Channels and providers
How an agent is reached — HTTP and Slack channels — and how each agent's model provider is selected and managed.
Channels
Channels are how an agent is reached once it's running.
Every platform-built agent exposes an HTTP agent endpoint inside your workspace. This is the channel the platform itself uses: the console's Overview tab chats with the agent through it, and workflows dispatch steps to it. There is nothing to configure — the endpoint, its authentication, and its registration for workflow use are managed for you.
Optionally, an agent can also have a Slack channel: people talk to the agent in Slack, and tool-approval prompts are delivered there too. Enable it on the create (or skill-edit finalize) screen and provide:
- an app token (
xapp-…) and a bot token (xoxb-…) — use a dedicated Slack app per agent; don't reuse an app or bot token across agents, and invite the bot to every Slack channel it should work in; - optionally, a list of allowed bot IDs if other bots should be able to talk to the agent.
Both tokens are handled as secrets: vaulted at deploy, masked in the console, and never readable back. When editing, leaving a token blank keeps the stored value.
For agents deployed from CI, channels are declared in the repository and baked into the image — the console shows them but doesn't edit them. See CI-deployed agents.
Model providers
Each agent has its own model provider and model, chosen on the create screen from the set your platform offers — for example an OpenAI-compatible provider or Anthropic, each with a curated model list. Platform administrators control which providers and models appear.
Model access is fully managed:
- Requests run through the platform's managed gateway — you never enter provider API keys or base URLs, and actual model credentials never reach the console or your browser.
- The gateway endpoint and authentication are shown read-only in the Managed by the platform panel on the create screen.
The provider and model are picked at create time; editing an agent's skill later doesn't change its model. The agent's current model is shown on its detail page and on the Agents list.