Build agents. Automate workflows. Run your work from one assistant.

The Three Parts of Carly

Your First 10 Minutes

1. Connect the inbox, calendar, and work apps you want Carly to use on the Integrations page.
2. Add plain-English working rules on the Preferences page: your hours, writing style, approval rules, priorities, and anything else Carly should remember.
3. Ask Carly for a real outcome in Chat or by email. You do not need commands or special syntax.
4. When you repeat the same task, turn it into a Workflow. When a job needs its own identity or tightly scoped permissions, create a specialized Agent.

Ask for Outcomes, Not Features

Describe the result you want and include any constraints. Carly can figure out which connected tools and steps are needed.

• → “Review my inbox, draft replies to anything urgent, and show me the drafts.”
• → “Research everyone I meet tomorrow and send me a briefing at 7am.”
• → “When a demo request arrives, enrich the lead, add it to HubSpot, and alert sales in Slack.”
• → “Create an onboarding agent that answers new-hire questions from our docs.”

Your Main Carly

Your main assistant works across your connected accounts and remembers your preferences. She can manage email and calendars, research, update CRM records, create files, use external apps, build automations, and coordinate with people on your behalf.

You can rename her, choose her display name and signature, and give her a custom @usecarly.com address from the dashboard.

Specialized Agents

Create a specialist when you want a narrower job or a smaller keyring. Each agent can have separate instructions and access to only the accounts, API keys, files, data, skills, and integrations it needs.

• → Sales agent: qualify inbound leads, enrich records, update the CRM, and book demos.
• → Recruiting coordinator: screen candidate emails, schedule interviews, and send follow-ups.
• → Support agent: answer common questions, create tickets, and escalate risky cases.
• → Operations agent: process invoices, reconcile data, update trackers, and chase missing inputs.
• → Client-facing agent: use a dedicated inbox and tightly limited tools to serve one customer workflow.

Create and Configure an Agent

Open the Agents area or tell Carly what you want her to build. Give the agent a clear job, the context it should use, what it may do without asking, and when it should escalate to a person.

Tools, Knowledge, and Permissions

Treat an agent like a teammate: give it enough access to do the job, but not every key in the building. For each specialized agent, you can choose whether it may use the calendar, memory, web search, scheduled work, and other built-in tools. You can also select specific inboxes, Drive or OneDrive accounts, connected apps and actions, custom API keys, custom OAuth connections, files, data tables, and skills.

Choose the Right Connection

Connect Gmail or Outlook

Email and calendar access are separate permissions. On the Integrations page, add the address with Google or Microsoft, then check its account card. Connect each service you want Carly to use—Calendar, Email, Contacts, and Drive or OneDrive—until it shows a checkmark.

Bring Any API Key

1. Go to Integrations, find Connect an API, and choose Paste an API key.
2. Add the credential with a recognizable name and a short description of the API.
3. Give only the agents that need it permission to use that key.
4. Ask Carly to use the named service. Include a public documentation link, or provide the relevant endpoint details if the API is private.

Keys are encrypted at rest. The raw value is inserted only when Carly executes the API call; it is not sent through the language model, returned by the dashboard, or written into run history. Prefer restricted, least-privilege keys and rotate them according to the provider’s security guidance.

What You Can Connect

Carly’s integration catalog spans the tools teams already run on:

If the app is not listed, open Connect an API. Carly can inspect its public API documentation, or you can paste an API key or MCP server URL directly.

Use Connected Tools in Plain English

• → “Add this lead to HubSpot, enrich the company, and set a follow-up for Friday.”
• → “Pull this month’s Stripe revenue and put the totals in Google Sheets.”
• → “Create a Linear issue from the bug report in my inbox and post it to Slack.”
• → “Use my Acme API key to fetch open orders and flag anything more than a week late.”
• → “Save the signed contract to Drive and update the deal stage in Salesforce.”

Choose What Starts the Workflow

• → Manually: run it on demand from the dashboard.
• → On a schedule: every hour, each morning, every Friday, monthly, or on a custom cadence.
• → When email arrives: watch a Gmail or Outlook inbox and filter by sender, subject, folder, label, or content.
• → When a calendar changes: respond to an event being created, updated, or deleted.
• → From a webhook: let a form, website, product, or internal system start the workflow.
• → From an app event, feed, or API: react to connected-tool events or poll an external source.

Build the Steps

A workflow can read data, transform it, make decisions, wait, loop over items, and act in another system. Add AI only where it adds value—classification, extraction, summarization, writing, or judgment. Deterministic steps handle the rest predictably.

• → Search, read, label, move, draft, or send email.
• → Add filters, if/match branches, for-each loops, and delays.
• → Read and update calendars, CRMs, spreadsheets, ticketing systems, files, and connected apps.
• → Call an API with a custom key or run a controlled Python transformation.
• → Ask AI for structured fields, a summary, a decision, or content for the next step.

Build Visually or Ask Carly

Open the Workflows page to start from a template or build step by step. You can also describe the automation to Carly and have her assemble it for you.

