Assist lanes
When an employee sends a message, Assist decides how to respond:| Lane | Description |
|---|---|
| Respond | The answer is already in the conversation, such as “what did you find?” after a fix. Assist replies from what already happened without starting a run. |
| Ask | The message is too brief to act on safely, such as “it’s broken”. Assist asks for more details. |
| Answer | The employee wants company information, such as “what’s the leave policy?”. Assist searches your connected knowledge sources and shows where the answer came from. If nothing is found, Assist offers to raise the question with IT. |
| Act | Something on the device or an account needs to change, such as “my VPN won’t connect” or “reset my password”. Assist matches a skill and starts a run. |
| Reject | The message isn’t about IT or the company, such as “what’s on TV tonight?”. |
Assist runs
When Assist needs to fix something, it initiates a run:- Understand - Assist interprets the intent and matches the request to a skill.
- Plan - Assist turns the skill into an ordered list of tool calls for this request.
- Check - the plan is screened, limited to the skill’s allowed tools, and checked against your policy.
- Execute - steps run one at a time and changes pause for a preview and the employee’s approval.
- Verify and report - Assist confirms the outcome, asks the employee, and records the run as a ticket with the full trail.
Assist terminology
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Desktop agent | The Assist app on each computer. Installs with one command. |
| Lane | One of the five ways Assist responds: Respond, Ask, Answer, Act or Reject. |
| Conversation | An ongoing chat with Assist. Closes after 30 minutes without a message, a new chat, or app close. |
| Turn | One employee message and Assist’s reply. |
| Skill | A playbook for one problem type, such as disk cleanup. Defines its steps and the tools it may use. |
| Tool | A code-reviewed function that performs one action on the device or in the cloud, with its own risk level. |
| Guardrails | The checks between request and action: screening, plan validation, policy, consent. Enforced by the system, not the model. |
| Run | A turn that fixes something: plan, gated execution, verification and report. |
| Plan | The ordered list of tool steps Assist builds from a skill before anything runs. |
| Gate | A pause for a human: consent, preview, acknowledgment or intake form. |
| Triage | The path for issues no skill can fix. It starts only when the employee chooses it. |
| Escalation | A run handed to IT with the diagnostic bundle attached. |
| Diagnostic bundle | The evidence on a ticket: device context, diagnostics, steps already taken, and the conversation. |
| Quick action (pill) | A one-click shortcut that starts a skill, such as “Free up space”. |
| Audit trail | The cloud record of a run: the plan, every gate decision, every tool result and the outcome. |
| Connectors | The cloud systems idemeum connects to, such as identity providers, device management and ticketing. |