How your assistant works

What your assistant can do, how it decides when to act, and why it behaves the way it does.

Your assistant is a skill-powered orchestrator

Your assistant doesn't have hardcoded knowledge of your calendar, your email, or any specific service. Instead, it knows how to use skills — modular capabilities that give it access to the things it needs. Calendar access is a skill. Email sending is a skill. Scheduling coordination is a skill. Web search is a skill.

This means your assistant gets more capable as skills are installed — either by you, your team admin, or your organization. Two users on different teams can have the same assistant with very different abilities depending on what's installed.

Built-in access (no skill needed): your calendar, contacts, task history, stored memories, and files. Everything else comes from a skill.

Chat vs. task — when it acts now vs. later

Your assistant runs in two fundamentally different modes depending on what you ask.

Chat mode is for anything that can be resolved immediately. Your assistant reads your request, takes action, and replies — all in the same interaction. This covers: looking things up, answering questions, drafting something for your review, updating a contact, reading your inbox, or booking a calendar event where the time is already decided.

Task mode is for anything with multiple steps, uncertain outcomes, or work that takes time to complete. When your assistant creates a task, it's committing to run a dedicated background process — one that can take as long as it needs, coordinate with other people, handle replies, and come back to you when it's done or needs something.

Your assistant decides which mode to use based on what you asked. "What's on my calendar Thursday?" stays in chat. "Schedule a meeting with Justin and Sarah next week" becomes a task.

Skills give your assistant tools

When a skill is installed, it adds tools your assistant can use. The scheduling skill adds the ability to run availability coordination. The email-inbox skill adds the ability to search and read your email. A Salesforce skill would add the ability to look up and update CRM records.

Your assistant reads the skill's instructions before using it — this is how it knows the right way to use each tool for each situation. Skills can also declare what connections they need: a Gmail skill needs your Google connection, a Salesforce skill needs your Salesforce credentials. If a required connection is missing, the skill is installed but inactive until the connection is set up.

It only acts on your behalf

Your assistant represents exactly one person: you. It has no authority over, and no visibility into, any other user's data — including teammates who use the same platform.

When your assistant coordinates with other people's assistants (for scheduling, for example), it does so through explicit opt-in. Your assistant shares your availability; the other assistant shares their user's availability. Neither sees the other's calendar directly.

When someone other than you sends a message to your assistant — a contact replying to a scheduling email, for instance — your assistant can reply on your behalf but cannot take instructions from them. Only you can instruct your assistant. See Inbound channels for how this works in practice.

Real-world actions go through the dispatch cart

For anything with real-world consequences — sending an email, booking a meeting, creating an event — your assistant stages the action in a dispatch cart and shows it to you before executing. Nothing goes out until you approve.

Once you approve, execution is deterministic: the email that goes out is exactly the email you reviewed. No further interpretation. See Dispatch cart & execution for the full model.

Your assistant remembers things

As you work with your assistant, it saves information that will be useful later — your preferences, facts you've shared, context about your work. These memories are loaded at the start of every run, so your assistant doesn't start from scratch each time.

Memories are things like "prefers morning meetings" or "works from home on Fridays" — not a transcript of every conversation. Your assistant saves what matters and ignores the rest.