Cloud workspaces

A cloud workspace runs in Harriet's cloud instead of on your computer, so it keeps working when your laptop is shut and follows you between devices and the browser. This page covers what one is, how to share it with colleagues, and exactly what the people you share it with can and cannot do.

What a cloud workspace is

An ordinary workspace is a folder on your machine. A cloud workspace is the same idea, hosted: its files and conversations live in Harriet's cloud, and the AI does its work there.

Three things follow from that:

• It sleeps when idle and wakes when you open it. Sleeping is normal, not an error — the sidebar shows a moon. Nothing is lost while it sleeps: your files, conversations and scheduled tasks are all still there when it wakes. Waking takes a few seconds.
• It roams. Sign in on another computer, or open Harriet on the web, and the same workspace is there with the same history. Nothing has to be copied across.
• It can be shared. A folder on your laptop cannot be; a cloud workspace can be opened by colleagues you name, read-only.

You can send a message to a sleeping cloud workspace. Harriet holds it, wakes the workspace, and delivers it — so you never have to wait for a workspace to start before you can type.

Talk to Harriet in your browser (preview)

Harriet on the web shows the same waveform button beside the message box as the desktop app. It works well on a phone: tap it, allow the microphone when your browser asks, and describe what you want done instead of typing. Voice conversations behave as they do on the desktop (see Chat & sessions), with these differences:

• Voice starts straight away, even when your workspace is asleep. Harriet is ready to talk while the workspace wakes, which usually takes about fifteen seconds, and anything you ask for that needs the workspace waits for it. A new task's chat is created once the workspace is up. If the workspace cannot be woken, Harriet tells you and can still answer general questions.
• There is no wake word. After a minute of quiet, Harriet goes to sleep and the microphone turns off. Tap Wake Harriet, the button beside the voice pill, to carry on. To keep her asleep and stop session updates waking her, choose Mute voice from the voice pill. While the page is open, a reply from the chat can still wake her to tell you what happened.
• Leaving the page pauses voice. Switching to another app, changing tab or locking your phone turns the microphone off. When you come back, tap Unmute voice to resume, and Harriet reads out anything you missed.
• Your screen stays on while you are talking, so the phone does not lock mid-conversation.
• In a noisy place, choose Push to talk from the voice pill and hold the microphone button while you speak. If Harriet keeps interrupting herself on your phone's speaker, use headphones.

Share a cloud workspace

Sharing is per workspace and read-only. Use it when a colleague needs to see what the AI did — a finance reviewer checking a reconciliation, a manager reading the output of a scheduled report — without being able to change it.

1. Open the cloud workspace you own. You can only share a workspace that belongs to you.
2. Go to Settings → Workspace → Sharing. The quicker route is the ⋯ menu next to the workspace in the sidebar, then Share…. The same control is on the web at /bots/cloud/.
3. Add the people and groups who should see it. Search for individual colleagues, whole groups, or both. Groups stay live: as people join or leave a group, their access follows.
4. Confirm who should see it. When you add anyone, Harriet reminds you that they can read the workspace's conversations, including anything personal or confidential in them, and lists the skills the workspace has used so you can judge what that might be. Tick the box to confirm you are sharing only with people who should see it.
5. Save. The workspace appears in their sidebar the next time they open Harriet.

Only the owner sees the picker. Everyone else sees the list of who the workspace is shared with, so it is clear who can read it, but cannot change it.

Each cloud workspace you own has a page on the web under Workflows, then Sharing and safety, with three tabs:

• Needs a decision: anything Harriet held back in the workspace, people it paused, and restoring shared access once everything is decided.
• People and access: who can open the workspace, who can help you decide, and turning sharing off.
• History: everything Harriet checked in the workspace and what people decided.

Turning screened sharing on still happens in Harriet Desktop. Held inputs, on the same menu, lists every run Harriet stopped before an agent saw it, across all your cloud workspaces.

Who looks after what Harriet holds back

When screened sharing is on, Harriet can hold a message or a reply for a person to decide. That person is the workspace owner, anyone the owner has named under People and access, and your account owners. Account owners can always decide and restore access in every workspace in the account, without being named. A person who does not want that responsibility should be a super admin instead: super admins can only act where an owner has named them. Neither role lets someone read the private content of a request, which needs separate audit and tool-debug permissions.

The owner can name each admin as someone who can look into held items (see what Harriet held and why, and record what they think) or who can decide and restore access.

On Sharing and safety, the Needs you tab lists what is waiting on you across every workspace, and the Workflows menu shows a count. Each held item has its own page saying what was held and why, next to the decision: keep a conversation private or release it, deliver or discard a collaborator's message, or let a held run go ahead or discard it. Only the workspace owner can deliver a held message or let a held run go ahead. When a held message is the reason its sender was paused, the choices are Deliver and restore access, Discard and restore access and Discard and keep them paused, so you decide on the message and on the person in one step. When you say a held message was safe, Harriet remembers it and treats similar messages in that workspace the same way. While other items are waiting the page offers Next held item, and after the last one it offers Restore shared access.

Notifications for decisions

Harriet tells the people who can act, by email and in Slack or Teams, as soon as something needs a decision. If it is still waiting after 24 hours they get a reminder. After 72 hours your account owners are told as well, and they are told at once if nobody else could act, for example because the owner has left. Several held items that arrive close together are sent as one message. Messages say which workspace needs a decision, whose it is, how many things are waiting and for how long, with a link. They never include the content of a conversation or why something was held.

