AI coworkers

AI coworkers is a per-user entry in the Settings → Personal sidebar group, at /settings/ai-coworkers. The sidebar row carries a BETA tag: the page is live, and the coworkers behind it are still young. It lists the two places Brev can work alongside you, and it is open to everyone: a coworker posts into your own Slack or Teams, so you ask for it yourself rather than waiting on an admin.

Coworkers #

• Slack coworker: mentions, your digest, check-ins and the daily briefing delivered in Slack.
• Teams coworker: the same, delivered in Microsoft Teams.

The Slack row connects from this page: its control is Connect Slack. The Teams row does the same, with Connect Teams, when Microsoft Teams is enabled for your organization. Where it is not, the row is marked By request and its only control is Request access.

Your notifications when you connect #

The first time you connect a coworker, Brev moves your check-in reminders, meeting recaps and @-mention notifications to chat: those three switch on for chat, which covers both Slack and Teams, and the matching emails switch off, so you are not told twice. Your weekly digest, integration alerts and action reminder emails stay as they were. The emails only switch off when your organization's reminder switch for that chat is on (Product settings) and this is the only Brev organization you belong to. Your email settings apply in every organization, and another one may not reach you in chat, so otherwise they stay on and you never end up with no reminders. Connecting never changes whether Brev files unanswered check-in drafts for you. You can switch the emails, and the chat recap and mention switches, back in Notifications; chat check-in reminders have no switch of their own there. This happens once per chat: disconnecting and reconnecting later leaves your choices alone.

Requesting the Teams coworker #

Request access opens a short dialog, 'Request Teams coworker', asking what the coworker would unlock for you. The answer is optional. Sending it shows 'Request sent' and records the request for the Brev team, who follow up about turning it on; nothing about your workspace changes on its own. Cancel closes the dialog without recording anything.

Connecting the Teams coworker #

The Teams coworker needs two things before your row offers Connect Teams: Microsoft Teams enabled for your organization, and the Brev Teams app connected by one of your admins from Settings, Integrations. Until the second is done the row reads Needs admin setup and points at Integrations; nothing on this page can do that step for you. Where the coworker is not switched on yet, the row reads 'Coming soon' instead, exactly as the Slack row does.

Press Connect Teams and Microsoft asks you to sign in with your work account, so Brev knows exactly which Teams account is yours even when your Brev email is a different address. Brev only reads who you are; it does not act as you in Microsoft. Back on the page the row reads Connected while Brev sets your coworker up in the background. Within a minute or so it adds itself to your Teams and says hello in a personal chat with you, and the row says so. Reply to it there any time. While it stays connected, the messages Brev sends you in Teams on its own (meeting recaps, the morning briefing, reminders, @-mention notifications and nudges) go to that same account in that chat, even when your Brev email would not find you in Teams. Disconnect it and they go back to the Teams account your Brev email matches, if there is one. The same row appears on the Add Brev Coworker step in onboarding, and it is one connection.

Every answer your coworker gives in Teams carries a short note that it is AI-generated, with a link to report a problem, and two buttons: Helpful and Not helpful. Pressing one records your verdict and replaces the buttons with a thank you; reacting to the answer with a like, heart or laugh counts as helpful, and sad or angry as not helpful. Neither sends anything to your colleagues.

Reconnect Teams starts the setup again on the same account and your coworker introduces itself again. Disconnect asks you to confirm, then stops your coworker messaging you in Teams and cancels anything it was about to send. Messages already exchanged stay in Teams, and the Brev app stays installed there until you remove it yourself. The row goes back to Connect Teams. Both act only on your own coworker in your current organization.

Connecting Slack yourself #

You may have set the Slack coworker up already: the Add Brev Coworker step in onboarding shows these same two rows, and it is one connection, so a coworker connected there reads as Connected here. Connect Slack takes you to Slack's own approval screen. Approving it brings you back here, and the row reads Connected straight away: the connection is made and your coworker has started. It then introduces itself with a direct message in Slack a short while later, and you can reply to it there. The row does not wait for that message to arrive before saying you are connected. A few minutes after that it looks through your meetings, and if it finds one it can genuinely prep, it sends a second message offering to do it. When it does not find one, it sends nothing rather than something thin, and looks again later. A request in that direct message that needs more than a quick look, such as researching a company or reading a link you send, gets a short reply saying it is working on it, then the answer in the same conversation. For those requests it can search the web and read public pages, and it names the pages it used.

If Brev has not been added to your Slack workspace yet, that same approval screen also asks to add it, so one approval covers both. Many Slack workspaces only let an admin add a new app. When yours does, Slack sends your request to an admin rather than finishing, and the row tells you it is waiting on one. Once an admin has approved Brev, press Try again to finish. If Brev is already set up in your workspace, none of this appears and the screen asks only about your own account.

Nothing on this page asks you to choose channels, models or permissions. Brev sets all of that up for you. The coworker works in Brev with your own permissions, so it sees only what you can already see there. When something it is keeping an eye on asks for it, it can update your goals and check-ins, and it tells you which ones it changed. It cannot send messages, invitations or briefings on your behalf.

