Team assistants

Sometimes an assistant shouldn’t belong to anyone. A repairs coordinator for the whole repairs unit, a reporting assistant the entire finance team leans on, a company-wide helper in the Org team — for these, “pick someone to own it and tell them to share everything” is the wrong shape. Team assistants make the team itself the owner: no single supervisor, no private memory, and everyone on the team can work with it as naturally as with a colleague.

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What makes a team assistant different

The memory point is worth dwelling on, because it’s a genuine privacy model, not just a default:

• A personally-supervised assistant keeps a private pool and chooses when something belongs to a team. A team assistant has nothing to choose between — its knowledge, playbooks, skills, tasks, data, transcripts, and credentials all live at the team scope. There is no hidden layer only one person can see.
• Its working state defaults to the owning team’s pool. If it also joins other teams, it can read and contribute to those pools like any member — but its home never moves.
• Because everything is team-visible, a team assistant is exactly as auditable as the team itself: open the team in the sidebar and every brain section shows the full picture.

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Hiring one

Team-first is the default. The hire dialog includes an Owning team selector, pre-set to the team you hired from (or the managed Org team where org-wide sharing is on):

• Pick a team → you get a team assistant, born into that team: it’s enrolled automatically, appears under the team in the sidebar with a Team-owned badge, and its memory starts at team scope from the first message.
• Pick “Personal (only you)” → you get the classic personally-supervised assistant instead, with a private memory and optional team memberships layered on.

The fastest route for a specific team: open the team in the sidebar, switch to Members, and use Hire for this team — the owning team comes preselected. Everything else about hiring — profile, voice, its own accounts, phone numbers, and mailboxes — is identical to any hired teammate; see Hiring. A team assistant still gets its own identity in your org’s tools; what changes is who it answers to.

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Working with one

Anyone on the team can message a team assistant directly, work with it in the team group chat, assign it tasks, and see everything it’s doing. There’s no privileged channel — the hiring member’s messages carry no more weight than anyone else’s. Because its transcripts and tasks live at team scope, the whole team sees one coherent history: what it was asked, what it did, what it scheduled. Its scheduled work runs on the team’s task surfaces, so runs and results are team-visible too.

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Teams, plural

A team assistant always has exactly one owning team — that’s where its memory lives and who it belongs to. On top of that it can join any number of other teams, exactly like any assistant: each extra membership adds that team’s shared pool to what it can read and contribute to. Two structural rules keep ownership coherent:

• It can’t leave its owning team. Removing it from the owning team is refused — that pool is its memory. (Other memberships can be added and removed freely.)
• The owning team can’t be deleted while it owns assistants. Deleting the team would delete their entire minds; the platform refuses until the owned assistants are deleted first.

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Spend, caps, and attribution

Team assistants bill the organization’s account, and their cost controls are team-shaped rather than person-shaped:

• Caps are managed by org admins. Any member with assistant-management permissions can set or change a team assistant’s monthly spending cap — the hiring member holds no special position.
• The org cap is the ceiling. A team assistant’s cap is bounded by the organization’s spending cap only — no individual member’s personal cap constrains a team asset.
• Limit alerts go to the org’s Owners and Admins (alongside the hiring member), so the people who can act on a cap are the ones told when it’s reached.
• Spend is attributable per team. The organization’s spending breakdown can be scoped to a team, aggregating across every assistant that team owns — so “what does the repairs team’s AI staff cost?” is one query, not a spreadsheet.

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Which ownership model to choose

Both models coexist freely in one org — and in one team. The question to ask is simply: if the hiring person left tomorrow, should this assistant carry on unchanged? If yes, it’s a team assistant.