What is Cycle AI
3 min read
Cycle AI is Smart Cycle Discounts’ natural-language assistant for creating and managing discount campaigns. Instead of clicking through the 5-step wizard, you describe the sale you want — “40% off winter coats next weekend” — and Cycle AI drafts a complete, ready-to-launch campaign for you. Cycle AI is available to all merchants; the Free plan includes 10 conversations per month and the Pro plan includes 50 per day.
What Cycle AI Can Do #
| Capability | Example |
|---|---|
| Create campaigns | “Run a summer sale — 25% off all t-shirts for two weeks” |
| Refine through conversation | “Make it 30% instead”, “add shoes too”, “extend to Friday” |
| Edit existing campaigns | “Change the Summer Sale discount to 30%” |
| Pause, activate, delete, duplicate | “Pause all active campaigns”, “delete last month’s Black Friday draft” |
| Bulk actions | “Activate the three scheduled Pride campaigns” |
| Answer questions about your store | “Which campaigns are running right now?” |
Every suggestion appears as a preview card before anything is saved — nothing is committed until you approve it.
Where You Find It #
The Floating Action Button (FAB) #
Cycle AI lives in a small circular button pinned to the bottom-right of the Smart Cycle Discounts admin pages. Click the sparkle icon to open the chat panel.
- Visible on the dashboard and campaigns pages
- Not shown on non-plugin pages — it’s a campaign tool, not a general WordPress assistant
- Pulses gently on your first visit to draw attention, then stops
The Chat Panel #
Clicking the FAB opens a 420px-wide chat panel:
┌─────────────────────────────┐ │ ✦ Cycle AI ✕ │ ├─────────────────────────────┤ │ │ │ Suggestion cards │ │ (first time) │ │ │ │ Your messages │ │ AI responses + previews │ │ Progress steps │ │ │ ├─────────────────────────────┤ │ [ Type your prompt... ]→ │ └─────────────────────────────┘
- Chat area — scrollable history of your conversation with previews and progress steps inline
- Input bar — type your prompt (up to 500 characters) and hit send
- Conversation persists across page navigations within the plugin (but not across browser sessions — closing the tab starts fresh)
First Use: The Consent Step #
The first time you open Cycle AI, a welcome modal appears:
Ready to try Cycle AI?
Describe the sale you want and Cycle AI drafts it for you. To do that, it sends your prompt and a summary of your store (product names, categories, and tags) to our hosted AI service.
Click Enable Cycle AI to opt in. This is required by WordPress.org Guideline 7 (third-party services) — you must explicitly consent before any store data leaves your site.
What gets sent to the AI #
- Your prompt text
- A summary of your store: name, URL, currency, timezone, and base country (so “target my country” resolves correctly)
- Your product catalog (up to 250 products): IDs, names, prices, category IDs, stock status
- Your category list with product counts
- Your tag list with product counts (so “promote my summer tag” resolves to the right tag)
- Key product segments: bestsellers, slow movers, new arrivals
- Stock summary (low-stock and out-of-stock counts)
- Upcoming holidays and events relevant to your store’s locale
- Your current campaigns (IDs, names, status) — so the AI can reference and manage them
- Available user-role slugs (so “wholesale customers only” resolves to the right role from your store)
What does NOT get sent #
- Customer data (names, emails, addresses, order history)
- Payment information
- Order details
- WordPress user accounts
- Anything outside the WooCommerce catalog and campaign data
You can disable Cycle AI at any time from the panel header’s disable button — disabling stops further data from being sent.
Free vs. Pro #
| Capability | Free | Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Cycle AI access | ✓ | ✓ |
| Natural-language campaign creation | ✓ | ✓ |
| Conversational refinement | ✓ | ✓ |
| Edit/pause/activate/delete via AI | ✓ | ✓ |
| Bulk actions via AI | ✓ | ✓ |
| Free-tier discount types (percentage, fixed, BOGO) | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pro-tier discount types (tiered, spend threshold, bundle) | — | ✓ |
| Pro-only campaign settings (usage limits, stacking, advanced filters, subscription controls) | — | ✓ |
| Quota | 10 conversations/month | 50 conversations/day |
Webstepper hosts the AI service and provides the API key — you don’t need an OpenAI account or any additional configuration. Your Pro license includes API usage up to the daily limit.
What Cycle AI is Not #
- Not a replacement for the wizard. The wizard is still there for fine-grained control. Cycle AI generates a draft; you can edit every field in the wizard before launching.
- Not autonomous. Cycle AI never activates, pauses, edits, or deletes a campaign without showing you a preview or confirmation card and waiting for your approval.
- Not a chatbot for general WooCommerce questions. Its knowledge is scoped to your store’s catalog, campaigns, and the plugin’s own capabilities.
- Not a per-product AI. It recommends catalog-wide or segment-based discounts, not individual-product price optimization.
- Not a replacement for Campaign Intelligence. Intelligence evaluates campaigns after they exist (verdict, risk, recommended action). Cycle AI creates and manages them. The two work together — Cycle AI creates the campaign, Intelligence tells you whether it’s Ready to launch.
Getting Started #
- Go to the Smart Cycle Discounts dashboard or campaigns page
- Click the sparkle FAB in the bottom-right
- Enable Cycle AI in the consent modal
- Pick a suggestion card, or type your own prompt
- Review the preview, refine if needed, then click “Review & Launch”
For your first prompt, try something like: “Run a 20% off sale for my bestsellers for the next 7 days.”
