Guide: your AI staff — Atlas, the agents, and how to get the most out of them
The AI subscription comes with staff. This guide covers who they are, how to run them, and the habits that make them genuinely useful instead of noisy.
Meet the roster
- Atlas — the operator brain. Ask it anything about your business ("Why was March slow?", "Can I afford a second crew?") and it answers from your live tool data, not generic advice. Owner-only.
- Argus watches Inventory — items about to run out, low counts on stock that matters, expensive stock going stale.
- Chronos watches Bookings — schedule gaps, regulars slipping away, follow-ups that never happened.
- Midas watches Ledger — overdue invoices, spend drift, labor cost creeping past budget.
- Hermes watches Job Sites — jobs at risk of blowing their due date, bids going cold on the board.
Your AI plan sets how many agents can be on duty at once: Pro puts 4 on duty, Business runs the whole roster (Starter is Atlas plus every in-tool AI feature, no agents). Put the ones that watch your biggest fires on the clock first — for most trades that's Midas (money) and Hermes (jobs); for appointment businesses, Chronos and Midas.
Hiring and shifts
Everything happens in Command (the Staff page). Hire an agent and it starts working — zero setup. Each agent has a shift schedule (hourly, twice daily, daily, or weekly) and quiet hours so it never pings you at 2 AM. Daily is the right default; move an agent to hourly only when its domain is genuinely fast-moving.
Autonomy: three trust levels
- Suggest — the agent only reports. Every action waits for you.
- Green-gate — safe internal actions run on their own; anything customer-facing or money-touching still waits in your queue. This is the sweet spot for most owners after the first week.
- Auto — maximum autonomy, same hard rule: customer-facing and money actions always gate. No agent can text a client or touch an invoice without your tap.
Work the queue, train the staff
The approval queue in Command is where agents earn trust. Two habits matter:
- Clear it daily. Approvals are one tap; a queue you check every morning means agents act while the finding is still fresh.
- Deny with a reason. When you deny an action, say why — the agent remembers the preference and stops proposing it. Deny the same thing three times silently and it learns anyway. This is how the roster molds itself to how you actually run things.
Built to be quiet
An employee that cries wolf gets ignored, so the roster is engineered the other way: a healthy day ends in silence — no email, no feed spam. Findings you've seen don't come back tomorrow; they resurface on a slowing schedule only if they stay unresolved. When an agent does speak, it's worth reading.
The weekly digest
Every Monday morning a digest lands in your inbox: what each agent found, what was done, what's waiting on you. It's the five-minute version of "how did the business run last week" — read it with your coffee.
Getting the most out of Atlas
- Ask outcome questions, not report questions. "Which clients should I win back this week?" beats "show me lapsed clients" — Atlas will find the list and draft the move.
- Feed the tools. Atlas is only as smart as the data underneath. Log the time, complete the tasks, keep client records current — every entry sharpens every answer.
- Let it do the math. Margin checks, "can I afford X", bid sanity checks — Atlas reads your real numbers, so use it before decisions, not after.