Working together in chat

Open any employee and you land in Chat. It works like messaging a colleague who happens to be very fast and never sleeps.

Sending work

• Enter sends, Shift Enter adds a new line.
• Attach files with the plus button or just paste. Screenshots, PDFs, spreadsheets, docs, images, audio, video, and code files all work.
• Type @ to bring one of your other employees into the task, for a handoff or a second pair of hands.
• Type / to insert a connected app, an installed skill, or a surface like the browser or computer, telling the employee exactly what to use.

While they work

Employees narrate as they go: short milestone lines between the actual steps, like a colleague talking you through their screen. Tool activity shows as compact steps you can expand. If a run is going somewhere you don't like, the send button becomes a stop button while they're working.

Above the composer sits the autonomous status bar. It shows whether the employee is Working, Waiting for work, or Paused, and lets you turn Autonomous mode on or off without leaving the chat.

When they need you

Employees don't ask permission to act, so a question only reaches you when they genuinely can't get something themselves. Instead of failing quietly, they ask in the chat, and the answers sit right above the message box until you tap one:

• An answer, when they're missing information only you have. You type it in the message box, which says Answering and their name.
• A choice, when there are a few reasonable directions and they want you to pick. Tapping one sends it.
• Connect an app, when the task needs a tool you haven't connected. Connect and the app's name is right there.

While a question is waiting, that employee goes quiet: no nudges, no status texts, no asking twice. It keeps working on anything it can finish without you, and once you answer it picks the blocked work back up and mentions what it got done meanwhile in one line.

Everything waiting across your team is also on Waiting on you, at the top of your Employees list, with a red count on Employees in the sidebar, so nothing waits on you invisibly. Unanswered questions expire after about a week and the work winds down safely. Details in Waiting on you.

In a company, your team room brings you calls: the decisions only you should make, like what to sell or whether to launch, each a card of options the team made. A call never expires, and the team keeps working on everything that doesn't need it. See Making the calls.

Giving feedback

Under each reply you can copy the text, try again, or rate it with a thumbs up or down. Ratings train the employee. So do plain words: “too formal, keep it to three sentences” changes future work, not just this reply. The Context button opens a drawer showing what went into a reply: your prompt, attachments, its reasoning, memory it drew on, and web sources.

Work you didn't start

Scheduled runs, triggered runs, and autonomous work stream into the same chat, live, exactly like work you asked for. You can watch an employee do its 6am inbox pass with your coffee, or scroll back through it later. A company's team works a little differently, as the next section explains.

Teammates in a company

When your company's team forms, every teammate besides the Manager says hello in their own chat, so it's there when you open it. Those hellos never count as unread.

Your Manager is the one who speaks to you, in your company's team room. A teammate's work on the checklist shows there as a card for each step, instead of in their chat with you, and the team's back-and-forth sits in each card's thread. Your chat with your Manager is a normal one-to-one.

• They answer where you ask. Message a teammate in their chat, in the team room, or over Telegram, Slack or email, and they reply there and finish the work there, including the message that says it's done.
• Their asks go through the Manager. When a step is stuck on something only you can give, your Manager asks you in the team room, with two or three ways forward to tap. An app to connect comes as one request, waiting above the team room's message box, even when two teammates need it, and connecting it gets their work going again.
• You can see what they're on. Their step's card in the team room says what they're doing right now.

The teammate who owns a step of the plan also makes the options for its call, and your Manager brings them to you. If you tell that teammate your pick in a conversation you started with them, like “go with B”, they record it on the card. See Making the calls.