Requests and Needs attention
When an employee genuinely can't continue without you, the request is one clear card: answer something, choose something, or connect something.
Employees don't ask permission to do their job. Sending the email, publishing the post, updating the record: if they can do it, they do it, and they tell you after. What they can't do is invent a fact you never gave them or sign into an app you haven't connected, so those are the only two reasons a request ever reaches you.
The three kinds of request
| Kind | What they're asking | You resolve it by |
|---|---|---|
| Reply | Information only you have, like an account number or a decision in words. | Typing an answer and hitting Submit. |
| Choose | A decision between a few reasonable options. | Picking one and hitting Submit. |
| Connect | Access to an app the task needs, like Gmail or Notion. | Connect the app, then I've connected it (or Skip). |
Where requests show up
- In the chat, as an inline card, if you're watching the run live.
- On the Runs page, in the Needs action table at the top: who's asking, what's needed, risk, and time left.
- On the sidebar, as an amber badge on Runs counting everything pending.
What happens while you're away
That thread of work pauses; nothing is retried or forced, and the same question is never asked twice. The employee carries on with anything else it can finish without you, and it goes quiet in the chat until you answer, so you come back to the request rather than to a wall of updates around it. When you answer, it picks the work back up and mentions in one line what it got done meanwhile.
Requests expire after about three days by default. An expired request resolves as declined, so the failure mode for the blocked step is always “didn't act,” never “acted without you.”
Tip
Seeing the same question come back? Answer it once in chat as a standing instruction ("always use the Acme account") and the employee remembers it instead of asking again.