Chief of Staff
The Chief of Staff is your organization's AI front desk. It receives inbound messages from all connected Apps — Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram — and handles them intelligently: responding directly, delegating to workflows, managing projects and documents, or routing to the right contact.
How It Works
The Chief of Staff operates at the organization level. It sees all projects, workflows, and contacts. When a message arrives through any connected App, the Chief of Staff:
- Identifies the sender — Matches the inbound message to a registered Contact. Unknown senders are rejected.
- Recalls relevant context — Searches its knowledge graph memory for information related to the conversation.
- Processes the request — Uses its tools to answer questions, take actions, or delegate to specialized agents.
- Responds through the originating channel — Replies go back through the same platform (Slack thread, WhatsApp chat, Telegram conversation).
Knows How You Work
The Chief of Staff remembers how you like to work. Your preferences, routing hints, and working style are kept in mind across conversations and applied automatically — so you don't have to repeat yourself. This memory is private to you: it stays within your organization and shapes how the Chief of Staff handles your requests.
Real-Time Progress Updates
When the Chief of Staff processes a multi-step request, users receive instant feedback. Instead of waiting in silence while the AI works, you see progress updates like "On it, one moment..." or "Looking up that workflow now..." as each step executes.
This works across all channels — web UI, Slack, WhatsApp, and Telegram.
Capabilities
Conversations
The Chief of Staff maintains persistent conversations. In Slack DMs and WhatsApp/Telegram chats, the conversation continues across messages — you don't need to repeat context.
Media Processing
The Chief of Staff automatically extracts content from media you send through messaging platforms, so you can communicate naturally using voice, images, and files.
Voice Message Transcription
When you send a voice message (recorded using the push-to-talk button in WhatsApp, Telegram, or similar apps), the Chief of Staff automatically transcribes it to text and processes it as a regular message. You can speak your requests instead of typing them.
Supported voice formats: OGG/Opus, WebM/Opus, MP3, WAV, and MP4.
Only voice messages (recorded in-app) are transcribed. If you forward a regular audio file like a podcast or music track, the Chief of Staff treats it as a file attachment rather than a spoken message.
Image Vision and OCR
When you send an image, the Chief of Staff processes it in two ways:
- Vision — The image is passed to the LLM, which can see and describe its visual content. This works with JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP formats.
- Text extraction (OCR) — If the image contains text (screenshots, documents, signs, whiteboards), that text is automatically extracted and included alongside the image. This means the Chief of Staff has both the visual context and the exact text strings, so it can quote, search, or act on text from images accurately.
Document and File Handling
The Chief of Staff can save received images and documents to a project's document library. Documents saved this way are automatically classified into the Knowledge Graph.
Sending Files Back
The Chief of Staff can also send files to you — a document or artifact from a project's library, or a file you shared earlier in the conversation. Which file types it can send depends on the channel:
| Channel | File support |
|---|---|
| Slack | Virtually any file type, up to ~1 GB |
PDF, Office docs, images (JPEG/PNG/WebP), video (MP4/3GP), audio, and text files like .md/.csv/.json; up to 100 MB | |
| Telegram | Any file type, up to ~50 MB |
| Gmail | Any file type as an email attachment (~25 MB) |
See each channel's page under Apps & Channels for the exact details and limits.
Project Management
The Chief of Staff can create, update, and delete projects through conversation:
- "Create a new project called Customer Research"
- "Update the description of the SEO project"
- "Delete the test project"
Document Management
Read, create, update, and organize documents across projects:
- "What documents are in the Research project?"
- "Create a meeting notes document in the Planning project"
- "Move that document to the Archive folder"
Documents created or updated by the Chief of Staff are automatically classified into the Knowledge Graph.
Workflow Operations
Browse workflows, trigger runs, and check on recent activity:
- "Show me all workflows in the Content project"
- "Run the weekly report workflow"
- "What are the recent workflow runs?"
Integration Actions
When you've connected an app — like Google Calendar, Gmail, or GitHub — you can ask the Chief of Staff to perform a single action on it directly, no workflow needed:
- "Create a calendar event tomorrow at 3pm titled Design review"
- "List my Google Calendars"
- "Register a webhook on my Trello board"
These are one-shot actions on a connected integration. For something that should happen automatically and repeatedly ("every time a card moves to Done, …"), the Chief of Staff builds a workflow instead. The integration has to be connected and verified first — if it isn't, the Chief of Staff will point you to Settings → Integrations.
Knowledge Graph Memory
The Chief of Staff maintains persistent memory across conversations using a knowledge graph. It remembers:
- Preferences — How you like things done
- Decisions — Past conclusions and their reasoning
- Experiences — What happened in specific scenarios
- Patterns — Recurring themes and workflows
- Topics — Domain knowledge and facts
Memory is automatically recalled when relevant to the current conversation. You can also ask the Chief of Staff to remember specific things or query its knowledge directly.
