How to make an AI employee in your team chat, no code

1. Pick one recurring job first

Hand over many jobs at once and it is hard to tell what works and what does not. Pick one job that comes back every day or every week, takes time and needs little judgment.

Jobs like these are a good place to start, by role:

• Founders: a brief on the company you meet on Thursday, getting back in touch with accounts that went quiet, the weekly report.
• Sales: find every account that stopped replying and draft a follow-up email for each.
• Marketing: turn your latest news into a five-card carousel, get a message when a competitor's price changes.
• Operations: post the weekly report every Monday, compare this quarter's sales with the same quarter last year.

Write the job down in one sentence, the way you would ask a colleague. For example: "Find every account that stopped replying and draft a follow-up email for each." That sentence is your first request.

2. There are two ways to do it

You can build it yourself, or use a service that is already built. Either way, start with the job you picked in step 1.

Build it yourself with Claude Code or Codex

Claude Code, made by Anthropic, and Codex, made by OpenAI, are AI tools that read files and run commands on a computer. You write down how your company works in an instructions file (CLAUDE.md for Claude Code, AGENTS.md for Codex). With Claude Code you can also turn the steps you repeat into skills (files that write down the order of a job you do often), so it does the job the same way each time.

It takes some setup. You usually use them in a terminal on a PC (the window where you type commands yourself). You need a paid plan from Anthropic or OpenAI, or an API key (an access key you pay for by use), and setting it up takes time. Calling it from your messenger or running it on a schedule needs its own setup. It suits you if the terminal is familiar and you like to tinker.

Use a messenger-based AI employee such as Ara

A service like Ara lets you keep the AI employee inside the messenger your team already uses. Ask in Slack, Telegram, Discord or another messenger, in your own words. Ara works in the tools you connected and posts the finished result in the same conversation. You can also skip the messenger and use the website only.

Sign-up takes minutes in the browser. It asks for your email and your company, then where your team talks, which can wait. You do not have to pick an AI: Ara works with its own AI from the start.

You can also mix the two. In the Ara desktop app you can pick your own Claude Code or Codex for Ara to work with.

3. Connect your tools and decide what it may do

To finish a job, an AI employee needs your company's tools. With Ara, each team member connects apps such as Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Notion, Google Sheets or HubSpot with their own account.

Every connected app lists its tools (single actions such as sending an email or creating an event), each with a switch. All are on until you switch them off, so switch off the ones you never want used. A switched-off tool cannot be used by anyone, and "Reads only" leaves only the reading tools.

An admin can set one rule per app: "Runs without asking", "Asks a person first" or "Never runs". A new workspace starts with mail and messaging apps such as Gmail, Outlook, Telegram and Discord set to "Asks a person first". In other apps with no rule, changing and deleting run without asking. So for anything hard to undo, like deleting or paying, switch it off or set it to ask a person first.

An action that waits shows what would change first. It runs only after someone allowed to approve it says yes: usually you for work on your own account, and for a shared AI employee a workspace admin unless approvers were named. If nobody decides, it expires and nothing runs.

• How Ara handles company data
• What Ara does in each connected app, and its limits

4. Your first-week checklist

1. Write the job you picked in step 1 down as a request.
2. Add Ara to the messenger you use. In Slack, type /invite @Ara in the channel where it should work. It never joins a channel on its own.
3. Connect only the apps that job needs.
4. Switch off the tools that are hard to undo, like sending and deleting, or set them to ask a person first.
5. Send the first request, then check the result and the run record yourself. The record shows what Ara read and what it did. Ara can be wrong too, so look again before you use the result.
6. Tell it what to fix and give it the same job again. Ara keeps what you told it and uses it on the next job.
7. If the job repeats every week, set it up once, for example "Every Monday at 9, post the weekly report here". Only a workspace admin can create a schedule. In a Telegram or Discord group, create it on the schedules screen of the dashboard.

5. What it costs

Every Ara account starts on the Free plan: free credits and no card, so nothing can charge on its own.

A finished job uses a credit, plus a little for any data lookups (Ara pulling information from a paid outside data source). A standing job uses one each time it runs. A failed job has no task cost, though the data lookups it made still count.

A job Ara answers with your own Claude Code or Codex has no task cost; only the data lookups it makes count. If you build it yourself, what you pay follows the plan of the company that makes the tool.

To bring Ara to your whole team, talk to us and we quote a rollout sized to it, before anything is signed.