Preview, Test, and Monitor

• → Preview a real sample from the selected email, calendar, webhook, feed, or app trigger.
• → Test one step or the full workflow before switching it on.
• → During a safe test, external write actions are replaced with a preview of what they would change.
• → Inspect each run’s inputs, outputs, warnings, and errors from Workflow Details.
• → Pause, edit, run now, resume, or archive an automation at any time.

Workflow Ideas

• → Turn form submissions into enriched CRM records and personalized follow-ups.
• → Classify incoming email and route it to the right label, folder, person, or system.
• → Save attachments to Drive or OneDrive and log their details in a spreadsheet.
• → Prepare meeting briefs from the calendar, inbox, CRM, web, and internal docs.
• → Sync records between systems, produce recurring reports, and alert on exceptions.
• → Process invoices, receipts, support requests, applications, or onboarding tasks.

Workflow vs. Scheduled Task vs. To Do

Scheduled Tasks

Use a Scheduled Task for delayed or recurring work whose exact steps cannot be fully defined in advance.

• → “In two hours, check whether Priya replied. If not, draft a follow-up.”
• → “Every Friday, review my pipeline and tell me which deals look risky.”
• → “Tomorrow morning, investigate anything unusual in yesterday’s product metrics.”

To Dos

Ask Carly to add, update, organize, or remove items from your list in Chat, email, or SMS. If you say “remind me” or ask Carly to do something later, she will use a calendar reminder or Scheduled Task instead.

• → “Add ‘send the Acme invoice’ to my work todos.”
• → “What is still open on my list?”
• → “Remove the dentist task—I already called.”

Inbox Management

Connect Gmail or Outlook natively to let Carly search and triage mail, read threads and attachments, draft replies, send approved messages, save files, and work across multiple inboxes.

• → “Summarize everything unread and tell me what needs a response today.”
• → “Draft replies to the three most urgent client emails and let me review them.”
• → “Find the latest contract from Acme, save it to Drive, and send it to legal.”
• → “Follow up with every lead who has not replied in seven days.”

Calendar and Scheduling

• → View, create, move, cancel, and update events across Google and Microsoft calendars.
• → Find time across multiple calendars while respecting working hours, buffers, travel, and preferences.
• → CC Carly on a thread so she can propose times, handle replies, and send the invitation.
• → Use booking pages, clickable time options, recurring meetings, availability polls, and video links.
• → Coordinate a large group and remind people who have not responded.

Delegated Outreach

Carly can start a separate email thread on your behalf, handle the back-and-forth, and update you when the task is complete. You can monitor the full exchange in Conversations without sitting on every reply.

• → “Reach out to my sales team and collect everyone’s forecast by Friday.”
• → “Email Dr. Smith’s office and reschedule my appointment for next week.”
• → “Ask the event speakers for their bios and headshots, and update me when everyone has responded.”

Briefings and Research

Customize the Daily Briefing prompt to combine your calendar with inbox searches, todos, web research, news, weather, or connected third-party apps. For a more complex report with fixed data sources and steps, build a scheduled Workflow instead.

• → “At 7am, brief me on today’s meetings and anything I owe each person.”
• → “Research the companies I meet this week and flag any recent funding or leadership news.”
• → Scheduled Workflow: “Every Monday, summarize my pipeline, overdue follow-ups, calendar risks, and top priorities.”

People, Groups, and Preferences

Tell Carly who people are, group them, and write rules in plain English. Preferences can cover far more than scheduling: communication style, approval thresholds, default tools, priorities, routing rules, and how you want work handled.

• → “Remember that David is my brother and prefers weekend plans.”
• → “Create a group called Board with these six addresses.”
• → “Never send a pricing concession without asking me first.”
• → “Keep client emails concise, warm, and free of jargon.”

Chat

Use dashboard Chat for direct requests, file uploads, research, building agents and workflows, or any task where you want to see progress in one place.

Email

Email your agent directly to delegate work, or CC the agent into an existing thread so it can use the conversation as context. Forward attachments, invitations, requests, and documents just as you would to a human assistant.

SMS and Chrome

Text Carly for quick work on the go—including screenshots of conversations, flyers, or invitations. Use Carly for Chrome inside Gmail to see your schedule, copy availability, and add Carly to a thread without switching tabs.

Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and MCP Clients

Carly also runs an MCP server. Connect it to a compatible AI client so that assistant can act on your Carly calendar, mailbox, contacts, CRM, booking tools, and automations.

See the MCP setup guide for authentication and client-specific steps.

CRM and Contact Data

Use Carly’s built-in CRM with custom columns, enrichment, and pipeline tracking, or connect an external CRM such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Attio, or Pipedrive. Agents and workflows can keep records current as conversations and events happen.

Files, Tables, and Knowledge

Scope agents to specific workspace files, data tables, Drive or OneDrive accounts, inbox attachments, or connected knowledge systems. This is useful for internal Q&A, client operations, document processing, reporting, and grounded drafting.

Reusable Skills

A Skill is a reusable set of instructions for how Carly should handle a particular kind of work. Use one to standardize a process across conversations or agents.

• → Enrich every new lead using your company’s qualification rules.
• → Turn meeting notes into follow-ups, CRM changes, and assigned action items.
• → Review invoices against your policy before routing them for approval.