Capabilities & connections

A capability is an integration your worker can actually use — not just a connected account sitting in a list, but a tool it can call while it works. Connect Gmail, Slack, your CRM, or any of CogniAgent’s 2,700+ integrations, and your worker can send the email, post the message, or update the record itself.

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What a capability is

Capabilities reuse the same Connection Manager and connected accounts that power the rest of CogniAgent — there’s no separate “worker integrations” system to learn. When you connect an app to a worker, the Connection Manager turns the actions that app supports (send an email, post a message, add a row) into callable tools, and the worker picks up those tools the next time it runs a task.

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Connecting an account

You attach capabilities from a worker’s Capabilities tab. The flow is one click for the common case, with more control when you need it.

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Example capabilities

A worker can hold as many capabilities as its job needs. A few common ones: Connections aren’t one-directional: the same Gmail or Slack connection that lets a worker send also lets it receive. See Channels for how a worker gets messages over these connections while a task is running.

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Search, browse, and interact with the web

Two related capabilities give a worker web access, from light research to hands-on browsing:

• Web search & extract — a built-in toggle that lets the worker search the web and pull clean content from a page. Best for research and lookups.
• Browser — a built-in capability that gives the worker a live cloud browser it can navigate, click through, and fill in forms on. Unlike search and extract, this is for pages that need to be acted on — logging in, submitting a form, paging through results.

The Browser capability streams a live view of what the worker is doing into the cowork session, so you can watch it work. When it hits something it can’t get past on its own — a login screen, a captcha, a two-factor prompt — it hands control to you rather than guessing. You act in that same live browser, then hand it back and the worker picks up where you left off. This uses the same pause-and-resume mechanism as Ask-a-Human — the worker’s turn suspends until you respond. A named browser remembers where it’s logged in. The first time a worker needs a site, you sign in through a handoff; after that, the worker reopens the same browser already authenticated, so you’re not re-entering credentials on every task.

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The always-on CogniAgent connection

One connection is different from the rest: every worker gets it automatically, with nothing to add. It’s what lets a worker:

• Invoke and manage Applications and workflows — list them, kick one off, and check on a run, the same way a person would from the Applications area.
• Start and manage Conversations — begin a Conversation Flow, check on one in progress, or read back what happened.
• Ask a human a question — the Ask-a-Human tool, which pauses the task and asks you directly when the worker needs information or a judgment call only you can provide.
• Delegate to another worker — the same reach covered in Multi-worker collaboration.

Because this connection is always attached, none of the above requires attaching a capability first — it’s simply part of what every worker can do.

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Tools load on demand

A worker can accumulate a lot of capabilities over time — several integrations, each with its own set of actions. Loading every possible tool into every conversation would waste context and slow the worker down, so tools load as needed: a small toolset is available immediately, and a larger one stays out of the way as a searchable list until the worker actually needs one of those tools mid-task. Either way, only the actions you’ve enabled for a connection are ever available to call — configuring a connection down to a handful of actions is also what keeps the worker focused. See Context & memory for how this fits into what the worker keeps in view more broadly.

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Moving files between integrations and the sandbox

Integration actions often deal in files — an emailed attachment, an exported spreadsheet, a document to upload. Those files need to reach the worker’s task files (the same files you see in the cowork session and that the sandbox works with), and files already in the task need to reach the integration when the worker calls it.

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Next steps