Agent Delegation
For complex creation or modification tasks (building teams, designing workflows), the Chief of Staff delegates to the project-scoped Workflow Assistant. For adding new platforms, credentials, MCP servers, or custom Python tools, the Chief of Staff delegates to the org-scoped Integration Builder, which calls the Tool Builder internally when Python is the right answer. The Workflow Assistant routes its own capability requests through Integration Builder for the same reason — there is one path for capability work, and it goes through Integration Builder.
Web Search and Fetch
The Chief of Staff can search the web and fetch content from URLs to answer questions or gather information for your requests.
Entry Points
| Channel | How it works |
|---|---|
| Web UI | Chat drawer at the right edge of every page, opened by clicking the chat handle or pressing ⌘J. Pick the Chief of Staff anytime by clicking its avatar in the drawer header. It's also pre-selected on dashboard, templates, contacts, subscription, API tokens, and LLM configuration pages — see below for how the picker works. |
| Slack | Messages to your Slack bot are routed to the Chief of Staff |
| Messages to your WhatsApp Business number are routed to the Chief of Staff | |
| Telegram | Messages to your Telegram bot are routed to the Chief of Staff |
| API | POST to the messages endpoint |
How the Chat Drawer Chooses Its Agent
The chat drawer in the ORQO dashboard has a picker in its header: a row of avatar icons, one per assistant — Chief of Staff, Workflow Assistant, Integration Builder, and (for developer accounts) Tool Builder. Click the icon of the assistant you want to talk to, from any page, anytime. The icons have no text labels; once an assistant is active, its name appears as the title above the conversation.
The drawer also pre-selects the assistant you're most likely to want on the page you're on, so you usually don't have to pick at all. The pre-selection is just a starting point — one click on any other icon overrides it.
| Where you are | Pre-selected assistant |
|---|---|
| Dashboard, templates, contacts, subscription, API tokens, LLM configurations | Chief of Staff |
| Project, team, workflow, stage, run pages | Workflow Assistant |
| Settings → Integrations / MCP servers / Credentials / Apps | Integration Builder |
| Developer Portal pages | Tool Builder (developer-only) |
Which icons appear
- Chief of Staff and Integration Builder are always available.
- Workflow Assistant needs an open project. Off-project its icon is dimmed and a tooltip explains why ("Open a project to chat with the Workflow Assistant"). Open any project and it lights up.
- Tool Builder only appears for developer accounts.
Each assistant keeps its own last conversation, and your pick stays selected as you move around the dashboard — switch to the Chief of Staff on the dashboard, move to a project, and it stays the Chief of Staff until you click a different icon (or until you leave a page where your pick isn't available, at which point the drawer falls back to that page's pre-selected assistant and restores your pick when you return).
Cross-Agent Handoff
Each specialist knows the boundaries of its own domain. When a request lands outside that domain, the agent has two choices:
- Delegate — quietly call another specialist for a one-shot result and continue the conversation itself. You don't see the drawer change. (For example, the Chief of Staff asks Workflow Assistant for a workflow validation, gets the answer back, and replies to you in the Chief of Staff conversation.)
- Hand off — terminal transfer. The current agent ends its turn, the chat drawer swaps to the right specialist, your reformulated request lands in their conversation, and the main view navigates to the specialist's home page. A Chief of Staff conversation that turns out to be a workflow design problem hands off to Workflow Assistant cleanly.
When the specialist finishes — or decides the request really is out of their domain — they hand control back the same way. If the agent receiving control already has an open thread in this conversation (i.e. they're the one who handed off to you in the first place), that thread is resumed with full prior history rather than starting fresh: they pick up exactly where they left off, with a brief status note from the specialist on what just happened. So a Chief of Staff → Integration Builder → Chief of Staff round trip leaves you back in the original Chief of Staff chat, with everything Integration Builder did visible in between.
The source and target conversations are linked by a shared session ID and the chat drawer renders all of them as one continuous timeline. Horizontal separators mark every agent change — both directions:
You: Set up a Stripe integration so the billing workflow can issue refunds.
Chief of Staff: That's an Integration Builder task — handing off now.
── Integration Builder takes over ──
Integration Builder: Got it. Stripe for refunds — let me check what's already set up …
Integration Builder: Stripe is wired up and the refund tool is verified. Handing back.
── Chief of Staff takes over ──
Chief of Staff: All set — the billing workflow can now issue refunds via Stripe. Anything else?
You see the full journey across agents in a single chat window, not three disconnected conversations. The conversation history list shows each segment under its own agent so you can re-open any part of it later.
Security
The Chief of Staff only responds to registered Contacts. When a message arrives from an unknown sender (someone without a Contact record in your organization), the message is rejected before the Chief of Staff processes it. This prevents unauthorized access to your organization's AI capabilities.
To allow someone to interact with the Chief of Staff, add them as a Contact in Settings > Contacts and create a Contact Channel linking them to the appropriate App.