AI Capabilities in Stella Enterprise, Stella Architect, and Stella Professional

Stella’s AI capabilities are both agentic and basic. Stella includes causal-loop-diagram (CLD)-building and stock-and-flow (SFD)-model-building agents. You describe your problem and the agent builds a CLD or SFD model, verifying it meets structural and behavioral tests. Two flavors are standard with the software:

Socrates, the coach, guides you through the modeling stages and elicits information about the problem by:

• Asking structured questions to clarify the problem
• Eliciting and organizing your mental model
• Identifying key feedback loops and assumptions
• Laying a strong conceptual foundation before building

Merlin, the craftsman, builds the model autonomously from your description and can:

• Build models at any level of complexity, from simple structures to large, multi-module and arrayed systems
• Incorporate advanced capabilities such as sensitivity analysis and optimization
• Produce publication-ready, professional visualizations and outputs

There are currently two large-language models (LLMs) supported for agents:

Claude: Slower, more expensive, and more in-depth than Gemini
Gemini: Faster and less expensive than Claude

The user-directed basic mode gives you complete control over the process in two main modes:

“Build qualitative” and “Build quantitative” let you build CLDs and SFDs, respectively, from detailed information you provide. There are also mentor versions that will ask you questions to improve your thinking about the problem and model.

“Discuss Seldon” lets you chat with the AI about your problem, your reference mode, your mental model, your constructed model, the structure of the model and how it affects the behavior, etc.

Access to the AI features is controlled by AI Assistant credits, which cover the cost of paying the LLM providers. Maintenance and support contracts for non-academic licenses include $50 of AI Assistant credits at the start of each contract year, while faculty/PhD licenses include $15. These credits do not carry over past the end of that year's contract. Additional credits, starting at $50, can be purchased, per license, on your My Products page. Purchased credits expire two years after the last time credits were purchased.

More information is available in the help.