NEW ZEALAND BUSINESS NEWS
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SyncHub, an Auckland business that connects data from separate cloud software systems into one place, reports growing demand for tools that let staff ask questions about their own operations in plain English and get an answer from live data. The company says customers are moving away from dashboards, static reports and exported spreadsheets towards direct questioning of sales, stock, staffing, invoice and performance information.
SyncHub sells a data integration service and an AI Assistant, and its systems can also be connected to general AI tools such as Claude and ChatGPT. The company says it now serves more than 500 businesses across 30 countries.
The change rests on Model Context Protocol, a technical standard that lets AI tools connect more directly to business systems and data sources. In practice, it lets a user retrieve an answer from live operational data instead of a report someone updated by hand or a file exported from another system.
SyncHub argues that this only works when data from several business systems has already been cleaned, structured and brought together. Most businesses run separate cloud platforms for accounting, customer management, human resources, inventory and timesheets, and each stores information in a different format.
SyncHub positions itself as an aggregator across those systems. Software vendors are beginning to offer similar connections, but those links generally reach only the vendor’s platform rather than providing a combined view across the wider business.
Product development has followed the same logic. In October, SyncHub released a custom database connector that lets customers query cloud software data alongside information held in on-premise systems, legacy databases and in-house software.
The connector followed demand from companies that needed data held outside standard cloud products. SyncHub founder Ben Liebert said many businesses build custom software for their particular requirements and needed that data alongside their cloud data, which prompted the connector.
He said the rise in custom database connections reflects wider change in business software. AI-assisted coding tools have made it easier for companies to build their own applications, creating more internal databases that still need to feed into reporting and analysis.
Liebert said customers increasingly want an immediate answer rather than another reporting layer that still requires manual interpretation. He said the quality of what an AI system returns still depends on the state of the data underneath it, and that a poor data foundation produces poor answers.
He added that conventional reporting tools retain a place, particularly for formal reporting and dashboard-based monitoring. Natural-language querying is becoming the quicker first step when someone simply needs an answer from business data.
Liebert described the old default as opening a dashboard, exporting a file, or finding someone technical to write a query. He said the protocol speeds that up by connecting structured data directly to the AI tools businesses already use.
For an SME owner, the practical point is that asking an AI assistant a question about the business is only as good as the plumbing behind it. If sales figures sit in one system, stock in another and timesheets in a third, those sources need cleaning and joining before a plain-English question returns something reliable.
SyncHub says growth in use of its AI Assistant and its server for the protocol suggests businesses are entering a more practical phase of AI adoption. The focus is less on generic prompting and more on linking AI systems to current business data so they act as a direct interface to information already held across the organisation.
One customer cited by SyncHub is UK retailer Pooky. Its business solutions architect, Benjamin Durrant, said the company first used SyncHub to get structured data from its ERP system, then used the built-in AI to help create SQL queries for daily KPIs. More recently, it connected SyncHub to Claude using the protocol’s connector, which he said made getting insights far easier, with reports across every area of the business running daily with little effort.
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