Setting up a WooCommerce discount campaign from scratch takes more decisions than it first looks like. You choose a discount type, set a value, pick which products or categories it covers, decide on dates and times, and think about whether it conflicts with anything already running. For a single campaign that’s fine. For a store running several promotions across the year, the overhead adds up.

Cycle AI is a campaign assistant built directly into Smart Cycle Discounts. Instead of filling in fields one by one, you describe the promotion in a single sentence or two. Cycle AI reads your actual store data, reasons through the options in real time, and produces a fully configured draft that loads into the campaign wizard. You review everything before a single campaign goes live.

This post is the feature introduction: what Cycle AI is, how the consent and streaming flows work, what the draft looks like, and why the review step is built into the flow by design.

What Cycle AI is

Cycle AI is a natural-language interface for creating WooCommerce discount campaigns in Smart Cycle Discounts. You describe a promotion in plain English — “25% off jackets this weekend” or “buy two t-shirts get a third free starting Friday” — and Cycle AI produces a complete campaign configuration: discount type, product scope, pricing values, schedule, and more.

The output is not a suggestion or a rough starting point. It is a complete configuration that maps directly to all five steps of the campaign wizard. That configuration loads into the wizard, where you can read through every field, adjust anything that needs changing, and then decide whether to save and launch it.

Cycle AI does not launch campaigns automatically. It creates a draft. The decision to go live is always yours.

The consent step: what you are agreeing to

The first time you open Cycle AI, Smart Cycle Discounts asks for your explicit consent before sending anything to an external service. This is not a terms-of-service checkbox buried in an onboarding flow. It is a distinct, required step.

When you give consent, the plugin records three things to your WordPress database: a flag that consent was given, the timestamp, and the user ID of the person who consented. This information stays on your server. What the plugin sends to Webstepper’s hosted AI proxy is your store context (catalog, schedule, current date and timezone) and the prompt you typed. No payment data, customer records, or order history is transmitted.

You can withdraw consent at any time. When you do, the plugin deletes all three stored values. Cycle AI becomes unavailable again until you re-consent. The consent mechanism was implemented to comply with WordPress.org guideline 7 (user tracking and external services disclosure), which requires plugins to obtain permission before sending any data to third-party services.

How to open Cycle AI and write your first prompt

After consenting, Cycle AI lives in a chat panel in the Smart Cycle Discounts admin area. It appears as a floating button in the bottom-right corner of the screen. Click it to open the panel.

The panel has a text input at the bottom and a conversation area above it. Type your campaign idea in plain English. You do not need to use special syntax or keywords. Write it the same way you would describe the promotion to someone helping you run your store.

A few examples of what that looks like in practice:

• “20% off all jackets this weekend”
• “Clear out my slow-moving winter stock at 30% off, run it for two weeks starting Monday”
• “Buy any two t-shirts, get a third free”
• “Flash sale on my bestsellers, 15% off, repeat every weekend for the next six weeks”
• “Wholesale customers get 25% off footwear this month”

The more specific you are about timing, product scope, and discount type, the tighter the draft tends to be. A vague prompt like “run a sale” produces a technically valid campaign — Cycle AI defaults to storewide, percentage discount, starting today — but it may not match what you had in mind. Adding a category, a duration, or a discount mechanism gives the AI more signal to work with. The tips post on writing better Cycle AI prompts goes deep on what makes the difference.

What happens while it thinks: real-time streaming

One of the more visible design choices in Cycle AI is that the generation process is streamed in real time. When you submit a prompt, you do not wait in silence for a result to appear. Instead, you watch the reasoning arrive word by word in the chat panel.

Before Cycle AI produces the structured campaign configuration, it writes a brief explanation of what it is doing: which products it is targeting, why it chose the discount type it did, how it interpreted your timing, and any substitutions it made (such as replacing a Pro-tier discount type with a percentage-off equivalent on the free plan). This reasoning text arrives first, as a stream of tokens, while the JSON configuration is accumulating silently in a buffer.

Once the reasoning is complete and the configuration is validated, the campaign draft renders as a preview card in the panel — showing the discount badge, product scope label, and duration. At that point you can either accept it (which loads the full draft into the campaign wizard) or refine it by typing a follow-up instruction.

