AI Teammates

An AI Teammate is an AI colleague that your members chat with inside Ciele. It uses the same answer engine as your Assistant. It answers your team, not your Visitors.

A Teammate has no Publication, no widget, and no Help Desk. Nothing about it reaches your website.

Create a Teammate

Open Teammates and select New teammate. You need the Editor role or higher.

Each Teammate has three parts.

• Name and title. The name starts every chat. The title says what the Teammate does.
• Standing role. Write what the Teammate is for, in your own words. Brief it like a colleague.
• Knowledge. Select the Knowledge Collections and the single Library items that the Teammate can search.

The Standing role applies to the next message. A Teammate has no Publication, so you never publish a change.

The avatar

Ciele draws the avatar. Each Teammate gets a figure generated from its identity. It looks the same on the roster, in the chat header and in a transcript, and you upload nothing.

The drawing is deterministic, not random: the same Teammate always gets the same face. Select Change colour in Configure to get a different one, and the face then survives a rename.

Members work the same way. Anybody who has not uploaded a photo gets a generated figure. It shows in the member list, in the sidebar and beside an Improvement they are assigned. A row is then recognisable at a glance, and a real photo always wins over the generated figure.

Knowledge scope

A Teammate searches only what you select. You select in two ways, and you can use both together.

• Collections. A whole Knowledge Collection. Use this for a subject that grows over time.
• Single items. One website, one file, or one FAQ from your Library. Use this to give a Teammate two documents, and not the whole collection around them.

The picker has one tab for Collections, and one tab for each Library type: Websites, Files, Applications and FAQs. The number on a tab tells you how many items you selected there.

Ciele searches your Collections and your single items together, and it shows the best answers from both. Answers cite a Document and its Source, exactly like the widget.

An empty selection is a valid configuration. The Teammate then answers from its Standing role only. It has no search tool at all, and it says so when a question needs a Source.

If you delete a collection or an item that a Teammate still searches, Ciele creates an Alert of the Knowledge type. The Teammate keeps answering from its role, and it finds nothing there. Open Configure and remove the dead entry from its knowledge to clear the Alert.

Who can see a Teammate

Visibility has two values.

• The whole organization. Every member sees the Teammate on the roster.
• Only me and admins. The owner, the members that the owner names as editors, and the Organization admins see it.

The owner, the named editors, and the admins can change the configuration. A member with the Viewer role can chat with a Teammate, but cannot create or change one.

Hide one from your own roster

A long roster is somebody else's problem to solve, so each member can shorten their own. Point at a Teammate in the list and select the eye icon to take it off your list.

This changes nothing for anybody else. The Teammate keeps answering your colleagues, it can still be suggested to you as a referral, and you can still open it from a link. Only your roster gets shorter. Open Hidden from your roster at the bottom of the list to put one back.

What a Teammate can do

A new Teammate can only talk. It answers questions and it changes nothing.

To let it act, an admin grants it one or more domains. A grant is a row. No row means no permission, and the Teammate does not even see the tool.

Open Configure to set the grants. Only an admin sees the controls. Every other member sees one sentence that says what the Teammate can do. The permissions of an agent are not a secret from the people who work with it.

How far it can go

Each Teammate has one limit that applies to all of its grants.

• Read only. It can look at everything you granted. It changes none of it.
• Read and change. The default. It can change things inside the domains you granted.

A Teammate never publishes or manages members, API keys, or roles. Those permissions do not exist for a Teammate.

Accept a Suggested Fix

A Teammate with the Improvements grant can draft a Suggested Fix. A person must accept it. The fix becomes knowledge only after that.

An admin can change this for one Teammate with the Let it accept its own Suggested Fixes control. The control needs the Improvements grant and the Knowledge grant. It is off by default.

With the control on, a fix that the Teammate drafts becomes a FAQ in your Knowledge, and nobody reviews it first. Ciele records the Teammate as the author. The Document then shows the machine-confirmed trust level, not human-reviewed.

The transcript is the record

Every action shows in the conversation as a card. The card names the operation and the item that it changed. Ciele records the member who asked, not the Teammate, on the change itself.

