# Duties Catalog

Give any employee a set of standing rules they follow on every single interaction, no exceptions: respond within the hour, always CC you on sales emails, never discuss pricing without approval. Pick from the built-in catalog or write your own in plain English, and the employee carries the full text of every active duty in mind on every turn.

Duties are behavioral rules your employee follows on every single interaction. Say "always check with me before sending emails" and it creates a duty that triggers an approval request before any email goes out. Say "never mention competitor names in customer-facing content" and that rule is enforced on every blog post, social update, and support reply. Duties shape how your employee works, not just what it works on.

Think of duties as the policies you would give a new hire on day one: use this tone, follow this process, escalate these situations, always include these elements. Except here, the employee actually remembers and follows every single rule, every single time. A human might forget a brand guideline after a busy week. Your AI employee never does.

Use duties for brand voice consistency, compliance requirements, output formatting, escalation paths, approval workflows, or any behavior you want guaranteed. Duties stack. An employee can have 3 or 30, and all of them apply simultaneously without conflict.

## Behavioral Rules That Govern Every Interaction

Skills define what your AI employee can do. Duties define how it must behave while doing it. Duties are always-on rules enforced across every interaction, not guidelines the agent can choose to follow or ignore based on context. They are the compliance layer of your AI workforce.

Examples of duties in practice: "Always respond in Spanish when the user writes in Spanish." "Never quote a price without approval from a human manager." "Cite the source for every factual claim." "Escalate any mention of legal action immediately." These rules run silently in the background on every conversation.

## Set Duties in Plain Language, No Configuration Required

You define duties by telling the AI employee what rules it must follow. There is no structured form to fill out or special syntax to learn. Write the rule as you would explain it to a new hire, and the agent internalizes it as a persistent behavioral constraint.

Duties can be additive or restrictive. Additive duties tell the agent to always do something: always greet the user by name, always include a summary at the end of a long response, always log completed tasks to the project tracker. Restrictive duties prevent behaviors: never share internal pricing, never make commitments on behalf of executives, never generate images.

Duty conflicts are surfaced automatically. If you set two duties that contradict each other, the agent will flag the conflict and ask you to resolve it before both go active.

## The Compliance Foundation for Autonomous Agents

As AI agents take on more autonomous work, behavioral guardrails become critical. Duties are how you ensure an autonomous agent represents your company correctly, operates within your policies, and does not make decisions that require human judgment.

For regulated industries, duties serve as a practical compliance mechanism. Legal firms can require source citation and prohibit legal advice without attorney review. Healthcare companies can restrict specific health claim language. Financial services firms can mandate disclosures. The duty system lets you encode real-world compliance requirements into agent behavior without custom engineering.

## How It Works

**Duties are non-negotiable behavioral rules the agent follows in every response, no matter what task it is doing.**

Unlike skills, which shape how an agent does a specific type of work, duties shape how it behaves always. Examples include: always respond in a specific tone, never share pricing without asking for context first, always add a disclaimer to legal content, always cc a specific address on outbound emails. The agent treats duties as hard constraints, not preferences.

Duties are managed from the employee profile and take effect immediately. You can stack multiple duties on a single agent, and they compound without conflict as long as they do not contradict each other. Duties are the primary mechanism for enforcing compliance, brand consistency, and safety requirements across your AI workforce without having to rephrase instructions in every conversation.

## Use Cases

### Compliance team enforcing rules across all customer-facing agents

Set duties that every AI employee must follow. Non-negotiable behavior is guaranteed regardless of what the user asks.

### Legal team adding disclaimer requirements to an AI agent

Define required language as a duty. The AI employee includes it every time, without exception.

### Brand team protecting tone and messaging across agents

Duties lock in the rules that must never bend. Every AI agent on the team stays on-brand automatically.

### Security team restricting what agents can say or do

Duties define what is off-limits. The AI employee respects those boundaries regardless of the conversation.

## Comparison

| Before | After |
|---|---|
| AI agents drift from guidelines over time or under unusual prompts. | Duties are hard rules that every AI employee follows without exception. |
| Enforcing compliance across multiple agents means constant auditing. | Set it once as a duty and it applies to every agent automatically. |
| Users can prompt the agent into violating your policies. | Duties are non-negotiable and cannot be overridden by user instructions. |
| Different agents follow different versions of the same rule. | Shared duties ensure consistent, compliant behavior across the board. |

## FAQ

### Can duties override an AI employee natural behavior?

Yes. Duties take precedence over the agent default tendencies. If the agent would naturally include a price estimate but a duty says not to without approval, the duty wins. This is intentional: duties are non-negotiable constraints, not suggestions.

