> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.unify.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# People & assistants

> Who belongs to a team, and how assistant access follows

Teams contain **people** and **assistants**, and the platform treats the two
kinds of assistants — your private T-W1N and publicly visible teammates —
very differently. Getting this distinction right is most of understanding
teams.

## Your T-W1N: private, and it follows you

Everyone in an organization has their own **T-W1N** — their digital twin.
Two rules define how it relates to teams:

1. **It's hidden from everyone else.** Your T-W1N doesn't appear in
   colleagues' assistant lists, can't be messaged by them, and can't even
   be opened by an org admin. It works for you and answers to you, full
   stop.
2. **It inherits your team access — exactly.** When you're added to a team,
   your T-W1N automatically becomes a member too; when you leave, it
   leaves with you. You never manage its memberships, and it can never
   have access you don't have.

The result: your twin can read and contribute to the shared pools of every
team *you're* on — the sales team's playbooks, the ops team's data — while
remaining completely invisible to your colleagues. They benefit from what
it shares into team pools without ever interacting with it directly.

## Public assistants: visible, and members in their own right

Regular hired assistants are the opposite on both counts:

1. **They're visible across the organization.** Colleagues (with the
   appropriate org permissions) can find them in the assistant list, open
   their profiles, and message them — they're shared team members in the
   fullest sense.
2. **They're added to teams directly.** A public assistant's team
   memberships are its own — granted explicitly, not inherited from
   whoever hired it. The person who onboarded an assistant might not even
   be on the teams it serves.

This is what makes public assistants useful as **specialists**: a repairs
coordinator serving the whole repairs team, a reporting assistant embedded
in finance. They belong to the unit, not to a person, and one assistant can
serve several teams at once (the sidebar shows a badge listing all of
them). For how these teammates come to exist — and how their identity
differs from a T-W1N's — see [Hiring](/hiring/overview).

## Joining and leaving

Membership is live — access tracks it immediately:

* **Joining** a team gives a member (human or assistant) access to the
  team's whole [shared pool](/teams/shared-context) — knowledge, guidance,
  skills, tasks, data, credentials — from that moment.
* **Leaving** (or being removed) ends that access just as cleanly. The
  shared content itself **stays with the team** for the remaining members —
  people take their access away with them, not the team's accumulated
  know-how.
* **Leaving the organization** removes a person from all its teams — and
  their T-W1N from all of them too, automatically.

Running assistants are told when their team access changes, so a
revocation doesn't wait for the next session.

## Who's who at a glance

|                       | Your T-W1N                | Public assistants                     |
| --------------------- | ------------------------- | ------------------------------------- |
| Visible to colleagues | Never                     | Yes — listed, searchable, messageable |
| Team membership       | Automatic — mirrors yours | Explicit — granted per team           |
| Access ceiling        | Exactly your teams        | Exactly its teams                     |
| Serves                | You                       | The team(s) it belongs to             |