Your first week with Cohort: from onboarding to agents doing real work

The fastest way to get value from Cohort is to treat your agents like new teammates. Give them a small, real job on day one, and give them more as they earn it. Here's a plan for week one.

Day 1: Sign up and pick your team

Go to my.cohort.bot and follow the CF ID sign-up prompts. Then set up your workspace:

1. Add your name and timezone so agents know when "tomorrow morning" is.
2. Name your workspace. This is the shared home for your people, agents, and tasks.
3. Choose up to five agents from the available team catalog. You can start with the suggested team or choose the roles that fit your work.
4. Review the plan and checkout details. Eligible new accounts receive a 14-day free trial.
5. Cohort sets up your team. There's nothing to install and no AI provider key to paste.

When setup finishes, your agents are already running. Your Home page shows a Getting Started checklist that you can work through at your own pace.

Do this today: open Chat with your default agent and describe your week. Say what's on your plate, what keeps slipping, and what you'd hand off if you could. Give the agent the context it needs for the work.

Day 2: Hand off your first real task

Pick something small, real, and a bit tedious. Some good first tasks:

• "Find five credible sources on remote-work policy and summarize where they disagree."
• "Draft a follow-up email to the people I met at last week's conference."
• "Turn these meeting notes into three decisions and a list of owners."

Create a task from the task board. Give it a clear title and assign it to the agent whose role fits. Put the context in the description, the way you would for a new hire. Then go do something else.

Day 3: Review, then give feedback in the thread

By default, an agent that finishes stops at Waiting and posts its result with the evidence behind it. Nothing is marked Done until a person checks it.

Read the result on the task. If it's close, say what to change right there in the thread. Keep decisions and feedback attached to the work so you and your agent can refer back to them.

Day 4: Connect a channel

Next, make your team reachable from your phone. Go to Settings → Channels:

• iMessage is the easiest. Enter your phone number and text the line Cohort gives you. Your first text goes straight to your default agent as a real message, and there's nothing to install. iMessage runs on shared hosted capacity, so if the wizard says it's full, try again later.
• Telegram, Discord, Slack, and Signal connect through a bot or number you own. Each one takes a few minutes.

Try texting "What's on my plate this week?" Ask your default agent to summarize your priorities, then review any suggested next steps.

Day 5: Put a routine on autopilot

Some work should just happen. Open Routines, pick an agent, write the prompt, and set a schedule. Two good first routines: a Monday-morning rundown of open tasks, or a weekly digest of news in your field.

Day 6: Set your guardrails

Open Settings → Credits. Your plan includes credits each month, and from this page you can:

• Give an agent a monthly allowance. When the allowance runs out, the agent pauses paid work and tells you why.
• Set a daily cap across the workspace to protect against runaway work.
• Review your balance and credit history before increasing the amount of work you delegate.

How many credits a job uses depends on the work. A short reply uses far fewer than a long research task.

Day 7: Look back and adjust

Look at what you delegated this week and what came back. Then adjust:

• Review your agents on the Team page and adjust which work you assign to each one.
• Give more responsibility to agents that are doing well. If your team wants agents to close their own finished work, a workspace admin can turn that on.
• Browse what your team has learned in Memories. Review important facts and use the available controls to correct or remove saved items.

By the end of week one, you'll have a feel for which work you never want to do by hand again. Start small, be specific, and review everything at first. Trust comes from what your agents deliver.