### How are duties different from instructions I give in a conversation?

Instructions in a conversation apply to that session. Duties persist permanently across all conversations and all users interacting with that agent. A duty is the difference between a one-time request and a standing policy.

### Can I set different duties for different teams?

Duties are set per AI employee, not per team. However, you can assign the same set of duties to all agents on a team by configuring each one. A future update will allow team-level duty inheritance.

### What happens if an AI employee cannot complete a task because a duty blocks it?

The agent explains why it cannot proceed and, depending on your configuration, either asks for human approval to continue or escalates to a manager. The agent never silently bypasses a duty to complete a task.

### How do I make sure my AI employee always follows certain rules or tone guidelines?

Duties are persistent behavioral rules that the AI agent follows in every conversation and task, regardless of what it is asked. You define them once and they apply automatically across all channels.

> We work in a regulated industry. I added a duty that requires a compliance disclaimer on every external document. The agent has never missed it once.
>
> Claire O., General Counsel · regulated industry

## Where Duties Catalog fits

Duties Catalog is part of Things that control how they behave.

Skip the settings panels. Tell your AI employee what skills to learn, what rules to follow, and what personality to use, all through natural conversation. They can even browse the skill catalog and configure themselves as work evolves.

- [Things that control how they behave](/en/features/behavior): Just ask. It configures itself.

## Read the guide

- [Guide: Duties Catalog](/en/guide/equip/skills)

## More in Behavior

- [Shape Your Employee's Personality](/en/features/behavior/employee_persona): Write a short persona prompt to set how each AI employee talks: formal or casual, brief or detailed, warm or blunt. Every employee starts with a role-based default, and you can rewrite it any time from the Profile tab. The change applies to the employee's next message, no restart needed.
- [Customize Employee Profile](/en/features/behavior/employee_profile_customization): Every hire's Profile tab is fully editable: name, role, team, avatar, persona, language, and tone of voice, all changed in place without a rehire. Updates apply from the next message onward, across every channel the employee uses. A change history on the same tab shows who edited what and when, including edits the employee made to its own persona.
- [Credits Saver](/en/features/behavior/credits_saver): Credits Saver watches every message and quietly hands the easy ones (greetings, quick acknowledgements, 'make that shorter') to a lighter, cheaper model, while real work still runs on the model you picked. On everyday back-and-forth that often means 40 to 50% fewer credits, with no drop in quality where it counts. It is on by default and fully in your control: turn it on or off anytime, and see tracked credits saved, its router cost, and the net benefit on its own page.
- [Ask Your Employee About Sistava](/en/features/behavior/platform_awareness): Ask your employee about Sistava itself and get a real answer: what plan you're on, what a feature costs to unlock, what your limits are, or who else you could hire. Your employee reads the live plan and feature data at the moment you ask, so the answer matches what your account actually has right now, not a guess from training data.
- [Choose How Deeply Your Employee Thinks](/en/features/behavior/reasoning_effort_control): Set how much an employee thinks before it answers, from Off through Minimal, Light, Medium, and Deep, or leave it on Auto so the platform picks the right depth per message on its own. It applies workspace-wide from the AI Behavior settings page, with a per-employee override when one employee's work genuinely needs a different depth than the rest of the team.
- [Set a Per-Task Action Limit](/en/features/behavior/max_actions_override): Set exactly how many actions one employee can take while working on a single task, from 50 up to 1,000. Give a research-heavy employee more room to search, read, and delegate before it has to stop and report back, or cap a simple support employee tighter so it never wanders past what the task needs.
- [Skills Catalog](/en/features/behavior/skills_catalog): Give any AI employee a step-by-step playbook for a specific type of work: how you want blog posts researched, how outreach emails get structured, how a report should be formatted. The employee reads the full skill only when a task actually matches it, so you can attach as many as you want without slowing anything down.
- [Personal Preferences Memory](/en/features/behavior/founder_personal_profile): Tell your team leader once how you want to be addressed, when you're working, and how you like answers written, and every employee on your team picks it up automatically. No settings form to fill out: just say it in chat and it sticks.
- [Skills They Can Master](/en/features/behavior/custom_skills): Teach any AI employee your own step-by-step process, from a blog-writing checklist to a lead-qualification script, and it follows those exact steps whenever a matching request comes in. Write it yourself in the Skills tab, or just describe your process in chat and the employee turns it into a skill. Skills load only when the task matches, so you can add as many as you want without slowing anything down.

## Explore

- [Every feature](/en/features)
- [Hire an AI employee](/en/market)
- [Pricing](/en/pricing)