How Opereo works
The handful of ideas behind Opereo AI, explained in plain language - company, departments, agents, models, and the canvas.
Overview
Opereo AI borrows the shape of a real business. You have a company, the company has departments, and each department has people doing jobs. In Opereo, those people are AI agents.
This page walks through each idea once, so the rest of the guides make sense.
Your company
When you sign up you create an organization — your company in Opereo. Everything you do lives under it: departments, agents, files, teammates, and billing.
Teammates you invite join the same organization. You can be a member of more than one organization and switch between them from the sidebar.
Departments
A department is one part of your business, like Sales, Operations, or Customer support. It's where agents work.
Each department keeps its own agents, its own files, and its own connected apps, so one part of the business never gets in the way of another. Most people start with a single department — the part of the business they'd hand off first — and add more later.
Read more in Departments.
Agents
An agent is an AI employee with a clear job. You'll also see the words teammate and AI employee in the app; they all mean the same thing.
Every agent has:
| Part | What it is | Where to find it |
|---|---|---|
| Identity | Its job description: where it works, what it owns, how it should sound. It reads this before every task. | Employee settings → identity |
| Model | The AI it runs on. Connect your ChatGPT plan or an API key and switch models anytime. | Employee settings → models |
| Skills | Reusable know-how you install from a hub or write yourself. | Employee settings → skills |
| Channels | Where people can reach it: the app, a WhatsApp number, your own Telegram or Slack bot. | Employee settings → channels |
| Automations | Work it does on a schedule, delivered to a channel you choose. | Employee settings → automations |
| Integrations | Apps it can act in, like Gmail, Notion, or Shopify. Sign in once, then just ask. | Employee settings → integrations |
Agents don't share these settings. Two agents in the same department can run on different models, have different skills, and be reachable on different channels.
The workspace
When you hire your first agent in a department, Opereo sets up a private, always-on workspace for it. That workspace is where the agent's conversations, memory, and settings live, and it keeps running whether or not you have the app open.
A workspace can hold more than one agent. When you click New employee in a department that already has one, the new agent joins the same workspace.
While a workspace is being set up, the department shows a status card that reads "{name} is moving in". This usually takes a couple of minutes, and the page updates on its own.
Billing follows the workspace: you pay for agent hosting, one line per workspace. See Billing and plans.
Bring your own AI
Opereo hosts your agents; it does not sell AI usage. Each agent runs on a model you connect yourself — your ChatGPT plan through a one-time sign-in, or an API key from an AI company like OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google.
Until a model is connected, an agent can't answer. That's why Connect a model is the first item on the setup checklist. Read more in Models.
Canvas and Chat
A department has two views, switchable at the top of the sidebar:
- Canvas — every agent is a card you can drag around. Click a card to chat, or click its gear to open settings. The first-agent checklist lives here.
- Chat — a focused conversation view with your agents listed down the side.
Both views show the same agents and the same conversations.
Discover, hub, and templates
You don't have to build every agent from scratch. Discover (⌘K) searches your existing agents and a hub of ready-made profiles — starting points for common roles like research, sales, or content. Install one and make it your own.
Skills and automations have hubs too, so you can start from a template instead of a blank page.