The draft: what it produces and what it fills in

When Cycle AI produces a campaign draft, it populates all five steps of the campaign wizard with values it has chosen based on your prompt and your store data. Here is what that covers.

Basic information

Campaign name, a short merchant-facing description, and a default priority. The name is human-readable — something like “Weekend Jacket Flash Sale” rather than a coded identifier. Priority defaults to a mid-range value; Cycle AI does not analyze your existing campaigns to pick an optimal priority, so review this if you have concurrent campaigns on overlapping products.

Product scope

Selection mode (all products, specific products, category/tag filter, smart selection, or random), product IDs where relevant, category targeting, tag targeting, user role targeting, and location targeting. All of these use real IDs from your catalog — not guesses. If you name a category that does not exist in your store, Cycle AI notes this in the reasoning text rather than silently targeting the wrong thing.

Discount configuration

Discount type, value, and any type-specific settings — BOGO buy/get quantities, tiered breakpoints (Pro), spend thresholds (Pro), bundle configuration (Pro). The available discount types depend on your plan. On the free plan, Cycle AI can draft percentage, fixed-amount, and same-product BOGO campaigns. If you ask for a Pro discount type on the free plan, Cycle AI names the right type in its reasoning, explains the substitution, and produces a percentage-discount version you can save today.

Schedule

Start date, end date, start time, end time, recurring configuration (if you asked for recurrence), and timezone. Relative time references resolve correctly — “this Friday for 10 days” calculates the actual calendar dates in your store’s timezone. Recurring schedules are configured only when you explicitly ask for them. For more on how recurring scheduling works, the guide to recurring WooCommerce discount campaigns covers the two scheduling modes and common patterns.

Launch option

Whether to launch immediately on save, or save as a scheduled draft for the configured start date. Cycle AI sets this based on your prompt — a prompt with a future start date produces a scheduled draft; a prompt without a date produces an immediately active campaign by default. You can change this in the wizard before saving.

What Cycle AI cannot fill in

There are settings the AI cannot emit in the draft. It will tell you about these when you ask for them — it does not silently skip the request.

• Usage limits (per-customer caps, lifetime campaign caps) — Pro settings, configured in the Discounts step after the draft loads.
• Combination policies (stacking rules, coupon blocking, sale-item exclusions) — also Pro, also in the Discounts step. The AI sets sensible defaults.
• Promotional visuals (badge style, threshold progress bar, BOGO panel display) — assigned via the Visuals picker in the Discounts step post-generation.
• Specific shipping method restrictions on free shipping — when the AI enables free shipping, it applies to all methods by default. Restrict to specific methods in the wizard.

The review step: why it matters that you look first

Cycle AI is designed so that you always review the draft before it becomes a campaign. This is not a limitation — it is the point. AI-generated configurations are good at capturing the broad strokes of what you described, but they cannot know your margins, your current stock situation beyond what your store data says, or the specific context of why you are running this promotion right now.

When the draft loads in the campaign wizard, you are reviewing five things:

1. Product scope — did it target the right category, the right products? If you named something ambiguous, this is where you find out how the AI interpreted it.
2. Discount value — is the number viable for your margins? Cycle AI picks a reasonable value based on the type and your catalog, but it has no access to your cost of goods.
3. Schedule — are the dates and times right? Check the start date, end date, and timezone. Recurring settings especially deserve a look if you asked for a recurring campaign.
4. Priority — does this campaign interact with others currently running? A mid-range priority default may not be right if you have active campaigns on the same products.
5. Launch option — will this go live on save, or wait for the scheduled start? Confirm this is what you intended before saving.

If anything needs changing, you can either edit the wizard fields directly or type a refinement instruction in the Cycle AI panel. Refinements read the current wizard state — all five steps as they are right now — and apply only the change you described. They do not re-run the original prompt from scratch. Each refinement instruction uses one quota request.

Once you are satisfied with the draft, you save the campaign. It does not go live until you save it, and if you chose a scheduled start date, it does not go live until that date arrives. You are in control of both decisions.

Free vs. Pro: what changes with a license

Cycle AI itself is available on both the free and Pro plans of Smart Cycle Discounts. The feature gate in the plugin (the cycle_ai_campaign_suggestions key) is set to free, meaning no license is required to access the feature. What a Pro license changes is the quota and the range of discount types available in the draft.

