Hire a team and get a first contact instantly
Hire any pre-built team and its leader is already seated when you land in the chat, so you have one clear person to talk to about the team's work from the first message, no setup required.
Give Your Team an AI Leader
Every team you hire gets one employee assigned as its leader, marked with a crown badge. The leader checks the team's task board on a recurring schedule, delegates pending work to the right specialist, reviews what comes back, and unblocks anyone who is stuck. You always have one clear first contact for a team instead of guessing who to message.
When you hire a pre-built team, one employee is set as its leader the moment the team is created, so you land in their chat immediately instead of picking someone yourself. For a custom team, whichever member's role is marked as a lead takes the seat; if none is marked, the longest-tenured member is automatically promoted.
The leader is the only member with a default recurring schedule, its Heartbeat. It starts on an hourly check-in right after hire and adjusts automatically as the team settles into its rhythm. Every time it fires, the leader checks the team's task board, delegates pending work to the right specialist, reviews what came back, and unblocks anyone who is stuck. Other team members stay idle until the leader, or you directly, hands them work, which keeps a team's activity centered on one coordinator instead of every member firing off on its own clock.
The alternative to this is messaging individual specialists yourself and manually tracking who is doing what, which falls apart once a team has more than two or three members. A leader removes that coordination tax: it holds the team's task board, so you get one place to check status and one employee who already knows the full picture. You are never locked into going through them, though. Once a team is active, you can expand it in the sidebar and message any member directly, and the leader keeps coordinating in the background regardless.
What the Leader Does on Its Heartbeat
Only the leader gets a default recurring schedule, called its Heartbeat. It fires hourly right after hire and adjusts its cadence automatically as the team settles in. Each run follows the same loop: check the team's task board, delegate any pending work to whichever specialist is the right fit, review what specialists already returned, and unblock anyone who is stuck on a task.
No other member on the team runs its own recurring schedule. They activate only when the leader hands them a task, or when you message them directly. That design keeps a team's automatic activity centered on one coordinator's clock instead of scattering it across every member, which is what makes the team's task board a reliable single place to see what is happening.
Opening a Sprint
A leader can open a sprint, a named stretch of work with one goal, when there is something worth naming, like a launch or a defined push. It is not automatic and not required: most weeks a team just works its board in order with no sprint open, and that is a normal way to work.
Before opening a sprint, the leader talks it through with you: what the goal is, in your own words, and how long it should run. While a sprint is open, tasks created during that stretch belong to it. Closing it is where the leader writes an honest account of what landed and what did not, giving you a record of the push instead of a board that just quietly moved on.
How It Works
One coordinator per team, assigned automatically and never left vacant
Leadership assignment happens without any setup from you. Pre-built teams ship with a leader defined in the team template, so hiring the team also seats its leader in the same action. Custom teams promote whichever member has a role marked as lead; if none is marked, the longest-tenured member on the team takes the seat instead.
The leader carries a crown badge everywhere a team roster shows up: the sidebar, the Members tab, and the org chart. Clicking their name opens a direct chat where they gather what you need and delegate to the right specialist. If a leader is ever removed from the team, the next longest-tenured member is promoted automatically, so a team is never left without one to coordinate its board.
In pre-built teams, the leader is a pure coordinator with no domain skills of its own: it delegates and reviews, it does not do the specialist work itself. In a custom team, the leader can hold domain skills and do work alongside its coordination role. The leader is also the one who writes and updates the team's charter, its description, vision, and guidelines, with other members surfacing change requests to the leader rather than editing it directly.
Use Cases
Keep a growing team's board from turning into chaos
As a team picks up more specialists, the leader's hourly heartbeat keeps checking the shared task board, delegating pending work, and unblocking anyone stuck, instead of you tracking who is doing what by hand.
Name a push with a sprint, then get an honest close-out
When a launch or a defined stretch of work is worth naming, ask the leader to open a sprint. Tasks created while it is open belong to it, and closing it produces a written account of what actually landed.
FAQ
Can I have multiple leaders on one team?
No. Each team has exactly one leader at a time, marked with a crown badge across the sidebar, the Members tab, and the org chart.