What a Teammate remembers

A Teammate reads three documents at the start of every message. Each one is short, and you can read and change all three.

Each document has a limit of 4000 characters. A Teammate reads the whole document, so an empty one costs nothing and adds nothing.

Your profile

Open Settings, then Memory. This document says how you work: your timezone, the words you use, what you want short and what you want in full.

A Teammate adds to it when it learns something about you. Every change shows in the History list with the name of the Teammate that made it and the date. Select Undo this change to put the document back the way it was. Nobody else can read this document, not even an administrator.

What it has learned

At the end of a conversation, a Teammate decides if it learned something durable about its job. Most conversations teach nothing, and the Teammate then writes nothing. When it does write, it adds one line, with a date.

A durable fact is a convention your organization uses, a name you have for something, or a correction a colleague made. It is not what you discussed today.

Open Configure on the Teammate to read these notes. Delete a line that is wrong. The Teammate reads this document every message, so a wrong line stays wrong until you correct it.

Projects

A Project is a name, a description, and one document of decisions. Open Projects to create one. You need the Editor role or higher.

Attach a Teammate to a project in Configure. A Teammate reads at most one project. From the next message, it answers "what did we decide" from the project document, and it can add a decision itself. Every write shows as a card in the conversation.

Select Archive to stop a project. The decisions stay readable, and attached Teammates stop reading them. Select the delete icon to remove the project and its decisions. Archive is the safer choice, because it keeps the record.

Referral to another Teammate

A Teammate answers from its own role and its own knowledge. When your question belongs to a colleague, it says so and shows a card with:

• the name of the other Teammate,
• one sentence on why that one,
• a summary of your conversation, so you do not repeat yourself.

Select Continue with … on the card. Ciele opens a chat with that Teammate, and gives it the summary. The two conversations keep a link to each other.

The other Teammate answers from its knowledge and its grants. It does not get the knowledge or the permissions of the Teammate that referred you.

A Teammate refers only to Teammates that the whole organization can see. It never names a private Teammate, and it shows no card at all when there is no other Teammate to suggest.

Channels

A channel is one thread for several members and several Teammates. Use a channel when a piece of work needs more than one specialist.

Open Teammates and select New group. Give the channel a name, then add the Teammates and the people you want. Every member can open a channel. You do not need the Editor role.

You can also start a channel from a 1:1 chat. Write @ in the message box and select a Teammate. Ciele opens a new channel with both Teammates and with you. The 1:1 conversation does not move. It stays where it is and you can read it again.

A channel is invite-based. Only the people in the channel can see it. A colleague who is not in the channel cannot open it, and does not see it in the roster.

The header of a channel shows the face of each member. Select the faces, or select Add, to open the list of the Teammates and the people that you can add. Select a name to add that Teammate, or to invite that person.

Ask a Teammate in a channel

Write @ and the name of a Teammate. That Teammate answers in the thread.

A Teammate answers only when somebody names it. A Teammate that nobody names stays silent. There is no default answerer.

A Teammate can name another Teammate in its answer. That Teammate then answers on its own, in the same thread. One question can reach the whole team, and you read one thread.

A Teammate can name only the Teammates in the channel. It cannot reach a Teammate outside the channel, and it cannot reach an Assistant.

Where a chain stops

A chain is everything that one message starts. A chain has two limits:

The chain stops at a limit. The thread then shows a line that explains why. Send another message to continue.

Each Teammate keeps its own permissions

Each Teammate answers with its own role, its own knowledge scope, and its own grants. A channel gives no Teammate more permission.

Ciele records the member who sent the first message as the person who asked. Every change that a Teammate makes in the chain is recorded against that member.

A Teammate reads the profile of that member only. It does not read the profile of the other people in the channel.

Give a channel a Project

A channel can use one Project. Select the settings icon in the channel, then choose the Project. Every Teammate in the channel then reads the decisions document of that Project, and writes the decisions of the channel back to it.

New messages

The roster shows the channels with new messages. Ciele marks a channel with Mentioned you only when a message names you. Messages between Teammates do not mark it.

When somebody names you

If a message names you, Ciele tells you outside the channel too. You get a card at the bottom right of the screen, and a count on the Teammates row in the sidebar.

