Working with your assistant

Plank is an AI assistant that does the document-heavy back-office work you'd rather not do by hand — reading, drafting, organizing, reconciling — and hands you finished files, not just a chat reply.

The shift is small but important: you don't ask Plank how to do something, you ask it to do the thing. You describe the task, your assistant works through it, and you get a real document back — ready to open, review, and send on.

How to delegate well

Your assistant is capable, but it isn't a mind reader. The clearer your request, the better the result — the same way it would be with a thoughtful colleague.

Three things make a request easy to act on:

• Give context. What is this for, who's it going to, what matters most.
• Say what "done" looks like. A one-page brief? A spreadsheet with totals? A dashboard? Name the finished thing you want.
• Point at the right files. Tell it which documents to work from, so it isn't guessing.

A vague request like "do something with these contracts" leaves the assistant guessing at your intent. A clear one — "Read these five contracts and write me a one-page summary of each party's obligations and key dates, in a single document" — tells it exactly what to produce and how you'll judge it. Both take about the same effort to type; only one comes back the way you wanted.

How your assistant works

Behind the scenes, your assistant reads and edits the files in your workspace, can reach connected tools when you've set them up, and takes several steps on its own to get a task done — rather than handing each small step back to you.

It works on one task at a time. Like a dependable colleague, it sees a request through before picking up the next one, so its attention stays on the thing you asked for. (See Workspaces for how that plays out when you switch between projects.)

When it's finished, you look at what it did and decide. If something's not quite right, you say so and it revises. Going back and forth a couple of times to get it just so is completely normal — it's how the work gets sharp, not a sign anything went wrong.

Where your work shows up

Everything your assistant produces lands as real files in your workspace — documents you can open, download, and share, exactly as if you'd made them yourself. It also keeps a running record of what it did along the way, so you can always see the steps behind a result. See Your files.

Where your work is organized

Each separate body of work lives in its own workspace — one for a recurring client, one for the quarterly report, one for personal admin. Your assistant can look across your workspaces (or, within a context, across that grouped set) to find the right place for something, but it always does the actual work in one workspace at a time. Before it writes into a new workspace for the first time, it checks with you. See Workspaces and Contexts.

A few things people hand off

These are the kinds of tasks Plank takes on every day. Yours will look like your own work — these just show the shape of it.

• Summarize a stack of contracts. "Read these five contracts and give me a one-page brief on each one's key terms, dates, and obligations." You get a single, skimmable document instead of an afternoon of reading.
• Turn a spreadsheet into a dashboard. "Build a weekly dashboard from this sales sheet." Your assistant can produce an interactive page — charts and figures you can actually click through — not a static export. See Deliverables and Interactive buttons.
• Research and compare options. "Compare these four suppliers on price, lead time, and terms, and put it in a table." It gathers what it needs and lays the answer out so the decision is easy to make.
• Reconcile the month's invoices. "Pull this month's invoices and match them against our payments." When you've connected your tools, the assistant can reach the source data directly rather than waiting for you to paste it in. See Integrations.

Where to go next

Once you've handed off your first task, these are good places to explore further:

• The app — a tour of where everything lives.
• Chats — how conversations with your assistant work.
• Plank on your phone — the mobile app, its widget, and sending things in with Share to Plank.
• Skills — ways to teach your assistant how you like things done.
• Automations — set work to happen on a schedule or in response to events.