Does the leader do actual domain work?
In pre-built teams, no. The leader is a pure coordinator that delegates and manages the board. In custom teams, the leader can hold domain skills and do work alongside its coordination role.
Can I choose or change who leads a team?
Not from the app today. Leadership is assigned automatically, from the team template at hire for pre-built teams, or by seniority for custom teams, and there is no manual reassignment control available yet.
What happens if the leader leaves the team?
The longest-tenured remaining member is promoted to leader automatically, so an active team is never left without one to run its heartbeat and coordinate its board.
Do I have to talk to the leader, or can I message specialists directly?
You are never locked into going through the leader. Expand a team in the sidebar and you can click any member's name to message them directly at any time; the leader keeps coordinating in the background regardless.
Where Give Your Team an AI Leader fits
Give Your Team an AI Leader is part of How they coordinate as a team.
Run your AI workforce the way you run a good team. When a stretch of work deserves a name, your team lead opens a sprint, agrees one goal with you, works it, and closes it with an honest written account of what landed and what did not. Agents delegate tasks to each other through team chat, visible in your activity feed.
- How they coordinate as a team: Sprints, one goal, and delegation. Built in.
Read the guide
More in Sprints Planning
- Delegation: When you ask a team leader for something, it splits the work and hands pieces to the right teammates instead of doing everything itself. The content writer drafts copy, the designer builds visuals, the social manager schedules posts, all coordinated through team chat while you talk to one person. Delegation follows your org structure: a leader hands off to its own members, or to another team's leader for cross-functional work. Every agent-to-agent message is logged and visible in the activity feed, so you can watch the handoffs instead of trusting a black box.
- Sprints: Give a team's work a goal and a time window instead of an endless task list. Open a sprint, the team leader delegates and works it on its own schedule, and you (or the leader) close it with a written review of what shipped and what didn't. Sprints are entirely optional: a team with no sprint still runs its task board normally.
- Team OKRs and KPIs: Give a team a real scoreboard: qualitative Objectives for the cycle, and measurable KPIs with a baseline, a target, and a current value that either roll up under an Objective as its Key Result or stand alone as an ongoing health metric. Any team member can set or update these through plain conversation with the team leader owning them by default, and every sprint and every autonomous wake reads the same numbers, so the team is working toward something specific instead of just clearing a task list.
- Team Goals & Guidelines: Give a team a shared Vision statement and a set of Guidelines that every member reads before they act. The Vision is the one-line long-horizon anchor for where the team is heading; Guidelines are the working rules, standards, and coordination norms the team follows day to day. Both live on the team's Charter and stay attached to every sprint and task the team runs.
- Start a Task Now: Every open task has a Start now button. Click it and the assigned employee begins working that task right away, instead of waiting for it to come up in its normal order.
- Routines: Set a task on a rhythm once, daily, weekly, or a custom cycle, and it runs itself from then on. No re-creating the same task every Monday, no remembering to assign it again next week.
- Playbooks: Every employee leads with a short set of proven playbooks, the highest-value jobs they can run start to finish for the role you hired them for.
- Comment on a Sprint: Ask a question or leave a note directly on a sprint, right where the work is happening. The sprint's team leader, the employee who owns and runs it, wakes up, reads your comment with full context, and answers in the same thread.
- The Weekly Sprint Check-In: Once a week your team lead looks at the state of the work and raises the sprint question with you directly: is there a stretch of work worth naming and turning into a sprint, or has the open sprint run past its date and earned a close? You answer in a sentence and the team acts on it. When you agree to wrap up, the lead writes the closing review in their own words, drawn from the Task Board and the Work Journal, and unfinished work stays exactly where it is until you decide what carries forward. Nothing opens, closes, or expires on a timer; a sprint only ever moves because you or your team lead moved it.
- Work Toward Your OKRs: Give your AI team objectives and key results in plain language, the same way you'd brief a human manager, and the team leader plans every sprint against them. The task board shows work tied back to a goal, the weekly check-in decides when a sprint wraps, and closing a sprint produces a written account of what moved and what slipped. Ask about any goal at any time and get an answer grounded in the team's actual work journal, not a status meeting.