Three things, nested
Your workspace holds everything, and your team shares it. A coworker is a colleague you’ve hired — a name, a job, a personality, a set of things it’s allowed to do. It’s shared with the workspace, so a colleague can give Nora work too. A task is one job. It has its own conversation and its own files, and it’s private to whoever started it. Your colleague giving Nora a task doesn’t interrupt yours, and can’t see it.How a task runs
Your coworker doesn’t follow a script. It works in a loop, the way a person does:1
Work out what's needed
Read what you asked for, look at what’s there, decide the next useful thing.
2
Do it
Search, open a file, run the numbers, use one of your apps.
3
Look at what came back
Did that work? Does it change the plan? This is the step that makes it different from automation — the result of one step shapes the next.
4
Repeat, or stop
Keep going until the job is done, or stop and ask you something.
What it can reach
Three sources, and knowing which is which explains most “why can’t it do X” moments.
If your coworker says it can’t do something, it’s almost always a switch on its Capabilities tab.
Where it stops
Your coworker works freely on anything reversible — reading, searching, analysing, drafting. It stops in two situations:- It needs permission. Something is about to leave your workspace or change your systems. See Approvals.
- It needs information. Something only you know, and it would rather ask than guess.
What carries, and what doesn’t
The thing people get wrong most often.
So a new task isn’t starting from nothing. Your coworker still knows who you are and how you like things — it just doesn’t have that particular conversation.
Good to know
Tasks run in the background. Close the tab, start another one, come back tomorrow — nothing needs you watching.
Common questions
Is a coworker a chatbot?
Is a coworker a chatbot?
No. A chatbot answers; a coworker acts. It opens the file, runs the numbers, sends the email — and comes back with the finished thing rather than instructions for making it.
Can two people use the same coworker?
Can two people use the same coworker?
Yes. Coworkers are shared, tasks are private. Everyone gets their own conversations with the same colleague.
Does it learn from my colleagues' tasks too?
Does it learn from my colleagues' tasks too?
Its memory belongs to the coworker, so what it learns benefits everyone using it. The tasks themselves stay private.
What if it does the wrong thing?
What if it does the wrong thing?
Every step is visible, including exactly what it changed in a file. Correct it in the chat and it remembers.
Next steps
Quickstart
Put it into practice.
What a coworker can do
Every capability, one page each.
Cowork vs workflows
When to use something else.
Approvals
Where it stops for you.