The concierge

What the concierge is

The concierge is a chat that builds. Tell it what your team does and what it is working on, and it creates spaces, adds rooms, sets up boards, writes stories into them, and hands those stories to an agent room to work on.

It is the alternative to assembling a workspace by hand. Nothing it makes is special: every space, room, board and card it creates is an ordinary one your team can open, rename and delete, because it works through exactly the actions you would use yourself, as you.

Where to find it

Two places, with different reach:

• The organization's home page. Here it can create spaces as well as everything inside them. Reaching it requires being the organization's owner or an admin.
• A space's home page. Here it works inside that one space: rooms, boards, stories, integrations. Any member who can write in the space can use it, so people build in their own space without needing to administer the organization.

The space-scoped version genuinely cannot reach past that space. It has no tool for creating a space, and the space it is working in is fixed rather than something the conversation can change.

What it can do

• Look around — read what spaces, rooms and boards already exist, so it extends your workspace rather than duplicating it.
• Create a space (organization scope only).
• Create a room, of any of the 21 types.
• Create stories on a Kanban board, choosing a column — Backlog, To Do, In Progress, Review or Done, defaulting to To Do.
• Connect a board to an agent room, so @agent on a card reaches that agent.
• Hand a story to an agent, which starts a build run on it.
• Browse the integration catalogue and connect one, after asking you for the credentials in a form.

What it cannot do

Its instructions are explicit, and it will tell you so if you ask:

• It cannot delete anything.
• It cannot change billing.
• It cannot reach another organization.
• It cannot enable an integration's write actions without your explicit yes, given through a form.

Credentials never go through the chat

When the concierge needs a secret — an API key for an integration — it presents a form rather than asking you to type it into the conversation. Secret fields are sent separately from the message, the transcript records only "[provided]", and the value is substituted in at the moment the tool runs.

So the conversation you can scroll back through, and that an administrator can read in Organization → Chat logs, never contains the key.

Whose key the concierge runs on

The concierge names your organization on every call, so it runs on exactly the same key everything else in Openbook runs on — whichever mode Organization → AI self hosted is in.

• Managed by us — the platform's model and the platform's bill, and the call counts against the owner's token allowance. Once the allowance is spent the concierge is refused with the account service's own sentence, naming the figures, the date it turns over and the two ways out.
• Self hosted — your organization's own provider key. Your provider bills you directly, nothing is metered against the allowance, and the concierge is never refused for being over one.

This changed. The concierge used to run on the platform's key whatever mode an organization was in, and it was the one feature Openbook's credit ledger charged for. Both halves of that are gone: credits were retired, and the concierge now follows the organization's mode like everything else. See What happened to credits.

If the mode is managed and no platform model has been configured at all, the concierge says so and points an administrator at it — the platform's model is set at the account service, and there is nothing an organization can do about that from its own AI page.

See AI usage & the token allowance.

Limits

• A run takes at most 14 steps before it stops and reports.
• A message can carry up to 6 attachments, each up to 4 MB.
• The sidebar keeps your 20 most recent conversations.

Using it well

• Describe the team, not the feature list. "We are four engineers and a designer shipping a mobile app, two-week sprints" produces a better workspace than "make a kanban board".
• Let it look first. Asking it what already exists before asking it to build stops it duplicating a board you forgot about.
• Check what it made before piling work on. Everything is a normal room; renaming and deleting is yours to do, and doing it early is cheaper.
• Use the space-scoped one for day-to-day work. It needs no organization privileges and cannot wander.