Working with colleagues

A colleague is a specialist, not a search box. Each one covers a field — Hardware, Quality, Sales, Finance and so on — and each has its own brief, its own way of working and its own documents to look after. You get better answers when you treat them like specialists and ask the right one.

Pick who answers

The coloured pill at the bottom of the chat, inside the composer, decides which colleague replies. Click it and you get:

• ● Roundtable (all) at the top — every enabled colleague at once, described in The roundtable;
• a separator;
• every colleague available in the area you are currently in.

You can also click a colleague in the sidebar. That starts a fresh conversation with them.

Ask the owner of the answer

Ask Supply Chain about lead times, Regulatory about which directives apply, Sales about what you have sold. Asking the wrong colleague still gets you an answer, but a thinner one, because each colleague's brief and tools are built around its own field.

Who shows up at @

Typing @ in the composer lists everyone you can address directly: the built-in colleagues that carry real content, plus the colleagues your organisation has created and enabled. A few built-in colleagues that are still thin previews stay out of the list until they do real work. The list filters as you type, and a leading @hardware (or any other name) routes the question straight to that colleague instead of letting the orchestrator choose.

Have a conversation

1. Select the product (Product Development only) and the colleague.
2. Type your question and send it.
3. Watch the colleague work. It shows you its steps as it goes — what it is reading, which tool it is calling and what came back.
4. Read the answer, then keep going in the same thread. The colleague remembers everything earlier in the conversation.

Conversations are saved automatically and listed in the sidebar under the colleague's name. + New starts a clean one — do that when you change subject, because a long thread about something else costs credits and muddies the answer.

Your history is yours. The sidebar lists all of your own chats in one place, across products, with the product named under each row. Nobody else in the organisation can see or open your chats, whatever their role. Clicking an old chat resumes it and switches the workspace to its product.

Answer length

The Standard picker in the composer sets how the next answer is shaped:

• Short — a few sentences or a small table. Right for quick lookups.
• Standard — the everyday default.
• Investigative — the colleague digs deeper, reads whole documents and cross-checks the ERP, and prefers landing a long answer as a report rather than a wall of chat text.

The choice applies per question, so you can ask short and follow up investigative in the same thread. Warnings about data quality are never dropped, not even in the shortest mode. In Microsoft Teams, answers are short by default.

Choosing a model

The second picker in the composer selects the language model, with its credit cost shown as a multiplier such as (1x) or (3x).

• Use the cheap model for lookups, summaries and quick questions.
• Use the expensive model for design reasoning, tricky trade-offs and anything you are going to publish.

Which models are on the list is set by your organisation under Settings → AI.

When a colleague writes a document

Colleagues do not only answer — they write. When one changes a file, the canvas opens on the right and shows you what happened. There are two behaviours:

• Suggested changes appear as an inline diff you accept or reject.
• Direct edits are written straight into the document, and the canvas reloads to show the new text.

Either way nothing is published. The change sits as a draft until you publish it. See Documents and the canvas and Publishing and reviews.

Escalating a question

Sometimes you realise halfway through that a question is bigger than one colleague. Next to the colleague pill there is an ↗ Roundtable button. It takes your last message across to the roundtable, tagged with where it came from, so all colleagues can weigh in without you retyping anything.

Looking under the hood

• Execution plan, in the ⋯ menu of the chat header: the phased plan for the product, showing which colleague is working on what and what has to be approved before the next phase unlocks.
• Colleagues, in the rail: one page per colleague with what it does, which procedures it follows and what it does on its own.
• Settings → Colleagues (admins): the instructions each colleague has been given, for the organisation and per product.

Shape a colleague's role

Every colleague can be edited under Settings → Colleagues — the built-in ones too, not only those you created yourself. Besides the identity and the company rule, each colleague can carry a role profile: its responsibilities, the KPIs it is measured on, its mandate (propose, decide within limits, or escalate) and where it escalates.

A KPI can be bound to live ERP data — customer delivery precision, quality cases, planned versus reported time and more. The colleague then knows both what it is measured on and where the number comes from, and checks the real figure instead of reasoning in the abstract.

A built-in colleague you have not edited behaves exactly as shipped. Your own colleagues look and work the same as the built-in ones; the only difference is the Own label.

Getting started is suggested, not blank: Colleag proposes colleagues that fit your company profile, and + New colleague can start from a role in the built-in role catalogue — some twenty roles for manufacturing companies, each with responsibilities, KPIs and ways of working filled in as a starting point.

Routines

A routine is recurring work a colleague does without being asked: the firmware colleague checks every SBOM against the vulnerability database each night, and the regulatory colleague can write the CRA status report every Monday.

Open Colleagues in the rail to see them. Each routine shows when it runs, who owns it, and what its last runs found. Open one to Run now, Pause it, or choose Tell me too to get its briefings.

New routine sets one up: choose what the colleague is to do, for which products, when, and who is told. Three rules always hold:

• A routine writes a draft. A person publishes it.
• It runs with its owner's access, and pauses if the owner leaves the organisation. An admin can give it a new owner under Settings → Routines.
• Every run is recorded, with what it found.

The nightly vulnerability check is created for you when a product gets its first SBOM; the person who uploaded it becomes its owner.

Troubleshooting

Problem	Likely cause
The colleague invents a number instead of looking it up	The system it should read is not connected. Check Settings → Integrations — see Integrations and your ERP.
The answer ignores your company context	The company profile is empty. Fill in Settings → Company.
The colleague will not write to a document	Product Development colleagues need a product selected. Pick one in the sidebar first.
Answers stop coming	You may be out of credits. Check the balance in the profile menu, at the foot of the rail.

Next: The roundtable →