This article is auto-synced from its in-app version in Tai.
Chats are interactive, multi-turn conversations with an AI agent inside the Workbench.
When you'd use this
Start a chat when you want to ask an agent a question, work through a task step by step, or test how an agent behaves before deploying it. For example: ask the TripBuilder Ops & BI Agent to summarise a booking, or run through a scenario with the Tai Guard agent.
Steps
In the Workbench sidebar, click Chats (under the Terminal section).
In the chat panel, select an agent from the agent picker. Available agents are listed with their names and descriptions. Narrow the picker with the ownership pills (All, Starred, My agents, Company agents, Built-in) and the Maturity filter — your selection is remembered, so it's applied again the next time you open Chats.
Type your message in the input field and press Enter (or click the send button).
The agent responds in real time. Continue the conversation across as many turns as you need.
To start a fresh conversation with the same agent, begin a new session. Past sessions are listed in the sessions panel on the left.
While the agent works on your request, a live activity timeline shows what it is doing — thinking, searching the knowledge base, querying your data, searching the web, working with files, or running subtasks. Completed steps get a checkmark and the current step pulses. Once the answer starts streaming, the timeline collapses into a one-line summary, which you can expand at any time — including on past replies.
Start a chat from the agent detail page
If you want to test a specific agent:
In the sidebar, click Agents.
Click the agent you want to test.
Click the Test Chat button in the top-right corner. This opens Chats with that agent pre-selected.
Answer an agent's questions
When an agent needs you to choose between a few alternatives — which trip, which tone, which date range — it shows the question as a card above the message box instead of in its reply.
Click an option, or press its number key. The arrow keys move between options.
If none fits, choose Something else (when offered) and type your own answer.
Click Skip to leave a question unanswered; the agent is told you skipped it.
With several questions, the card shows them one at a time ("1 of 3"); Back returns to the previous one. Your answers go to the agent together after the last question, and appear in your message as question-and-answer pairs.
Close the card with × to set it aside; it comes back the next time you load the chat. Typing a message in the message box instead skips the open questions.
Agents only ask this way in a live chat. Reports and scheduled runs never stop to ask.
Open or download files the agent produced
When an agent's reply includes a file — a report, spreadsheet, or document — it shows up as a card under the message.
HTML reports open in a preview right in the conversation when you click the card. From the preview, use Download to save the file, or Export to PDF (when available) to save it as a PDF instead. To save the file without opening it, click the download icon next to the card.
Other file types (CSV, Excel, Word, PDF) download as soon as you click the card. Images appear directly in the reply.
Memory — what agents remember
Agents can remember facts across chat sessions. Ask an agent to remember something — a preference, a recurring detail, a fact worth reusing — and it recalls it in your later conversations with that agent, so you don't have to repeat yourself.
Memory is scoped per user, per agent:
Private to you. What you tell an agent is never visible to other users, even when they chat with the same agent.
Private to that agent. Memories stay with the agent you shared them with. They don't carry over to a different agent — tell another agent yourself if it should know the same fact.
To see or change what an agent remembers, just ask in the chat: "What do you remember about me?" or "From now on, my preferred airline is KLM".
Tips and limits
Each chat runs against one agent at a time. To switch agents, start a new session.
An agent keeps up to 200 remembered facts for you. Past that limit, the facts updated longest ago are dropped first.
Past chats are saved and listed in the Chats area, so you can reopen a previous conversation.
Under the last message you'll see what the conversation has consumed in credits. It covers the whole session and grows as the conversation does — see Credits and billing.
Every chat tells you that you're chatting with AI: a notice under the empty-chat message, and a caption under the message box that stays in view as the conversation scrolls. It appears in every TAI language, in TAI chats embedded in other apps too, and can't be hidden. See EU AI Act.
Built-in agents are configured by your company admin and may be limited in what they can access.
The agent can only use the connectors and knowledge items assigned to it by your admin.
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