s…”.
5. Answers appear per file with a check box for each tag. Everything that is new to the file is ticked. Untick what does not fit, or use Select all and Select none.
6. Choose Add 12 tags to 4 files.

Expected result: the tags are added to the drafts of the files. Nothing is published, and a file that has nothing new says “Nothing new to add.”

While it runs you can choose Stop. Files not yet asked are left alone (“Not asked”), and the answers that arrived are kept. The dialog cannot be closed by accident while the run is going.

If any file cannot take its tags, the dialog lists them under “files could not be changed” and you can Close it.

What is sent to the AI

The CMS sends text to Anthropic’s Claude API only when you choose Suggest. It sends:

• For a document: the title (unless you ask for a title), the text, and for tags the workspace’s tag list. The text is shortened to 12,000 characters, keeping the beginning and the end. Link targets such as lake:// and asset:// and inline image data are removed.
• For an image: a small preview of the picture, its file name, title, caption, tags and the workspace’s tag list.
• For a file with text: the file name, title, extracted text and the tag list.

Nothing else leaves the CMS. The CMS keeps no copy of the AI’s answers, except the image answer that it holds in memory for 10 minutes so that a second button press costs nothing. Its logs hold timings and token counts, never your text, pictures or the answers.

Unlike sites and Claude Code, which read the published lake, a suggestion sends the draft you are working on, which may not be published yet. It goes to Anthropic’s API under your organisation’s API agreement, and Anthropic’s commercial terms and data processing addendum apply. Admins can turn suggestions off for a workspace in the workspace settings, under AI suggestions in the editor (the switch Let editors ask for suggested summaries, tags, titles and alt text).

Cost and the usage ledger

AI calls cost money. The CMS keeps a record of every call, the usage ledger, so an admin can see what is used and bill it.

What the ledger holds for each call:

• the workspace, the date and the time,
• the source, CMS suggestions for the buttons on this page or Site builder for tokens reported by the builder plugin (Install the builder),
• the operation: suggest-summary, suggest-title, suggest-tags or suggest-alt,
• the model, and the number of input, output and cache tokens.

It does not hold your text, your pictures or the answers. A retry is its own row, and a suggestion answered from the 10-minute image cache adds none.

The ledger stores tokens, not dollars. Cost is worked out when you look, from the prices in the AiPricing setting (Install the CMS). If an admin changes a price, the cost of past months changes with it.

See the usage

Only admins can see usage. Open the user menu and choose AI usage, or follow the link See what it costs under AI usage next to the switch in Workspace settings.

The page AI usage has a Month picker. Months are counted in UTC.

• The overview has one row per workspace: Tokens in, Tokens out, Estimated cost, Budget and Used of budget. A footer row sums all workspaces.
• Choose a workspace for the detail: the summary, By source and operation, By model, and Per day with a chart.
• Choose Export October 2026 as CSV (the month you are viewing) to download the rows for a spreadsheet.

If a model has no price in the settings, its tokens still count, and the cost reads Price unknown or No price configured, with a note such as ”+ 1,000 tokens without a price (claude-xyz)”. The cost shown is then a minimum. An admin adds the price under AiPricing:Models.

Set a budget

In Workspace settings, under AI budget, an admin types a monthly amount in Monthly AI budget (USD) and chooses Save budget. The CMS then shows:

A bar at the top of Workspace settings warns in the last two cases. A budget only drives warnings. It never blocks a suggestion and never sends a message.

If something goes wrong

What’s next

• Alt text in depth: The media library.
• Keep tags tidy: Folders and tags.
• Set the budget and the switch: Create a workspace.