What Kairos is and the difference between Process Mode and Agent Mode

Kairos is WorkOS's AI assistant. You can talk or type to it. When you open it with the Kairos button it always starts in Agent Mode; Process Mode only kicks in when you launch it from a specific screen.

Process Mode

You don't choose it: it starts when you open Kairos from a specific screen with By voice (for example, New task → By voice in Tasks, New note → By voice in the Digital Garden, or when replying to an email or a WhatsApp by voice). That place fixes the category: task, note, publication, email or calendar. You record or type, and Kairos carries out that single process: it creates the task, drafts the note, prepares the publication, and so on.

Examples: dictating a new task ("remind me to call Laura tomorrow"), creating a note, drafting a publication, dictating a calendar event, or dictating a reply to an email.

Agent Mode

This is what you get when you click the Kairos button. A free-form chat, by voice or by text, where you can ask for anything in natural language: creating, searching, editing or linking records across several sections at once ("find company X's documents and create a task to review the latest one"). Kairos decides which actions to take to fulfill your request.

In Agent Mode you can also cite specific pages as context (typing @ while writing, or using the Cite pages as context button while speaking) so Kairos bases its answer on real information from your account — notes, documents, wiki articles, projects, clients or contacts.

The golden rule: it never acts silently

Any action that writes something (creating or editing a record, linking records, sending an email) first shows you a card, Kairos proposes this, with what it's going to do, and you have to click Confirm (or Cancel). If your request chains several steps that write, you're asked to confirm once for the whole chain, within a limit of steps; emails also always go through their own review screen (Review and send). Reads (searching, listing, reading a record) don't need confirmation, because they don't change anything. Kairos can't delete or archive records (it can only delete calendar events). This is the default behaviour: the Owner or someone with Technical administration permissions can change what Kairos does without asking in Settings → Kairos permissions.

Conversations with memory

In Agent Mode, conversations are saved: you can close the panel and pick them back up later, or have several at once (New conversation button). They're strictly private — not even the account administrator can see another person's conversations.