Quickstart

A working agent on your team’s Slack in 10 minutes. No code, no setup.

1. Create the agent

From the Agents page (left nav under WORK) or from the Dashboard’s “CREATE ANOTHER AGENT” card, you land on the Templates page.

The template catalog is currently empty. Click Start from scratch at the top of the page — a DEPLOY NEW AGENT dialog opens.

Fill in:

Field	What to put
Display Name	e.g. Acme Support Bot
Slug	auto-generated from the name. Becomes acme-support-bot.cloud.surogate.ai. Locked once you confirm.
Description	one sentence — what the agent does
Model	leave as Surogate (the platform default)

Click CREATE AGENT. The agent provisions in ~30 seconds; status flips from deploying to running.

You land on the agent’s Overview page with its public URL, stats, channels, and recent sessions.

2. Have your first conversation

On the agent’s Overview page, click New chat in the left navigation (between Configure and Inbox).

The chat opens. Type a question, press Enter — the agent streams its response. Tool calls (KB searches, web fetches) appear inline so you can see what it did.

Templates ship without your team’s content, so the agent doesn’t know your product yet. Step 4 fixes that.

3. Publish to Slack

Click Configure in the left nav, then open the Channels tab. Find the Slack row and toggle the switch ON.

Paste your Slack credentials:

• App Token — xapp-… from your Slack app’s App-Level Tokens (scope connections:write)
• Bot Token — xoxb-… from OAuth & Permissions

Don’t have a Slack app yet? Create one at api.slack.com/apps → enable Socket Mode → add bot scopes (chat:write, app_mentions:read, im:read, im:write, channels:history, groups:history, users:read) → install to your workspace.

Click SAVE CHANNELS. Within a few seconds, the bot is online in Slack. DM it or @mention it in a channel.

4. Make it smarter (optional but worth it)

Two quick wins, both on the Configure page:

Add a knowledge base

In the left nav under LIBRARY, click Knowledge Bases → NEW KNOWLEDGE BASE. Name it (e.g. acme-product) and pick a curator model. Add a few .md or .pdf sources, click COMPILE, wait for status active.

Back on the agent’s Configure page → Knowledge Bases tab → + ATTACH KNOWLEDGE BASE → pick the new KB.

The agent will now search the KB at runtime when a question matches its content.

Tighten the persona

The agent’s identity, tone, and rules live on Configure → Identity tab — the DESCRIPTION field for short summaries and a SOUL.md textarea (up to 20,000 characters) for the full persona block. Replace the default with something like:

# Acme Support Agent

You are the Acme support assistant. Speak as "we" when referring to Acme.
Tone: warm, concise, technically literate. Avoid corporate boilerplate.

When you don't know something, say "I'll get a human on this" rather
than guessing.

Save. New chats pick up the new persona; in-progress sessions keep the old one (by design).

5. Watch what it does

Every chat is a session. Open Sessions in the left nav → pick a session.

For each session, hover assistant turns and click 👍 or 👎. This is the signal you use to improve the agent over time — see Improve your agent.

What you’ve done in 10 minutes

• A live agent on a public URL: <your-slug>.cloud.surogate.ai
• Available in Slack to your team
• Grounded in your product docs (via the KB)
• With your tone (via the persona)
• Recording every conversation for review and improvement

That’s enough to start using it for real work. Come back to Run an agent and Improve your agent when you want to go deeper.