Can an AI assistant read my profit reports?

The short answer

Only if you connect one yourself. From version 0.2.6, on WordPress 6.9 or later, Merchgain registers three read-only abilities through the WordPress Abilities API:

• Profit summary — revenue, cost of goods, gross profit, margin and cost coverage for a period, with the estimate for items sold without a recorded cost kept apart;
• Products sold at a loss — the products whose recorded cost was higher than their revenue in the period, biggest loss first;
• Products without cost — the products whose sales are left out of profit, and whether their costs sit in another plugin’s field.

An AI assistant you connect to your store, for example through an MCP plugin, can call them and gets the same figures as the Profit & margin screen.

What WordPress actually does

Since version 6.9, WordPress keeps a register of abilities: a plugin describes what it can do, with a schema for the input and the output and a rule for who may call it. An MCP server — MCP is the protocol AI assistants use to reach other software — lists the abilities marked for it and calls them as a logged-in user.

None of this runs by itself. Until you connect an assistant, the abilities sit in your WordPress like any other function that nothing calls.

What to do about it

Nothing, if you do not use an AI assistant.

If you connect one, two things are worth knowing:

• it acts as the user it logs in as and needs the same “view WooCommerce reports” permission as the report screen — an account without it gets nothing;
• the figures it asks for, product names included, go to that assistant and to whoever runs it. Connect only an assistant you would also let see the report screen.

How Merchgain reports it

The abilities only read: they never change a product, a price, an order or a cost, and Merchgain itself still makes no outbound connections. Amounts and percentages come as decimal strings, the estimate for items without a recorded cost is a separate part of the answer that is never added to the recorded figures, and each answer carries the warnings the screen would show — partial cost coverage, orders in another currency, costs kept by another plugin. Results are cached for up to an hour, like the screen, and the Recalculate button refreshes both.