The assistant does not depend on a module or a user permission. There are three things that can stop it from working for you.
Owner accounts do not have it
If you are signed in with an Owner profile, the chat icon does not appear. The assistant is not part of the owner view, and no setting or permission can add it for that profile.
A lapsed subscription removes it
For everyone else, the assistant depends on the company's subscription. It stays available until the end of the current billing period, and through any grace period after a missed payment. After the grace period ends, the chat icon disappears for every user in the company. It comes back automatically, with your chat history, once the subscription is active again. Edit mode, which drafts form templates, controlled documents and vessel profiles, is part of the same chat, so it is unavailable too.
If this happens, you will normally have seen subscription warnings in the app first. A Management Admin can check and manage the subscription on the Billing page, using the credit-card icon in the top bar.
The monthly AI limit
Each company has a monthly spend limit on AI use. All of the company's AI features share it, including this assistant in both Ask and Edit mode and file scanning across the app. Companies on a free trial start with a smaller monthly AI allowance, which increases automatically to the standard monthly allowance when a paid subscription is activated on the Billing page.
When the company reaches its monthly limit, the chat icon stays, but every message you send gets this reply: AI is unavailable — your company has reached its monthly AI limit. Contact info@nauticare.io to raise it.
The limit resets at the start of each month. To have the limit raised sooner, contact Nauticare at the address in the message.
Everyone else has it
In a company that has access, every user except Owners gets the assistant. There is no per-user setting and no permission to grant. Users differ only in what the assistant can find and propose for them, because it uses each person's own role and permissions. See What It Can Look Up.
Nauticare staff accounts keep the assistant whatever the company's subscription state.