Team Agents
An agent that leads other agents: choosing its members, one at a time or as a team, how many work at once, the task budget and spend limit, the lead's own tools, and where a team works.
A Team agent is a lead with members. Its members are other agents in your workspace, each with its own model, tools, knowledge and approvals. The lead reads the request, answers small questions itself, and hands bigger or parallel work to its members; then it answers with what they found.
Use one when a job splits into parts that different specialists do well: an operations lead that sends a supplier question to Supplier analyst and an invoice question to Invoice clerk, at the same time, and puts the two answers together.
Make a Team agent
Create an agent and set Agent Type to Team. (The API and exported files store this type as delegate.) Its setup gains a Members section.
- The members. Tick the agents this Team agent can hand work to. Each works with its own tools and approvals. Leave all unticked to allow any agent.
- How members work:
| Choice | What it does |
|---|---|
| As a team | Members work in parallel, write to the lead while they work, and share one task list. |
| One at a time | The lead hands each task to one member and waits for it before the next. |
A new Team agent starts as a team. An agent that was a delegate before teams existed keeps working one at a time until you change it.
Write the lead's Instructions like any agent's, and add what makes it a good lead: what each member is for, and when to answer alone.
As a team: the numbers
| Setting | What it does |
|---|---|
| Members working at once | How many members work side by side (3 for a new Team agent). Others wait for a free slot. |
| Task budget per turn | How many tasks the lead may hand out in one turn, helpers included (6 for a new one; up to 50). At the budget, the lead is told to finish with what it has. |
| Spend limit per turn | Optional. The most the turn may spend on models, lead and members together. |
Both limits are checked before every model call. When the budget or the limit is used, the lead finishes with what its members have found. A team costs what its members' work would cost one by one: working together saves time, not money.
Members working at once has a ceiling. On Cloud it is set by the plan: Free 2 · Solo 3 · Team 5 · Growth 8 · Business 8. Self-hosted, an owner sets it under Settings › General › Agent teams (Members working at once, most; 10 unless changed, up to 50). More at once costs no more, but providers' rate limits slow a large team down.
The lead's own tools
A Team agent has a Tools section of its own, empty to start. Give it a few quick lookups and it can answer a small question without starting the team, which is cheaper and faster. When the lead answered alone, the turn says so: Answered alone, without its members.
The lead never borrows a member's tools. A member's tool runs as that member, under that member's tool policy, and approving it runs it as that member.
Switch on Can send helpers and the lead, or any member that has it, can also hand a focused task to a short-lived helper. Helpers count against the same Members working at once and Task budget per turn.
Where a team works
| Where | What happens |
|---|---|
| Chat, and a workspace member's own messaging channels | The team works, with a line per member you can watch and steer. |
| A workflow's Agent step | The team works inside the step's time and the run's cap. See A team in a workflow. |
| A schedule | Whatever the schedule runs: the agent, or the workflow its step is in. |
| The chat widget, a public channel, a phone call | A visitor talks to the lead alone: no members, no helpers. |
| The OpenAI-compatible endpoint | The client gets the team's final answer only. |
When a member needs a person's approval, it asks on its own and the others keep working. See When team members need approval.
What a team costs on Cloud
In chat, a turn is charged for its agents' active minutes added together (the lead's, each member's and each helper's), not the minutes on the clock: one credit per started minute, at least one credit. In a workflow, a Team step is 1 credit plus 1 for each member or helper task it ran. Model tokens are billed as they are used, from the model wallet or your own keys. See Plans and credits.
Self-hosted, a team costs only its model tokens, on your own keys.
Agent Types
Four kinds of agent — conversational, code, orchestrator and Team — and which one a given job actually wants.
Watching a Team Work
What a Team agent's turn shows while it works: the task list, one line per member, messaging a member or the lead, stopping one member or the whole team, and what is kept afterwards.