In this guide· 7 chapters
One install, one invite, and it is in the room.
Setting this up is an admin job, and a short one. Everything below happens in your organisation's admin panel and in Slack itself — there is nothing to deploy and no API key to paste.
A note before you start: this is the team agent — the one anyone in a channel can tag. If what you want is your own 1Presence reading your own workspaces as you, that is the Slack connector, and each person connects that themselves.
Add the bot to your workspace
- 1
Open your organisation's connectors
Switch into your organisation, then go to Admin → Connectors. You will find two Slack tiles there, and they are not the same thing: Slack — member access is how individual colleagues connect their own Slack, and the tile named for the bot itself is the team agent. You want the second one. (That tile's name is fixed; the handle you will actually tag in Slack is a separate thing, and step three is where you find it.)
- 2
Install into the workspace
Open the bot tile and install. Slack asks you to confirm what the app may do, as it does for any app, and you will need permission to add apps to that workspace. Once it lands, the tile shows the workspace it was installed into — and the exact handle Slack gave it.
- 3
Note the handle it came back with
This is the one detail worth two seconds of attention. Slack decides the handle at install, and if something in your workspace already claimed the obvious name, yours will be a variation. The panel shows you the real one. Use that — not the name you were expecting.
Bring it into a channel
Installing puts the app in the workspace; it does not put it in any channel. Like a new colleague, it only sees the rooms you bring it into — which is exactly the property you want, so start with one.
- 1
Invite it where the work is discussed
In Slack, open the channel and invite the app the way you would any other — the panel shows you the exact
/inviteline to paste, with the right handle already in it. Pick a channel with real work in it rather than a test one; the agent gets its bearings from what is actually being said. - 2
Say hello
Tag it and ask for something small — a summary of the last day in the channel is a good first request. It acknowledges within seconds, then edits that message into a checklist as it works, and leaves the answer in the thread. For a few minutes afterwards you can carry on in that thread without tagging it again.
Once it has been invited somewhere, the channel appears back in the admin panel, ready for the next step.
Decide who answers in each room
A bare tag runs whichever agent you have assigned to that channel. This is the setting that makes the difference between a general-purpose bot and something that feels like it belongs in the room.
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Open Channel agents
In the bot tile, the Channel agents section lists every channel it has been invited to. Pick the agent that should answer a bare tag in each one. The list only offers agents your organisation actually has, so build the specialist first if it does not exist yet.
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Match the agent to the room
The researcher in the channel where you argue about the market. The support drafter where customer threads land. The analyst where the numbers live. A channel without an assignment falls back to your organisation's default agent, which is a perfectly good place to start.
- 3
Anyone can still call someone else
The assignment sets the default, not a restriction. Naming an agent straight after the tag runs that one instead — useful when a thread strays into someone else's territory without needing to move rooms.
Tell it who is who
Out of the box the agent sees Slack users, not colleagues. Mapping the two together once is what lets it know that the person asking is the same person who has a 1Presence membership, a place in your teams, and a name it can use.
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Map each member to their Slack user
Go to Admin → Members, open a person, and set their Slack handle. That is the whole mapping.
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What it changes
A mapped person is recognised: the agent addresses them properly, stays inside the teams they belong to when it reaches for shared knowledge, and their usage is attributed to them rather than to an anonymous room.
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Unmapped colleagues still get an answer
A member of your workspace you have not mapped can still use it — they are just not recognised individually, and their work is attributed to the organisation rather than to them. Map the regulars; leave the rest.
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People from outside cannot
Guests and outside collaborators, including in a shared channel, are turned away with a short message. It spends the organisation's credit and reaches the organisation's knowledge, so it is kept to full members of your workspace — there is nothing to configure for this.
Permission, on purpose
An agent you bring into a channel starts with no access to your organisation's tools. The first time it needs one to finish a job, it stops and says so in the channel rather than quietly failing or quietly proceeding.
- 1
It asks in the channel
You will see a short note saying which capability it needs. Nothing has happened yet — it has paused at the point of needing permission.
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You grant it in 1Presence
Open that agent in your organisation's 1Presence and grant the access on its Access tab — not from inside the Slack thread. That is deliberate: a permission decision belongs somewhere considered, not in the middle of a busy channel where a tap is cheap.
- 3
Then tag it again
Repeat the request and it goes through. The grant sticks — you are not asked a second time for the same thing.
Your organisation's default agent is the exception: it carries the access it already has, so a channel using the default typically never sees this flow at all.
When the mention list shows a look-alike
Worth knowing because it is confusing rather than difficult: some workspaces end up with two entries in the mention list that both look like 1Presence. Only one of them can hear you, and tagging the other produces no reply and no error — Slack simply has nowhere to deliver the message.
This happens when a different 1Presence app reached the workspace first and claimed the obvious handle, so Slack gave the team bot a variation. It is a naming collision, not a fault in the install.
The fix is to use the handle the admin panel shows. When the panel detects that this has happened, it says so directly and names the one that works — invite and tag exactly that. If your team has already been tagging the wrong one, that also explains the silence.
What it did, and what it spent
Two things sit in the bot tile once it is running, and both are worth a glance in the first week.
Recent activity
Every run: who asked, in which channel, which agent, what it reached for, how it ended. It deliberately keeps no message text — a record of what happened, not of what was said.
The organisation's balance
Slack work draws on the organisation's balance rather than anyone's personal plan. If it runs out, runs stop and the channel is told plainly — nothing fails silently and nothing runs up a surprise.
Things to try first
Tag it and ask in plain words. A few that show what the channel context is actually doing:
Catch me up on this channel since Friday.
Reads the thread end to end and tells you what was agreed, what is blocked, and what still needs an answer.
Draft a reply to the customer in this thread.
Writes it in the channel for everyone to see and edit — nothing is sent to anyone from here.
Pull last week's signups and chart them.
Works from what your organisation has connected, and posts the result in the room.
What did we decide about pricing?
Answers from what this channel has built up over time, without anyone re-explaining the background.
Questions people ask
Q Does it read our channels when nobody has tagged it?
It has no standing watch, sends nothing unprompted, and posts nothing on a schedule — every message it sends is a reply to someone. The one nuance: for a few minutes after it has answered, it will pick up a follow-up in that same thread, or from the same person in that channel, without a fresh tag. Outside those short windows, channel activity is discarded the moment it arrives — not stored, not read by an agent, not acted on.
Q Does that follow-up behaviour work in private channels?
No — there it needs a tag every time. Tagging works the same in a private channel once you have invited it; only the untagged follow-up window is public-channel behaviour.
Q Can people outside our workspace use it?
No. Guests and outside collaborators — including in a shared channel — are turned away with a short message. It spends the organisation's credit and reaches the organisation's knowledge, so it is limited to full members of your workspace.
Q Can it see channels we have not invited it to?
No — the same as any Slack app. It sees the rooms it has been invited into, and nothing else.
Q Does what it learns in one channel leak into another?
No. Each channel keeps its own memory, held apart from the others and from anyone's personal 1Presence.
Q What happens if I message it directly?
You get the company's agent, reaching the company's knowledge on the company's account — a private channel of the organisation rather than a personal session. That conversation has its own memory too.
Q Who pays for the work it does?
The organisation. Slack runs draw on the organisation's balance, never a member's personal plan.
Q Do people need their own 1Presence account?
Not to tag it in a channel. Mapping them to a membership is what makes it recognise them by name and respect their team scope — worth doing for the regulars.