Your coworker's day #

Where your organization has it switched on, your Slack coworker also works to a daily rhythm, Monday to Friday, on your own clock: the timezone your Slack profile had when you last connected Slack, or your organization's when Brev has none for you. Around 8:30 AM it sends you a short brief of what needs you today. Before a meeting of yours with other people on it, it may offer to prepare you for it, once per meeting: the afternoon before for a meeting with people outside your company or a business, OKR or leadership review, the evening before for a meeting that starts before 10:30 AM, and around two hours before for any other. Between 4 and 6 PM, it may offer an end-of-day catch-up on a goal of yours: a check-in drafted from what you got done today, for a goal with no check-in from a person for a week, one never checked in a week after it was set and its period began, or one that is behind or at risk with no check-in from a person that week. It does that at most once a week. Each offer is a yes or no in the conversation, as the first one was. You can answer any of your coworker's messages in the DM itself or in a thread under that message, and a reply in a thread is answered in the same thread.

A daily team sync works differently: a series held every weekday, or three or more days a week, or set up as a stand-up, with at least three people on it. If you host it, your coworker offers to prep the next one between 2 and 4 PM on the working day before (Friday for Monday). It holds back one of your four daily messages until 4 PM for that offer. Say yes and it fills the meeting's doc in the layout your team has kept using, not whatever the last one happened to look like. If someone already made the doc, it adds the missing sections after theirs and leaves their part alone. Nobody on the sync gets a separate meeting prep offer for it. Only the first yes builds the prep; a later one gets a note that it is already in hand, and a yes in the last 15 minutes before the meeting builds nothing.

If the host says no, the offer moves on at once to one other person on the sync, or at 4 PM if the host has not answered; that person has until 6 PM, and then, if needed, one more person is offered it on the morning of the meeting until an hour before it. It goes to whoever prepped the last one, then the series' owner, then whoever has made the most of its recent docs, and only inside their own working hours. Any of those offers can still be answered yes until 15 minutes before the meeting, and the first yes is the one that builds. From the third time a host is offered a series, the offer also asks "or every day?"; answer every day and later ones are built without asking, with just a short note when each is ready. Reply "stop" to an offer and it is not offered again: from the host, for anyone on that sync; from anyone else, for them. To turn either back on, contact support. Reply "use today's layout" as the host and today's doc becomes the series' layout from the next one on.

Once the host says yes, each person with a section in the doc is asked once for their update: by the same message for the host, and by one short message for everyone else, about 90 minutes before the sync, or at 5 PM the working day before when that falls outside 8 AM to 6 PM on their clock. That message does not count toward the four a day. Reply to it and your words go into your own section, and nobody else's; a second reply adds to the first. If you write in your section yourself, your coworker never writes there again. Ten minutes before the sync, a section nobody filled gets a short list drawn only from that person's own activity since the last sync, marked as drafted by Brev and not confirmed: their merged pull requests and their tickets that someone else on the sync is also on, and their goal check-ins and meetings everyone on the sync can see. With nothing to draw on, it stays empty. A reply after that still replaces the draft. Someone who keeps their own tile, titled with their name, is never asked.

Everyone gets that message with a draft of their update already in it, made from their own recent work (pull requests, tickets, actions, meetings and check-ins, plus what their coworker already noted from Slack) and laid out the way their section usually is, or as Yesterday, Today and Blockers. It is written the way they wrote their own section in recent syncs, including any draft they corrected before confirming, with one line per piece of work rather than one per pull request, and a link or two after each line: a pull request's number, a ticket's key, or a meeting's name. Reply ok and the draft goes into your section as is, or reply with what to change, or with your own update, and that goes in instead. Nobody else sees the draft until you confirm it or the deadline passes. If you don't answer, the deadline puts in only the draft's lines everyone on the sync could already see, marked as drafted by Brev and not confirmed. The host's draft starts as their prep is written, so the finished-prep message says it is coming, and the draft follows in the same conversation a few minutes later. When the draft can't be made in time, the message is the plain question. After three drafts in a row you left unconfirmed, the message also offers to stop; reply stop to any of these messages and your coworker no longer asks you, or offers you this sync's prep.

It sends you at most four of these a day. On a day the brief goes out it is one of the four, and it comes first: an offer never takes its place. A day with nothing worth saying gets nothing at all: no brief, and no message saying there is none. The brief replaces the weekday morning briefing for you, so you do not get both. You still get action reminders, meeting recaps and check-in reminders as before.

Every offer and question it sends ends by saying you can reply in the DM or in that message's thread, and a reply in the DM still reaches it after reminders or recaps have landed below it. To stop the brief, switch off Daily briefing. If the times run on the wrong clock, or you move to another timezone, Reconnect Slack below picks up the zone your Slack profile has now.

Reconnecting or disconnecting Slack #

Once your coworker is connected, the row keeps two buttons. Reconnect Slack sends you back through Slack's approval screen, which is what to use if Brev's access has been revoked in Slack or the coworker has stopped answering. Finishing it starts your coworker back up on the restored connection and it introduces itself again, the same way a first connection does, so you can tell the new connection is working. What it remembers about you is kept: only the introduction starts over. Disconnect removes the connection. Both act only on your own coworker in your current organization, and a colleague's connection is untouched.

Disconnect asks you to confirm first, and explains what it does: your coworker stops working in Slack, Brev gives up the Slack access you approved, and anything it was about to send is cancelled. Messages you have already exchanged stay in Slack. The row then goes back to Connect Slack, so you can set the coworker up again with the same Slack account. If the disconnect cannot be completed, the row tells you so and stays connected rather than pretending it worked.

One thing disconnecting does not give back: connecting again has to use the same Slack account. Your coworker keeps that account's history, so it stays bound to it even with no connection in place. The confirmation dialog says so before you go ahead. If you need to move your coworker to a different Slack account, contact support to reset it rather than disconnecting and connecting as someone else.