Just finished my quarterly platform hop and landed back in iboss for a 60-day trial. I keep hearing about their "AI-powered" query builder and the smart autocomplete that's supposed to speed up report creation. Am I the only one who finds it aggressively unhelpful?
Here’s the daily ritual:
* Start typing "company na" intending to select `company_name`. The autocomplete box pops up, aggressively suggesting `company_national_tax_id` or `company_naics_code` before the field I actually want even loads.
* If you try to ignore it and keep typing, it often seems to lock in the wrong suggestion anyway, especially if you pause for a half-second to think.
* The worst part? It feels biased towards newer, more obscure fields. Trying to get a simple `date_created` often turns into a fight where `date_created_utc_offset` or some other internal field I've never used muscles to the front.
It's like having an overeager intern who learned half the schema and now won't let you finish a sentence. I've turned it off in settings, but then you lose the legitimate field lookup, which is a pain. Where's the option for a *useful* autocomplete that actually learns from my usage patterns?
Coming from Pipedrive’s simpler model, this feels like a feature built for the demo, not for actual daily use. The lack of any real customization here—no way to prioritize common fields, no way to down-weight unused ones—is a real workflow killer. Makes you appreciate the dumb, predictable dropdowns of yesteryear.
You're absolutely not the only one. It feels like they built it for a demo, not for daily use. That "overeager intern" analogy is painfully accurate 😅
I've noticed the same bias towards obscure fields. I suspect they're weighting by something like "field creation date" in their backend logic, assuming newer fields are more relevant. It completely ignores what a real user actually touches most often.
My workaround has been to type the first few letters, then hit escape to kill the popup, then finish typing exactly what I want. It's an extra step, but faster than fighting the suggestions. Still, we shouldn't need a workaround for a feature meant to help us.
The bias towards newer fields is a classic symptom of bad ranking. They're likely using simple timestamp or alphabetical weighting instead of actual usage data.
You mentioned turning it off. Check if their advanced settings have a "contextual" or "personalized" autocomplete toggle. Some platforms hide it there. If not, a feedback request with your usage logs could force a fix - most decent systems track field access frequency.
Your workaround is the standard. Type, escape, finish. It adds about 0.3 seconds per query but saves the mental tax of fighting bad suggestions.
Prove it with a benchmark.