You get one card for each channel, and no more. Three colleagues can name you ten times in the same channel. That is one place to go and look, so it is one card. The count in the sidebar is the number of channels that wait for you, not the number of times somebody named you.

Open the channel to clear the card and the count. There is nothing else to dismiss.

Read a channel as an Owner or Admin

An Owner or an Admin can read every channel in the organization, also a channel that they are not in. Open Inbox, then Channels.

Channels are internal. They stay out of the Visitor conversation list, and out of Insights.

Routines

A routine is a standing instruction that a Teammate carries out on its own. Open Configure and select Add under Routines. A Teammate can have 5.

Each routine has an instruction and a schedule. The schedule is a preset:

The hour is UTC. Ciele runs each routine one time per period. If the schedule is late, the routine still runs one time, and it does not run twice to catch up.

Each run is a conversation

Every run adds a conversation to the thread of the person who created the routine. The card at the top of the list says Routine, so you can see which work was unattended. Each action shows as a card, the same as in a chat.

When a run fails

A failed run creates an Alert. The alert says which routine failed and why. The next successful run clears it. A quiet failure is the risk with unattended work, so Ciele makes the failure loud.

If you delete the Teammate, its routines stop. This is not a failure, and it creates no alert.

Triage visitor feedback

The most useful routine scans the answers your visitors rated down and files the new problems on the Improvements board.

Give the Teammate the Improvements grant, then add a routine like this:

Every morning, triage yesterday's thumbs-down and file what is new.

Each run:

• reads the conversations with a thumbs-down from the last day,
• attaches the answer to an improvement that is already open for that conversation, instead of creating a second one,
• creates a maximum of 5 new improvements,
• adds the auto-filed tag to each new item, so you can filter the board.

The limit of 5 applies to new items only. A problem you already know about always gets the new evidence.

Conversations

Each member has a private thread with each Teammate. Select View history in the chat header to open an earlier conversation.

For a long answer, open the More options menu in the chat header and select Open full screen. The chat then fills the window. Select Exit full screen, or press Escape, to go back.

Teammate conversations stay out of the Inbox, because the Inbox is the queue for Visitor conversations. They also stay out of Insights, because internal use must not change your widget metrics. Channels are in the Inbox, in their own list, for an Owner or an Admin.

Automation

The teammates domain is available to the CLI, the MCP server, and the API. An API key acts as the Member who created it, so it sees the same Teammates that member sees.

ciele teammates list
ciele teammates create --name "Nora" --title "Support Copywriter"

Channels have a channels domain of their own. You can read a channel, open one, and change who is in it:

ciele channels list
ciele channels create --name "Launch week" --teammates <teammate-id>
ciele channels add-member <channel-id> <user-id>

There is no command to send a message into a channel. A message starts a chain of teammate replies, and a chain runs in the console, where you can watch it.

Which AI provider answers

A Teammate uses the Organization's provider connections, like your Assistant.

If your Organization allows personal AI subscriptions and you paired your own device, your own chats with a Teammate can use your subscription. This applies to your chats only. A colleague who chats with the same Teammate uses the Organization's connections.

A channel always uses the Organization's connections. A channel has several people in it, so it is not personal use.

Attach a file

Select + in the message box, then Attach a file. You can also drag a file onto the message box, or paste an image into it. A Teammate chat accepts attachments at all times, because you are signed in.

Ciele reads the file into text and answers from that text. Ciele does not keep the file. An image goes to your Organization's AI provider, which reads it. This costs one AI call.

The attachment stays available for the rest of the conversation. Remove it from the strip above the message box when you no longer need it.

Select a model for one message

Select Configure, then select the models in Models it can answer with. The Teammate model is always available. Each additional model that you select becomes an option in the chat window.

If you select no additional model, the chat window shows no model control.

Your own AI subscription has priority. If you paired your own device, your chats use your subscription. The chat window model does not apply. Change your subscription in Settings, then AI.

Delete a Teammate

Select Configure, then Delete teammate. The Teammate leaves every roster and nobody can chat with it again.

Your past conversations with it stay readable. The record of the work remains.