Choose how you are told in your profile, under Notification:

• Email me when a shared cloud workspace needs a decision and Also message me on Slack or Teams when a cloud workspace needs me control these messages. The Slack or Teams option also covers your own cloud tasks that are waiting for an answer, which are always emailed as well.
• Get chat notifications via picks Slack or Teams. Teams can only reach you after you have sent Harriet a message there once; until then you get email.
• Email me about cloud workspaces shared with me and Also message me on Slack or Teams about cloud workspaces shared with me control the messages you get as someone a workspace is shared with: when it is shared with you, when a request you sent is waiting or was not sent, and when shared access comes back.

If you own a workspace that gets paused, you are always emailed, whatever these say, because a paused workspace holds up everyone it is shared with.

If you are waiting on a paused workspace

If you are a collaborator and you have been paused, or shared access to the whole workspace is paused, opening the workspace says so and names the owner to contact. On the web page, it says who you are waiting on and since when. Remind owner sends the owner and anyone they have named to decide a short nudge, at most once every six hours. It does not say who you are or why you are waiting.

What viewers can and cannot do

Someone you share a workspace with can:

• open it from their own sidebar, on the desktop app or in the browser;
• read every conversation in it, including ones from before you shared it and ones that happen afterwards;
• open and download the files in it;
• see its scheduled tasks, their run history and earlier versions of their instructions, and see who else the workspace is shared with.

They cannot:

• send a message or start a task — there is no way for a viewer to make the AI act;
• answer a permission prompt or a question the AI has asked — those wait for you;
• run, edit, pause, restore or delete a scheduled task;
• change which skills the workspace uses, or change who it is shared with.

What collaborators can do

With screened sharing on, you can add people as collaborators instead of viewers. A collaborator opens the workspace from their sidebar like any shared workspace, reads its conversations, and can start conversations of their own and write in any conversation in the workspace, yours and other people's included, as if they were talking to the workspace directly. Everything they send is checked first against your sharing policy. They cannot attach files, answer a permission prompt, or reach settings, connectors, skills or files.

• What they read. The text of conversations. Not the files, the details of what the AI ran or looked at, or its private reasoning. A conversation you kept private when Harriet held it stays hidden.
• What happens to a message. A short check, usually a few seconds. The check assumes the people you share with are colleagues you trust: ordinary conversation is sent, and it looks for attempts to get hold of other people's personal information or credentials, or to take over the workspace. A message that might cross that line waits for you, and the person is told they do not need to send it again. One that clearly tries to break your policy is not sent, and they can rephrase it.
• If a message clearly tries to get other people's personal information or credentials. Only that person is paused: they can no longer read or write in the workspace, and they are told to contact you. Nobody else is affected. You are emailed, and the held message appears under Needs a decision on the workspace's page in Workflows → Sharing and safety, where you can deliver or discard it and restore them.
• Who said what. Each message in a conversation that more than one person writes in shows who sent it, with their work email when you hover over the name. Harriet sees the same, so it knows whether the owner or a collaborator is asking, and answers each person about themselves.
• Your conversations and your runs. They can write in a conversation you started, and each message shows who sent it. For a scheduled or triggered run, their message is checked and delivered the way a run's input always is, once the run has finished its current turn.
• Stopping a response. A collaborator can stop the response in a conversation they started. In anyone else's, yours included, they can stop one that has been running for more than five minutes without finishing.
• What the AI can do for them. What it does for you. It uses the workspace's tools and learned memory in their conversations as it does in yours, except asking about earlier conversations (session history), which stays on your own chats. Only what they send is checked, not each step the AI then takes. To stop the AI using a tool for collaborators, block it (see below).

Collaborators have their own guide: Working in a shared workspace.

Their conversations appear in your own sidebar, marked with their initials. A conversation of yours that a collaborator has written in stays yours, and its messages show who sent them.

Block tools for collaborators

Every tool in the workspace is available in conversations a collaborator writes in, unless you block it. Open Share…, then Advanced → Blocked tools. Press Block a tool and pick one of the workspace's tools, or type a name with * as a wildcard (for example slack_*). Use Only when an argument matches to block a tool only for certain values, such as one Slack channel.

Add a common block offers ready-made blocks: Shell and file changes, Sending messages and email, Subagents and Workspace memory changes. While the workspace is running it also offers one per connector, such as All Slack tools. When the AI tries a blocked tool for a collaborator, the tool does not run. Blocks never apply to your own messages.

A conversation a collaborator started before 11 October 2026 still cannot use tools. Ask them to start a new one.

Stop sharing

Open Settings → Workspace → Sharing again, untick the person or group, and Save. Access ends within a few seconds, even for someone who has the workspace open in front of them.

You do not have to do anything when someone leaves the company: a deactivated Harriet account loses access to every shared workspace automatically.

When a workspace is shared with you

A cloud workspace someone else owns appears in your sidebar alongside your own, marked as shared and showing the owner's name on the Workspace tab. Open it and you can read everything in it, but the message box is unavailable — it is read-only for you. If you were added as a collaborator, you can start conversations of your own and write in any conversation in the workspace. See Working in a shared workspace.

If you are not a collaborator and something in it needs doing — a task re-run, a question answered, a prompt sent — ask the owner. They are the only person who can act in their workspace.

Search past conversations

The owner can turn on Session history to ask about earlier chats, scheduled runs and triggered runs in this workspace. It is off by default. In a shared workspace it works in your own chats. Collaborators cannot use it, and automations cannot use it.