> ## 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.
# Team assistants
> Assistants owned by the team itself — no single supervisor, shared memory by construction
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.
## What makes a team assistant different
No individual holds a supervisor position. The person who ran the hire
is recorded only as the hiring member; management rights belong to the
org's admins, like any shared resource.
A team assistant has **no personal contexts at all**. Everything it
knows, learns, schedules, and stores lives in its owning team's
shared pool — visible to every member, by construction.
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.
## 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](/hiring/overview). A team assistant still gets **its own
identity** in your org's tools; what changes is who it answers to.
## Working with one
Anyone on the team can message a team assistant directly, work with it in
the [team group chat](/teams/overview#where-you-see-teams), 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.
## 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.
Want an assistant the *whole company* can use? Hire into the managed
**Org** team (on by default for new organizations). Its membership is
automatically everyone — current and future — so "owned by the Org team"
means "belongs to the company."
## 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.
## Which ownership model to choose
| | Personally-supervised | Team assistant |
| ----------------- | ------------------------------------------------------ | -------------------------------------------- |
| Best for | An assistant that works *for you* with private context | A shared specialist the whole unit relies on |
| Memory | Private floor + team pools it joins | Owning team's pool, entirely |
| Who can direct it | Its supervisor; teams it joins | Anyone on the team |
| Management rights | Its supervisor | Org admins |
| Billing anchor | Supervisor's caps apply | Org cap; per-team attribution |
| Lifecycle | Supervisor manages | Tied to the owning team |
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.