Reviewing a draft an employee wrote
Comment directly on the paragraph that needs a rewrite instead of describing its location in a chat message. The employee reads the comment in context and replies once the edit is made.
Document Comments
Comment directly on any document, Drive file, or written asset your AI employee produces. Highlight the exact passage you mean, or drop a numbered pin on a picture, and your remark stays anchored to that spot. The thread lives beside the file permanently, so questions, edits, and approvals stay attached to the exact work instead of scattering across chat. Mention an employee and it replies in the same thread; mention a teammate and they get a notification that opens on that comment.
When an employee drops a report, contract draft, or written deliverable into Drive, the feedback loop usually breaks the moment it leaves chat. Someone has to paste a snippet back into a message, describe which paragraph they mean, and hope the employee remembers the context by the time it replies.
Document Comments keeps the conversation on the file itself. Open a document or Drive file, add a comment, and optionally @mention the person or employee who should act on it. The comment posts to a thread that stays attached to that document for as long as it exists, so anyone opening the file later sees the full back-and-forth: what was asked, what changed, and who signed off.
The difference from commenting in chat is permanence and precision: chat scrolls away and loses the connection to which file a message was about, while a document comment stays pinned to that exact artifact. An @mentioned employee receives the comment as a direct work request and replies in the same thread, so the fix and the ask never drift apart the way they do in a running conversation.
Because comments are threaded, a reviewer can reply to a specific point, resolve it once it's handled, or hover the comment and select Create task to turn it into a tracked to-do assigned to the employee responsible, with the original comment text carried onto the task card.
You are not limited to commenting on a whole file. Select a passage in a document and press Comment: the sentence you highlighted travels into the box alongside your remark, the passage stays marked in the text, and clicking either one jumps to the other. Pictures work the same way with a pin or a drawn box instead of a quote, numbered so that four remarks on one screenshot read as a single review rather than four loose notes. Because a highlight is matched by the words it covers rather than by a position on the page, it still finds its passage after the employee rewrites the document, and if that passage is gone entirely the comment says so rather than quietly marking the wrong sentence.
Feedback That Stays With The File
Every comment is anchored to the specific document it was written on, so the thread survives as long as the file does. There is no separate feedback log to keep in sync and no risk of a comment referring to a version of the file nobody can find anymore.
Replies stack under the original comment, giving reviewers a complete decision trail: what was flagged, what the employee changed in response, and when the thread was marked resolved.
Turn Feedback Into Tracked Work
Not every comment needs to become a task, but when one does, hovering the comment and selecting Create task assigns it to the employee accountable for the thread and carries the original comment text onto the card, so the request stays clear on the board.
The comment itself is left in place as the discussion and decision record, separate from the task that tracks the follow-through. That split keeps the document thread focused on context while the board tracks execution.
Comment On The Exact Passage, Not The Whole File
Review usually stalls on location. You know what is wrong, but describing where it sits takes longer than fixing it. Selecting the text and pressing Comment removes that step, because the quote travels with your remark and the passage stays visibly marked in the document until the point is settled.
This works on markdown, plain text, spreadsheets, code, and Word documents, which covers most of what an employee writes. Pictures take a numbered pin or a drawn box instead, and a set of marks is sent together as one review. Replies attach to the original point rather than creating a second mark, so one conversation paints one highlight.
How It Works
Comment where the document lives, not in a separate chat
Open the comment thread on any Drive file or document. Type @ to bring in an accepted organization member, an active employee, a team, or Everyone, then write the request and post it.
A mentioned person gets a bell notification linking straight to that comment. A mentioned employee receives it as an explicit work request and replies in the same thread. An unresolved thread stays visible on the document until someone resolves it or turns it into a task.
Employees are participants in the thread, not just recipients. They read the comments left on a file, reply in place, and can mark a settled point resolved, and they see the passage you quoted next to your words. Resolving never removes anything: the text, the replies, and who closed the thread all stay with the file.
Use Cases
Looping in a teammate on a contract or report
@mention a colleague on the exact document so they get a bell notification straight to that file, review it, and leave their own comment without you relaying context back and forth.
Keeping approval history on the file
Resolve a comment once feedback is addressed so the thread doubles as a lightweight audit trail: who asked for what, and when it was settled, without leaving the document.
Escalating a document fix into tracked work
When a comment needs more than a quick reply, create a task from it in one click so the fix shows up on the board while the original discussion stays attached to the file for reference.
Comparison
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| Feedback arrives as a chat message pointing at 'the third paragraph, the pricing one'. | The remark sits on the paragraph itself, with the sentence quoted, so nobody hunts for it. |
| Two weeks later nobody remembers why a clause changed or who approved it. | The thread is still on the file: what was asked, what changed, and when it was resolved. |
| A fix agreed in comments is forgotten because it never reached anyone's list. | Turn the comment into a task in place, assigned to the accountable employee, wording intact. |
| Marking up a design means writing five numbered notes and hoping the numbers line up. | Pin or box each spot on the image, write the remark beside it, send the review at once. |
FAQ
Which documents support comments?
Any Drive file or document an employee produced or that your team uploaded. The same comment thread also works on tasks, sprints, CRM contacts, and notification details, so the collaboration model is consistent across the platform.
Does the employee that created the document see my comment automatically?
Only if you @mention them, or the comment lands on an unmentioned CRM-style thread routed to your AI Team lead. On a document, @mention the employee you want to respond, and it arrives as a direct work request in that thread.
