Agents

An agent is a project your org owns. It has a name, a picture and a handle (@concierge), people who work with it, its own apps and accounts, and its own Instructions. Its automations are its work. Where a personal project is yours alone, an agent is the org's: its creator is its first manager, it outlives any one person, and everyone on it sees the same work.

Use one for work that belongs to the team rather than to a person: a customer concierge that looks after every customer, a support desk that answers support@ and escalates to engineering, a recruiter that moves every candidate through the same steps.

Making one

Open the org menu and choose New agent… under its agents. Give it a name and, if you like, a picture and the people who should be on it. It opens on its Apps, where you connect what it will use — the team's shared mailbox, the org CRM, Drive — through the ordinary app flows, once. An account you connect to an agent is used by everyone who can talk to it, so connect the team's accounts there, never your own.

Write what it is for in its Instructions. Every automation in the agent follows them, so "change how we greet new customers" is one edit.

The agent gets a handle the moment it exists — a starter; a manager can claim a custom one once, in its Settings, as you can for your own.

People

An agent has two roles:

• Members open the agent, read everything in it — its automations, their sessions, its feed, its files, its Settings and Instructions — and talk to it. A member can run an automation and message it; a question it asks is answered by a manager, so a member's message never counts as the answer. Setting one up, or changing its instructions or skills, is a manager's.
• Managers also change it: its name, picture, people, apps, Instructions and automations.

Org owners and admins manage every agent. A manager adds people from the agent's Settings → People, and can open the agent to the whole org, which makes every org member a member. Anyone named on it can take themselves off (an org owner or admin still manages it afterwards).

Talking to it

Open the agent and type in Chat, or send @concierge a message in Messages. Both are the same thread: your own, private conversation with the agent — nobody else on the agent sees it, not even its managers, and theirs stays theirs. Its reply comes back where you asked. Only the people on the agent can talk to it; a member can ask it anything, run its automations and message them, but cannot change it through chat — setting automations up, and its Instructions and skills, are its managers' to change.

The agent's work is shared; the conversation is not.

Its work

Automations in an agent work exactly as they do anywhere, with one difference in how you use them: when the work is one thing per customer, candidate or order, it is one automation per customer, in the agent. Ask the agent, as a manager ("onboard Acme"), and it sets one up; an automation that finds new customers — on a schedule, or when a company is created in the CRM — sets each one's up itself. Each runs on its own, with its own thread, stages and verdict.

An agent runs up to ten sessions at once; the rest wait their turn and start as sessions end. Nothing fails or is skipped for waiting. Each automation also keeps its own limit on sessions at once, as everywhere.

When it needs you

When an automation in an agent needs a decision, it asks by message. A question for a particular person — "send this to Acme from your account", named by their handle in the automation's instructions — goes to them. Anything else goes to the people named as its managers (the org's owners, when none are named). The message carries the question, how to answer, the deadline and what happens if nobody does, and a link to the automation. Reply with one of its choices to answer it; anything else is just a message to the agent. An open question — one without choices — takes any reply, as long as it is the last thing the agent said to you: once the agent has answered you since, your words are a message again, and the link is the way to answer. A review list (several things to approve or decline at once) is answered from the link. A send asked of you by name goes out from your own account; the agent's own sends go out from its accounts. When someone else answers first, you hear so in the same thread.

The agent's own feed keeps the story of what happened; the asking lives in Messages.

Credits

An agent draws on the org's credits like every member. It is not a seat and is not billed as one.