One AI Assistant for the Whole Team, Without the Chaos
Someone on your team set up an AI assistant, and it works. Now everyone wants it, and it is replying from the wrong inbox.
The fix is not a stricter Slack message about the password. It is a different setup.
The quick answer: share the agent, not the login. Give the team one or more named agents, each with its own email address and a single job. Have every person connect their own email and calendar under their own name, so the agent acts as the right person. Gate anything that leaves the company behind a “require approval” rule, and have the agents report into one daily digest everybody reads. Carly is built this way: you create named agents, CC them on threads, and they finish the job from their own address.
Where shared assistants go wrong
Almost every team hits the same five problems, usually in this order.
| Problem | What it looks like | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| Shared login | The password lives in a Slack channel. Nobody knows who asked for what, and offboarding a contractor means changing it for everyone. | Each person signs in as themselves. The agent is shared, the credentials are not. |
| One inbox for everyone | The founder’s Gmail is the only connected account, so every reply goes out from the founder, including the ones the founder never saw. | Each teammate connects their own email and calendar, so actions run under the person who owns the thread. |
| Contradicting instructions | Emily tells it “always offer Tuesdays”, Michael tells it “never book before 11”. It obeys whoever spoke last. | One agent per job, with its standing rules written once in the agent’s instructions, owned by one person. |
| No log | A client asks why they got two follow-ups. Nobody can say what was sent, by which request. | Agents send from their own address, so their sent mail is the record, plus a daily digest to the team. |
| No boundary between people | A contractor asks the assistant a question and gets an answer built from the founder’s private threads. | Scope each agent to the accounts and job it needs. Contractors work through an agent, never inside the owner’s connected accounts. |
Share the agent, not the login
A login is an identity. When five people share one, the assistant cannot tell them apart, and neither can you. Everything it does looks like it came from one person, and everything it can see, everyone can see.
An agent is different. It is a worker with a name, a job and its own address. Anyone on the team can hand it work by emailing it or copying it on a thread, and it acts through accounts that each person connected on purpose. The team shares the worker; nobody shares their keys.
This distinction matters more than it sounds, because some agent products blur it. Grok Bot, for example, runs every Bot on an account on one shared cloud computer: browser sessions, cookies, files and command-line credentials are available to all of them, and SpaceXAI says plainly that the Bots’ screens are “separate work surfaces, not separate security boundaries.” That is a reasonable design for one person running several helpers. It is the wrong mental model for a team, where the whole point is that the contractor’s agent and the founder’s agent are not the same thing. Our Grok Bot review covers that setup in detail.
How to set it up in Carly
Here is the setup that turns one person’s assistant into something a 3 to 30 person team can use without stepping on each other.
1. Create one agent per job. Open the agents page and create an agent for each recurring job, not for each person. A typical small team starts with four:
- Scheduling agent: books, moves and confirms meetings for everyone.
- Sales follow-up agent: chases proposals, books discovery calls, updates the CRM.
- Support triage agent: sorts incoming requests, answers the routine ones, routes the rest.
- Ops agent: invoices, vendor emails, onboarding paperwork.
Each one gets its own name and email address, like scheduling@ or “Claire from Ops”. Clients see a consistent sender, and your team always knows which agent did what.
2. Have each teammate connect their own accounts. On the integrations page, each person connects their own Gmail or Outlook and their own calendars. When the scheduling agent books a call for Michael, it reads Michael’s calendar and the invite comes from Michael’s side, not the founder’s. If someone runs several inboxes (a personal address, sales@, a client domain), they connect all of them. Carly works fully on both Gmail and Outlook / Microsoft 365, and connects to thousands of apps beyond email, so HubSpot, Slack, Stripe and QuickBooks can sit behind the agents that need them.
3. On Microsoft 365, grant consent once. If your company runs on Outlook, an admin can grant organization-wide consent on the admin setup page so nobody on the team gets a permission prompt when they connect. It covers mail, calendars and the shared mailboxes people already have access to, and Carly only touches a person’s data after that person signs in and connects.
