Chatting with agents from a channel

After you've run /claos connect, the bot is the way your agents reach you outside the web app. Every message you send routes to your workspace, an agent picks it up, and the reply lands back in the same conversation. This article covers what the experience looks like and where it differs from the web.

The conversation shape

You message the bot the way you'd message a colleague:

In a DM, just type. Every message is treated as a fresh ask to the workspace's default agent for chat — or whichever agent you've named in the message.
In a channel where the bot is invited, @mention the bot first ("@Claos summarise the latest in #incidents"). Without the @mention the bot stays quiet so it doesn't flood the room.

Replies stream into the conversation the way a person's would. Long replies break across messages if the platform has a length limit; the bot keeps the thread coherent so you can read the whole thing in order.

What works from a channel

Most of the things you'd do with an agent in the web chat work here too:

Ask a one-off question. "What did we ship last week?" "Pull the last three customer-mail threads from Acme." "Draft a 3-line update for the #leads channel."
Trigger a recurring task by hand. "Run the morning brief now." The agent runs the same task it would on schedule and replies when it's done.
Follow up. "Make that one shorter." "Send it to John as well." The thread keeps context the same way the web chat does.
Approve or decline a held action. When the agent tries something sensitive (sending mail, posting in a customer channel), the held-action card surfaces in the conversation with Approve / Decline buttons. Approve and the agent continues; decline and the agent adapts. See Approvals and sensitive actions.

What doesn't work the same

Channels are a chat surface — anything that isn't conversation goes back to the web app:

File uploads degrade. Most platforms let you attach files; the bot can read text from common formats but not all of them, and rich previews (PDFs with images, spreadsheets) don't translate. For document-heavy work, share a knowledge-base link or a Drive link instead.
Tables and custom layouts collapse. A table the agent would render cleanly on the web turns into plain text in a chat platform. For anything format-sensitive, ask the agent to save the output to a page and send you the link.
You can't manage the workspace. Building agents, changing settings, opening pages, archiving inbox items — all of that lives in the web app. The bot won't pretend to do them.
Slash commands aren't custom. /claos connect is the linking command. Otherwise just talk to the bot in plain language — there's no /run, /assign, or /schedule to memorise.

A few real patterns

The shapes that come up most often in practice:

Morning check-in from your phone. Open Slack on the way to the desk. DM the bot "morning brief." It runs your existing morning-brief task and replies in the DM. Read on the train; act when you sit down.
Triggering a researcher from a customer channel. Someone asks a question in #customers. @mention the bot to research it; the agent uses the workspace's connected integrations to look things up and posts the answer in-channel.
Late-night async approval. A scheduled run paused for approval at 11pm. You see the held-action notification, open the chat in WhatsApp, read what the agent wanted to do, approve. Run continues; you go back to sleep.

Tips and gotchas

One conversation per platform thread. A Slack thread is one conversation; a separate DM is a separate one. Context doesn't bridge across them — start a new ask in a new thread when the topic changes.
The agent's identity matters. If you have a workspace default agent set for chat, the bot routes to that one by default. To talk to a specific agent, mention it by name ("ask Imani to..."). The bot routes to whichever agent the message names.
Outbound integrations need their own setup. The bot can chat from Slack without integrations connected — but if the agent's reply needs to post somewhere (file a Jira ticket, send an email), the relevant integration has to be connected first. See Connecting an integration.
The web is still the system of record. Everything the agent does from a channel still shows up in the web app — run history, page saves, inbox notifications. You don't lose anything by working from chat; you just have one extra place where the work lives.