Agents & the Orchestrator
An agent is an AI assistant with a defined job. Not "an AI" in the abstract — a specific character with a specific role: a Project Manager agent that tracks tasks and writes standup summaries, a CRM Assistant that lives and breathes deals and contacts, a Customer Support agent that handles the questions customers actually ask.
What makes each agent itself is its identity: a written description, in ordinary language, of who it is and how it behaves. Think of it as the brief you'd hand a new team member on day one — "You're my research assistant. You summarise industry news, you never speculate, you always cite a source, and you write in brisk Australian English." No special format, no code; clear sentences do the job. The identity is the single most powerful lever anyone has over an agent, because it shapes every answer the agent ever gives. A well-written identity is the difference between an agent that sort of helps and one that feels like it's read your mind.
Alongside its identity, an agent has a set of skills switched on — the concrete things it's allowed to do, like reading a calendar or creating a JIRA issue. Skills get a chapter of their own next; for now, just know that identity says who the agent is and skills say what it can touch.
Yours and everyone's
Agents come in two flavours, and the difference is simply ownership.
Org agents are the shared workhorses. Your admin sets them up, everyone in the organisation can use them (subject to access rules), and they carry the load of common work — the Deal Desk Assistant, the support agent, the reporting agent. You'll mostly just chat with these without thinking about who built them.
Personal agents belong to you alone. You create them yourself — from a template, by cloning an org agent you like, or from scratch — and you shape them however you please: your tone, your rules, your priorities. A personal agent works only for you. It never answers anyone else — not in a DM, not in a shared channel, not even if a colleague mentions it by name. That's a privacy feature, not a limitation: your personal agent may hold your preferences, your working notes and access to your connected accounts, so it stays strictly yours. Both flavours chat the same way and follow the same approval rules; the difference is audience.
Agents also don't have to work solo. A squad is a group of agents that share memory, conversation context and artifacts, and can delegate tasks to one another — the platform's unit of collaboration. Where a single agent is a specialist, a squad is a small team: one agent researches, another drafts, a third reviews, and the work flows between them without you playing courier. Squads are set up by admins (and can be installed as ready-made templates from the marketplace), so as an everyday user you'll mostly experience them as work that seems to involve more hands than one.
The Orchestrator — the receptionist who knows everyone
With a building full of specialists, you might expect to spend your day working out who to ask. You don't, because of the Orchestrator.
When you send a question without naming an agent, the Orchestrator reads it and routes it to the best specialist for the job. Ask about deal pipeline and it finds the CRM Assistant; ask about your own calendar and it may pick your personal assistant, since that involves your accounts. Think of it as a helpful receptionist who knows everyone in the building — including your personal agents, who are in the running whenever you are the one asking (and never when anyone else is).
Why the same agent keeps answering you
Here's a behaviour that puzzles new users and then quickly becomes their favourite thing. Once the Orchestrator has routed you to an agent, your next messages in that conversation go straight to the same agent, without re-routing. This is called sticky routing, and it's usually exactly what you want: a follow-up like "and what about next week?" lands with the agent that has the context, not a stranger who'd need the whole story again.
The stickiness is per person, per channel. Your colleague in the same Slack channel might be "stuck" to a different agent, and your DMs are separate again. And you're never trapped: if the wrong agent has stuck to you, just name the one you want — "ask the Project Manager agent what's overdue" — and sticky routing follows your lead from then on. Admins can also bind an agent to a particular channel, giving it a home ground where it answers everything; if a channel seems to have a resident agent, that's why.
So: agents are the who, and the Orchestrator makes sure the right who gets your message. The obvious next question is the how — when an agent says it has checked your calendar or created a ticket, what's actually happening under the hood, and why can one agent do things another can't? That's the next chapter.