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Hugo is the AI agent inside Surfaice. This page describes its limits so your team can set realistic expectations before relying on outputs in systems of record. Surfaice is built for high-stakes retail real estate work. That means being clear about what Hugo can do in your workspace today — and what still requires a human or your system of record.

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Memory and context

Long threads may be summarized so Hugo can keep working. If a detail mattered three weeks ago and was never saved to a workspace artifact, ask Hugo to look it up again in the source system.

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Skills vs freeform chat

Skills route through tested procedures. Freeform chat is more flexible but easier to mis-scope — always specify store number, landlord, project, or folder when you can.

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Portfolio and corpus questions

  • “All leases” or “every store” requests can take a long time and may return partial coverage when the corpus is large
  • Hugo should report how many stores or files it inspected. If you do not see a count, ask: “How many leases did you include, and which folders?”
  • Maps, dashboards, and Preview artifacts depend on the skill finishing successfully. If Preview is empty, retry with a smaller scope — see Working with Hugo

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Scanned documents and OCR

Many retail tenants work from scanned lease PDFs. Hugo can transcribe and abstract scans, but quality varies:
  • Low-resolution scans, handwritten notes, or stamp overlays may produce missing or wrong fields
  • OCR transcription and full lease abstraction are different workflows — say which you need
  • Always compare abstracted values to the signed PDF before updating Lucernex

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Punch walk and field workflows

Construction punch walks (where enabled) have product-specific behavior:
  • Compliance checklists work best as on-screen forms — not three questions in one paragraph
  • If you chose inspect sections in order, Hugo should advance automatically; if it keeps asking permission to open the next section, say “continue in order” or restart with that mode selected
  • Verify the section before confirming a deficiency — voice or freeform descriptions can land in the wrong trade bucket (for example GC vs installer)
  • Contact tables on the start card should match your system of record (for example Sitefolio, a construction project tracker). If they disagree, treat Hugo’s table as a draft and correct before the walk

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Response time

Simple chat answers are usually fast. Heavy workflows — full-folder inventory, multi-store extraction, voice punch walk, or large portfolio maps — can take 30 seconds to several minutes. That is expected when Hugo is reading many files or running structured skills. For complex jobs, see Working with Hugo or contact support.

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What Hugo will not do

  • Expand your permissions to data you cannot already access
  • Replace sign-off in Lucernex, your CMMS, or email send without your explicit action
  • Provide legal advice — Hugo can summarize lease language; your counsel decides strategy
  • Guarantee 100% accuracy on first output — treat first outputs as drafts

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What you should always verify

  1. Citations — does the cited page or system record support the claim?
  2. Store and landlord identity — ambiguous store numbers cause wrong answers
  3. Dates and dollars — escalation tables and CAM pools are high-risk fields
  4. Coverage — for portfolio questions, confirm how much of the corpus was searched
  5. Saved artifacts — if you need to find work later, save or export the accepted result