Understand Their Memory
Your AI employees use relevant past context to continue your work, with access controls and a setting for additional memory costs.
TL;DR
Advanced Memory helps employees recall useful facts and earlier conversations. It connects people, projects, and decisions without requiring uploaded documents. It is on by default; manage it in Settings > AI & Integrations > Memory.
How It Works
There are three useful ways to describe employee memory:
- Conversation history: recent messages that help the employee follow your work.
- File-based memory: saved notes, journals, and reusable skills.
- Graph memory: remembered facts, relationships, and earlier exchanges.
Uploaded reference material is separate searchable knowledge.
Continuity Across Your Employees
By default, an employee receives up to three recent messages from each of the seven other employees you most recently contacted. These are messages from your private chats, including employee replies, with dates and speaker labels. Long messages are shortened. This gives a small view of your recent priorities; it is not a complete history.
In Settings > Technical > AI Models, Conversation Continuity groups this chat's message limit, other employees and their message limits, and employee-to-employee exchanges. Include zero to ten other employees and set message limits independently. Each control shows its default and range. See the AI Models settings guide for limits and advanced tuning.
Only your own eligible chats in the current workspace are included. Another person using the same employee does not receive these excerpts from your private chats. Archived chats and older shared chat records are excluded. This basic conversation context is separate from Advanced Memory and remains available when that setting is off. It adds text to the reply's input without an additional memory-search model call.
| Step | What happens |
|---|---|
| You work together | Your current conversation gives the employee immediate context |
| Memory develops | Eligible conversations are processed in the background into remembered facts, relationships, and conversation snapshots |
| Relevant context returns | Later requests can retrieve matching facts and recent snapshots the requester is allowed to access |
| You stay in control | The Advanced Memory setting controls this additional extraction and recall |
The connected facts are sometimes called a knowledge graph. Think of notes that link a person to a company, a project to its deadline, and a decision to the work it affects. Finding related notes gives the employee context for a useful answer.
Memory search matches both words and meaning. It can also prioritize facts near a known person in those connections. This helps recall; it does not mean the employee reads every past conversation or that every remembered statement is correct.
What It Can Do
- Carry preferences forward. Recall that you prefer a short weekly report.
- Connect people and projects. Relate a named contact to the project discussed earlier.
- Continue previous work. Bring relevant decisions and recent conversation context into a new request.
- Look for more remembered facts. When the initial context is insufficient, the employee can search accessible memory again with a focused question.
- Help across employees. Reuse accessible context when you work with another employee, without making a private conversation visible to everyone.
For example, you discuss a client's launch date with one employee, then ask another to draft a project update. If the date was captured and retrieved, and access allows it, that discussion can help shape the draft. Ask the employee to verify a deadline when it matters.
Ask About Earlier Decisions
You can ask an employee to look up a preference, project detail, or earlier decision. Automatic recall supplies an initial selection of relevant facts, and the employee can search for more during the task. This additional search returns remembered facts rather than full conversation transcripts.
The default search uses facts that have not been superseded. When you explicitly ask about a previous state or how something changed, the employee can also search superseded facts and distinguish their dates from current information. Older information can be found when it is still stored and accessible, but search is selective and an empty result does not prove the event never happened.
Memory, Knowledge, and Live Information
| Source | Purpose | How it becomes available |
|---|---|---|
| Current conversation | Follow the request you are making now | You chat with an employee |
| Advanced Memory | Recall earlier discussions and related facts | Enabled memory processes eligible conversations |
| Searchable Knowledge | Find passages from your reference material | You train selected content on an eligible plan |
| Files and connected tools | Read working documents or check current information | The employee uses an available tool with the required access |
Uploading a file is not required for conversation memory. Equally, copying a file to Drive does not automatically train it. See Knowledge and Sources for choosing, copying, and indexing material.
How to Set It Up
Advanced Memory is on by default. Open Settings > AI & Integrations > Memory and use Advanced Memory mode to change it for your workspace.
Turning it off stops advanced fact extraction and recall. Existing advanced memory is retained for when you turn it back on. Your current conversation, files, and other available context can still support the employee's work.
Inspect Remembered Context
On an eligible plan, select Load memory in the Memory Knowledge section. This inspector is separate from the memory setting: an upgrade prompt for inspection does not mean memory is off. You can inspect only memory you have access to; ask its owner for access when required.
The inspector shows remembered people and projects, current and superseded facts, and stored conversation snapshots. Its test search shows what a query retrieves. Results are reused for one hour for your workspace and account; Refresh requests the latest view.
The Memory section under a message's Inspect action can show facts and snapshots recalled for that reply when your plan includes that deeper view. See plans and feature access.
What It Costs
Advanced Memory uses additional credits for model work that extracts facts after eligible conversations and searches relevant facts before replies. Retrieved text can also add to the context used to generate an answer. It can incur these costs without a single uploaded file.
An additional memory search during a task can use more credits. The employee should search when the available information is insufficient, with results limited in size. Turning Advanced Memory off also stops this on demand fact search.
The system skips advanced operations when memory is off and skips paid fact search when there is no accessible memory to search. Caching and ingestion limits reduce repeat work, but they do not make enabled memory free. Review the usage information on the Memory settings page and choose whether continuity is worth that cost for your work.
Document retrieval has separate checks: unavailable training access or no usable trained content means that search is skipped. Turning Advanced Memory off does not turn document training off.
Tips and Tricks
- State important facts clearly. Give the project name and date together so the connection is easier to capture.
- Correct mistakes explicitly. Name the old information and its replacement, then verify important corrections before relying on recall.
- Use current sources for changing facts. An old conversation is not proof of today's price, availability, or order status.
- Choose the right control. Use memory for continuity, trained documents for reference material, and connected tools for current records.
Good to Know
- Memory is selective and processed in the background. Not every exchange is captured, and a saved fact may not be retrieved for every relevant question.
- Access is checked for the current request. Sharing a workspace does not automatically make every private conversation available to everyone.
- Disabling memory preserves stored information. It is a pause in advanced extraction and recall, not a deletion action.
- Search and memory help ground an answer, but they do not guarantee correctness. Review the source for important decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Do I need to upload files for memory to work?
A: No. Advanced Memory works from eligible conversations. Uploaded and trained documents belong to the separate Searchable Knowledge feature.
Q: Does Advanced Memory cost credits if I have no trained documents?
A: Yes. Conversation extraction and fact retrieval can use credits independently of document training. Use the Memory setting to control that additional work.
Q: Does switching memory off erase it or clear my conversation?
A: No. It stops advanced fact extraction and recall while preserving stored memory. The current conversation and other available sources remain usable.
Q: Why does the memory inspector ask me to upgrade when memory is on?
A: Inspection and automatic recall have separate access rules. The inspector's upgrade message does not switch memory off or control whether conversations can contribute to it.
Q: Can another employee use what I told the first one?
A: Relevant memory can support work with another employee when access allows it. Private conversation memory is not automatically broadcast to other people in your workspace.