4. Hand work over by CC. Nobody needs to open a dashboard. CC the agent on a thread and it takes it from there: it replies from its own address, books the time, sends the follow-up and logs it. You can also email it a task directly, text it, or use the Carly dashboard.
5. Put approval gates on external sends. Add a “require approval” rule for anything that goes outside the company, at least for the first few weeks. The agent prepares the email, a named owner approves it, then it goes. Internal work (calendar holds, CRM updates, task creation) can run straight through. Loosen the rule per agent as trust builds.
6. Send the team one daily digest. Describe it in plain English as a workflow: “Every weekday at 5pm, email the team a summary of what each agent sent, booked and updated today, and anything waiting for approval.” That digest is your shared log. Pricing is simple to explain to whoever signs off: free Zapier-style workflows; AI agents from $35/month.
What it looks like at a real team. Josh runs a 14-person agency that builds Shopify stores. Emily handles sales, Michael runs delivery, and two contractors do design. Before, everyone used Josh’s assistant login, and a contractor once saw a thread about their own rate. Now there are three agents. Emily CCs the sales follow-up agent on every proposal, and it chases, books the kickoff on Michael’s calendar and moves the deal in HubSpot. The support triage agent works the shared hello@ inbox. The contractors email the scheduling agent to book client reviews and never touch Josh’s accounts. Josh reads one digest at 5pm and approves the two external emails that needed him.
Who should own what
| Role | Can see | Can do |
|---|---|---|
| Owner (founder or ops lead) | Every agent’s instructions, the daily digest, approval queue | Create and retire agents, set approval rules, connect company-wide apps |
| Teammates | Their own connected accounts, threads they CC an agent on | Connect their own email and calendars, hand work to any agent, approve sends they own |
| Contractors | Only the threads they start with an agent | Email or CC a scoped agent (usually scheduling); no connected accounts of their own on your side |
The rule of thumb: whoever owns an agent’s job owns its instructions. If two people want different behavior, that is a sign you need two agents, not a longer prompt.
Scaling from one agent to a team of them
Split by job, not by person. “Emily’s assistant” and “Michael’s assistant” end up doing the same things with different rules. A scheduling agent and a follow-up agent each have one set of rules and serve everybody. When a job grows (support splits into billing and technical, say), split the agent.
Move rules-only work into workflows. If a task never needs judgment (“when a Typeform comes in, add a row to Google Sheets and ping Slack”), it does not need an agent at all. Describe it as a workflow and keep the agents for work that involves reading and replying. See what Carly can do for where that line usually sits.
Book a call once you pass a handful of agents. Past five or six agents, or with more than one Microsoft tenant or a compliance requirement, a 20-minute setup call saves time. Book one with the Carly team and they will map agents to jobs with you.
If your main pain is a shared support@ or sales@ queue rather than the assistant itself, read AI for shared mailboxes and our roundup of shared inbox tools. For a broader look at agents that take on whole roles, see the best AI employees.
Frequently asked questions
Can multiple people use one AI assistant?
Yes, as long as they share the agent rather than the login. In Carly, anyone can email or CC a named agent, and each person connects their own email and calendar, so the agent acts as the right person on every thread.
How do I stop the AI from sending email from the wrong person’s inbox?
Have each teammate connect their own accounts on the integrations page instead of routing everything through one person’s Gmail. Anything customer-facing goes out from the agent’s own address or the thread owner’s, never from whoever happened to set it up.
Should each teammate get their own AI assistant?
Usually not. Agents split by job (scheduling, follow-up, support, ops) stay consistent and are easier to govern than one assistant per person. You can create as many named agents as you have distinct jobs.
How do I keep a contractor out of the founder’s email?
Give contractors access to a scoped agent, not to connected accounts. They email the scheduling agent to book time, and it never exposes threads from inboxes the contractor has no business seeing. Put a “require approval” rule on the agent while they ramp up.
How do I know what a shared AI agent did?
Each agent sends from its own address, so its sent mail is a complete record. Add a daily digest workflow that summarizes what every agent sent, booked and updated. If you want help designing that for your team, book a call.
Related: How to correct AI assistant mistakes · Stop babysitting your AI assistant · Give your AI agent a name and email
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