Can I turn a document comment into a task without retyping the request?
Yes. Hover the comment and select Create task. The task is assigned to the employee accountable for the thread and includes the original comment text, so nothing gets lost between the discussion and the tracked work.
What happens to comments if the document is deleted?
The thread is archived along with the document rather than left dangling, since the platform never hard-deletes a discussion tied to a piece of work.
Can I comment on one specific sentence instead of the whole document?
Yes. Select the passage in a Drive document and press Comment, and the quoted text is carried into your remark while the passage stays highlighted in the file. Clicking the highlight jumps to the comment, and clicking the quote jumps back to the passage. The highlight is matched by the words themselves, so it still finds the right spot after the employee rewrites the document.
Can I mark up an image or a screenshot the same way?
Yes. Click a spot on the picture for a pin, or drag a box around an area, write a remark beside each numbered mark, then send them together as one review. The numbers appear on the image and next to the comments, so the employee knows which remark belongs to which part of the design.
Who can see the comments I leave on a document?
Only people who can already open that file. Comments follow the same workspace and sharing rules as the document they sit on, and a notification link takes someone straight to the exact comment without granting access to anything they could not otherwise see.
Where Document Comments fits
Document Comments is part of Where their work lives.
Your AI agents manage their own workspace. Scheduled tasks run daily, weekly, or on custom cron cadences. A built-in kanban board tracks what is in progress. Every document lands in a personal Drive. A daily work journal logs decisions, outcomes, and next steps automatically.
- Where their work lives: Where your employees organize their work.
Read the guide
More in Workspace
- Move a Team Member to the Bench: Every workspace has one Bench: a holding area for employees who are not currently on a working team. Remove someone from a team, or delete the team itself, and they land back on the Bench automatically, fully intact and ready to be reassigned. Nothing about them is deleted; only their team membership changes.
- Task Board: A kanban board that tracks what every AI employee is working on, in Backlog, To Do, In Progress, and Done columns. Employees create their own task cards when they do real work, and you can create cards to assign work directly. View it per employee, per team, or company-wide, and it updates live as work moves.
- Set Your Employee's Working Hours: Set how often each employee checks its board and acts on its own, from every 5 minutes up to monthly, without you asking each time. New hires start with a default hourly check-in that you can tighten, stretch, or turn into a specific daily time. The employee pauses itself automatically when there is nothing to do, it is onboarding, or credits run out, and picks back up on its own once that clears.
- Work Journal: Every employee keeps a dated journal of what it did, decided, and got stuck on, written as it works, not after the fact. Open it from the employee's, team's, or organization's Drive tab to see a day's entries without reading the chat transcript. Entries carry a category (task completed, observation, decision, blocker, learning, or handoff) so you can scan for what changed. It starts on hire with nothing to configure.
- Task Comments: Comment directly on a task, Drive file, sprint, CRM contact, or notification, and @mention the person, team, or AI employee who should act on it. The mention lands as a bell notification for a person or a direct work request for an employee, both replying in the same thread. Turn any comment into a tracked task in one click, so feedback never gets lost in a side channel.
- CRM: Every business runs on a CRM, the shared book of the people and companies it deals with. Sistava builds one in, and your AI employees run it for you. They add a prospect the moment one comes up, keep contacts current, open deals and move them down the pipeline as they progress, and write notes so nothing is forgotten. You get one clean place to see who you know, what's in flight, and what it's worth, without paying for a separate CRM.
- Sales Pipeline: Your deals live on a pipeline board, the same shape as your task board: a column for every stage, New, Screening, Meeting, Proposal, Customer, and a card for each deal showing its value and the company behind it. As a deal gets closer to won, it moves down the board. Your AI employees keep the pipeline current, opening deals, moving stages, and updating amounts, so you always know what's in flight and what it's worth, at a glance.
- Let Your Employee Use Any Desktop App: Your employee controls your actual desktop, not just a browser tab. It clicks, types, manages files, and runs terminal commands in real applications on your machine, the same way you would sitting at the keyboard. It works through the free Desktop Companion app and covers native software, file management, and shell tasks in one capability.
- Let Your Employee Work with Local Files: Connect the Desktop Companion app and your employee can read, write, list, and search files on your own computer, scoped to your home directory. Ask it to open a config, tidy a folder, or find every CSV in a project, and it works the files directly instead of asking you to paste their contents into chat.
- Let Your Employee Run Terminal Commands: Once you pair the Sista desktop app, your employee can run real shell commands on your machine: git, npm, brew, ls, grep, and anything else you'd type yourself. Commands run as your own user with no privilege escalation, and a hard-coded blocklist rejects destructive patterns like rm -rf /, disk formatting, or piping a remote script into a shell before they ever execute.
- Let Your Employee See Your Screen: Your employee looks at your actual screen and works from what it sees, not just an API. It captures your desktop through the Sista desktop app, reads the pixels the same way you would, and can click, type, and scroll based on what it finds. That covers any app you have open, including native software, dashboards, and design tools that never had an integration.
- Employee Drive: Every document, generated image, video, screenshot, and daily work log an employee produces lands automatically in its Drive, no saving required. Browse it per employee, per team, or company-wide, as a searchable flat grid or as folders. Files preview inline, from PDFs and spreadsheets to code and video, so you rarely need to download something just to read it. Every update becomes a numbered version that you can preview or restore without losing the original file.