Introduction
What ako is, and the five ideas you need before using it.
ako is where your team keeps what it knows, in a form both people and AI agents can work with. You write in the app, ask the assistant, or connect Claude, Slack or Linear. They all read from the same place and write back to it under the same rules.
Organisation
Your organisation is the home for everything your team knows. It has members, and each member has a role. One member is the owner. See Roles and what they allow.
Brains
A brain is a folder of markdown files about one area: a product roadmap, a support knowledge base, an engineering runbook. You browse brains under Knowledge in the sidebar.
There are three kinds:
- Org-wide: every organisation has one. It holds what everyone should know, such as people, decisions and agreed facts. An org-wide conversation starts here and can look into the other brains you can reach. It stays open to every member.
- Team brains: the ones you create, one per team or topic. A team brain can be open to the whole organisation or only to the people you choose. A conversation in a team brain works in that brain only.
- Personal: your own brain, which only you can open. See Your personal brain.
Proposals
Some changes don't go straight in. They become a proposal: a change someone has to approve before it lands. Agents always send a change for approval when they write to a protected folder. People on the Draft role send everything they change for approval. Proposals wait under Proposals in the sidebar. See Review and approve proposals.
Ground truth
Every brain has a ground-truth/ folder for facts somebody has checked. It is protected: an agent can only propose a change there, and a person approves it. You can protect other folders the same way. See Protect what matters.
Agents act as you
The assistant in the app, Claude when you connect it to ako, and ako in Slack all act as the person using them. In your brains, they can see what you can see and do what your role allows, never more, and they never approve. Every change they make is recorded against your name and the app that made it.
Connections an admin adds for the whole organisation work differently. Linear and MCP servers connected this way act as the shared account the admin used, so an agent can reach what that account can, not only what you can. See Linear and Add your own MCP server.
Routines are the other exception. A routine is an agent that runs on a schedule, acts as the member who owns it, and can never approve its own changes. See Schedule a routine.