The digital team — Cowork Assistants
Digital workers that take tasks — research, draft, watch, reconcile, summarise — prepare the work and leave the decision to a person.
- Repetitive work preparedResearch, drafts, follow-ups and reconciliation are done by the assistant.
- People decideWhen the work is ready the assistant opens an activity for its owner; it never decides.
- Cost is knownEvery job's steps, provider and cost are on record.
- Limits written downThe fields it may never touch are defined as rules.
Where it appears: The user form (Cowork Assistant kind) · task assignment · the assistant's job list
A user of a different kind
An assistant is a user defined on the user form with the Person / Cowork Assistant / Portal choice. It is assigned a task like a colleague; it does its part, writes the result into the task and waits for a person. It never decides.
- Identity. No password; it cannot log in. It has a named owner — an assistant nobody answers for cannot be saved. Draft, active, paused and retired states; working hours; a monthly and daily budget; a scope limited to the record types and projects it may work on.
- Role. Creating an assistant is not ticking eight boxes but choosing what kind of colleague it is: General, Research, Document, Follow-up (RPA) and Reconciliation (RPA) assistant.
Skills
Every skill has a written contract: what it reads, what it delivers and its cost ceiling. Shipped skills:
| Skill | What it does |
|---|---|
| Research and brief | Searches, reads pages through the guarded door, compares the options, writes only what it can cite |
| Draft a document | Prepares a draft in the house language from the task's request |
| Watch for a change | Watches a record or a source and reports when it changes |
| Reconcile two sources | Compares two lists and brings out the differences |
| Summarise what came back | Summarises replies and results |
| Follow up what is overdue | Finds overdue work and follows it up |
| Check records for missing data | Lists empty and contradictory fields |
| Answer in a conversation | Replies to a message with the record's context |
A customer can add a skill of their own on top of a shipped runner.
Duties and triggers
A duty is a standing order: a skill, the records it works on, and when — on a schedule (hourly, daily, weekly, monthly), when such a record is created or changed, or only when somebody presses Run.
Automation first
A step that can be written as a rule is done by rule: searching, fetching pages, checking citations, writing the page. The model is called only where judgement is needed, through PORTWARE AI's provider layer and spend ledger. Every job is a row: who asked, which steps, which were done by rule and which by a model, which provider, how many tokens, what cost.
Fields it may never touch
A decision's state, a contract's signature, a posted invoice, a closed task: the fields an assistant may never write are guard records, enforced on every model for every write made on an assistant's behalf.
| Module | What it does | Version |
|---|---|---|
| PORTWARE Cowork Assistants | Digital workers that take assigned work: research, draft, watch, reconcile, summarise -- and wait for a person to decide | 19.0.3.2.1 |