The quota is enforced server-side by the Webstepper AI proxy, based on the Freemius license headers sent with each request. It is not a soft limit that can be worked around by timing requests differently. After each successful AI response, the panel displays the remaining count for the current period.

For most stores on the free plan, 10 drafts a month is workable. A typical session involves one or two prompts to get a draft you are happy with, plus any refinements within that session. If you manage several campaigns concurrently or run a high volume of seasonal promotions, the Pro plan’s 50-per-day limit gives considerably more room.

When you run out of quota, the panel displays the reset time. If you are near your free-plan limit, editing wizard fields directly is quota-free and often faster than a refinement for single-field changes.

How Cycle AI fits into the normal campaign workflow

Cycle AI is an on-ramp to the campaign wizard, not a replacement for it. Every campaign it drafts goes through the same five-step wizard that you would use if you were creating a campaign manually. The difference is that the wizard arrives pre-filled rather than blank.

This means Cycle AI works well for getting started quickly, especially when you know the general shape of what you want but have not thought through all the details. It also works well as a fast way to create a campaign for an event you did not plan for — a supplier suddenly offering extra stock on a product you could discount, an opportunity to run a complementary promotion alongside a competitor’s sale window.

What it does not replace is the judgment call about whether to run a campaign at all. That decision depends on your margins, your current inventory, your customer relationships, and your sense of how your store is performing right now — context that Cycle AI cannot fully read. The Campaign Intelligence metrics built into Smart Cycle Discounts are useful for that second layer: after a campaign runs, the health scores and verdict states tell you whether it performed as expected and whether it is worth repeating.

The two tools complement each other naturally. Cycle AI helps you create and iterate quickly. Campaign Intelligence helps you evaluate what you launched and decide what to do next. Used together, they close a loop that most campaign workflows leave open: fast creation, followed by structured review.

If you want to see the full picture of what Cycle AI populates in each wizard step — including the edge cases and the fields it cannot touch — the deep-dive on how Cycle AI turns plain English into a campaign configuration covers each field with the logic used to fill it.

Common questions

Does Cycle AI launch the campaign for me?

No. Cycle AI creates a draft and loads it into the campaign wizard. The campaign does not go live until you save it, and if you set a scheduled start date, it does not activate until that date. The store owner reviews and confirms every campaign before it runs.

What data does Cycle AI send to an external service?

Smart Cycle Discounts sends your store context data — catalog structure (categories, tags, product counts, stock signals), your store timezone and base country, the current date, your active campaign summary, and the text of your prompt — to Webstepper’s hosted AI proxy. No customer records, order history, or payment data is transmitted. Webstepper’s privacy policy covers the full data-handling details.

What happens if I run out of quota?

The Cycle AI panel displays the reset time. You cannot generate new drafts until the quota resets — monthly on the free plan, daily on Pro. Editing wizard fields directly is always quota-free, so if you are close to the limit, direct edits to an existing draft are a practical alternative to a new generation or refinement.

Can Cycle AI set up a recurring campaign?

Yes. If you include recurring language in your prompt — “every Friday,” “repeat weekly,” “monthly clearance” — Cycle AI configures the recurring schedule settings in the draft. This includes the pattern, specific days, and end condition (never, after a number of cycles, or on a specific date). The recurring campaigns guide explains how those settings work once the draft loads.

Can I refine the draft without starting over?

Yes. Typing a follow-up instruction in the Cycle AI panel after a draft has loaded sends a refinement request. Cycle AI reads the current wizard state — all five steps as they stand — and applies only the change you described. It does not re-run the original prompt. Each refinement uses one quota request. For single-field changes, editing the wizard step directly is often faster and uses no quota.

Are bundle discount campaigns available on the free plan?

Bundle discounts require a Pro license — both to create manually and to draft via Cycle AI. If you ask for a bundle campaign on the free plan, Cycle AI names the bundle type in its reasoning, explains why it is substituting, and produces a percentage-discount version you can save today. The guide to WooCommerce bundle discount campaigns covers the bundle discount mechanics if you want to understand how the Pro version works before upgrading.