How to use WRITER Agent

WRITER Agent brings together the best of Ask WRITER and Action Agent in one simple, powerful interface designed to help you transform individual productivity into enterprise scale.

With WRITER Agent, you can brainstorm, draft, and refine ideas through natural conversation, or instantly analyze and act on large amounts of information. You can connect your tools, data, and teams through built-in, governed connectors that let WRITER Agent analyze, synthesize, and act across the systems in your stack — turning enterprise context into coordinated action. With customizable and repeatable playbooks, you can save time on recurring tasks and scale your best work across your team.

Whether you’re writing, researching, or operationalizing content, WRITER Agent helps you work smarter—delivering speed, consistency, and quality in everything you create.

A legacy version of Ask WRITER is also available in our extensions for Chrome and Mac.

What's in this article:

• What is WRITER Agent?
• How to use chat mode
• How to enable agent mode
• Using playbooks
• Configuring personality
• When should I use WRITER Agent vs. a prebuilt agent from the Agent Library?
• How can I get better output out of WRITER Agent?
• FAQs

What is WRITER Agent?

WRITER Agent is one intelligent interface that turns complexity into scale with repeatable, data-driven playbooks connected to the systems where work happens. It combines the ease of our much-loved Ask WRITER with the advanced capabilities of WRITER Agent, helping you get more done with less friction. Whether it’s content strategy or financial research, prospecting or merchandising – WRITER Agent is built to handle complex, unstructured work across every department and vertical.

Here’s how WRITER Agent can help you in your day-to-day work:

• Generate and refine content: Brainstorm ideas, draft emails, reports, or presentations, and iterate naturally until outputs meet your needs.
• Analyze and act on data: Search and work with large files, internal documents, or third-party data to make decisions with confidence.
• Automate repetitive workflows: Build reusable playbooks to scale frequent tasks without manual effort.
• Stay organized and efficient: Schedule playbooks to run automatically as routines, and pick up where you left off in any session.

Whether you’re writing, researching, or managing complex projects, WRITER Agent helps you work smarter and deliver high-quality results consistently.

WRITER agent modes

WRITER Agent has two modes to match the complexity of your tasks:

• Chat mode: Ideal for quick, straightforward requests. It recreates the Ask WRITER experience you know—generate text or code, use file uploads, reference Knowledge Graphs, and apply your custom instructions. Learn all about chat mode here.
• Agent mode: Based on our Action Agent beta feature, this is designed for complex, multi-step workflows that require deep thinking or tool use. Run playbooks, integrate with connectors, and generate a variety of deliverables including documents, spreadsheets, presentations, dashboards, code, and websites. Learn all about agent mode here.

You can switch between modes depending on your workflow needs.

How to access WRITER Agent

WRITER Agent will display on your home page as soon as you open the WRITER app.

How to use chat mode

Based on our beloved Ask WRITER feature, WRITER Agent’s chat mode is ideal for quick, straightforward requests. Generate text or code, use file uploads, reference Knowledge Graphs, and more! WRITER Agent pulls results from it’s training data and when necessary will conduct a web search to pull in the most up to date information.

For a deep dive into using WRITER Agent chat mode, click here.

How to enable agent mode

Agent mode allows you to connect WRITER Agent with other tools and create repeatable playbooks to help automate your work

To get started select the Chat/Agent toggle within the input field to active agent mode. Select the + icon to add source files, connect to external tools, select from playbooks, or enable presentation mode. WRITER Agent can handle just about any file type - if it isn’t able to handle a type of file, it has the ability to convert it or process it in a way it can use! ⚡

Using playbooks

Playbooks are reusable plans that you can create and save for your most common and complex tasks. Instead of retyping detailed instructions every time, you can simply trigger a Playbook to get the job done. This is perfect for tasks like:

• Generating weekly reports
• Analyzing sales data
• Creating marketing campaign assets
• Onboarding new clients

To learn how to create playbooks, click here.

Once your playbook is created you’ll see it in the list within the Playbooks tab. Here you can run, edit, and delete the playbook by selecting the three dot ••• icon next to a playbook. You'll also be able to create a routine from this playbook to have it run autonomously. To learn about routines, click here.

To launch a playbook from WRITER Agent, select + menu, then select the playbook you'd like from the menu. Once you select your playbook, WRITER Agent will fill in your prompt input field with the instructions. If your playbook contains variables you will be asked to complete these fields before you're able to run the agent.

Configuring personality

Are the outputs not sounding like your organization? Configuring the personality of WRITER Agent can help the outputs Configuring personality will produce consistent, repeatable outputs. Savvy brands know how important consistent brand and individual, shared voices are.

From the WRITER Agent settings menu select the Personality tab. From here you can select from the preset voices your admins have created for you to use, or create your own personal voice. If you have access to create new voices you’ll be able to do that here as well. For more information about voice profiles, click here.

To have a voice applied during a WRITER Agent session, select it from the +menu.

Using custom instructions

When using chat mode you can leverage Custom instructions to further personalize your agent. From the Personality tab of the WRITER Agent settings, select + New instructions. You can describe how you'd like WRITER to behave when generating responses, including specific formatting, style, voice, style, tone, persona, and more. If you’ve set custom instructions in Ask WRITER you’ll find those have been migrated to this section. Please note custom instructions can only be used in chat mode at this time.

Add a name to your instructions, then add the instructions, then select Save.

Once you've saved a set of custom instructions, you can reuse them in any chat mode session by navigating to the Personality tab within the agent settings and selecting the desired set of custom instructions.

To delete or edit a set of saved instructions, select the three dot icon ••• to activate the menu and select the option you’d like

Tips for getting the best results

To make your experience with WRITER Agent as effective as possible, keep these tips in mind:

• Be clear about your goal: The more specific you are about the final product, the better. Instead of "make a presentation," try "make a 10-slide presentation for a sales kickoff meeting."
• Provide context: If you have relevant files, data, or links, attach them to your request. The more information it has, the more accurate its work will be.
• Think big: Don't be afraid to give it complex, multi-step tasks. Action Agent excels at breaking down big projects into manageable steps. A request like "Research our top three competitors and create a competitive analysis presentation" is a perfect task for it.
• Review the plan: Pay attention to the plan it creates. If it doesn't look right, you can ask it to adjust its approach before it starts the work.

When should I use WRITER Agent vs a prebuilt agent from the Agent Library?

WRITER offers a wide variety of prebuilt agents. If you're just getting started with generative AI in WRITER, these are a great place to get started. Prebuilt agents require no experience, and they're fine-tuned on similar content to produce great outputs right away. However, these agents don't have flexibility: you won't always be able to add specific criteria, or ask it to reference a specific source.

WRITER Agent can take any criteria into account: tone, audience, creator, word count, intent, and of course, source URLs and files. However, there's a bit more of a learning curve. When you first begin using WRITER Agent, it's common to get results that aren't quite right. That's why our chatbot makes it easy for you to tweak your request and provide feedback on the output you've received.

Learn more about using prebuilt agents here.

How can I get better output out of WRITER Agent?

So you've submitted a request to WRITER Agent, but the output you've received isn't quite right. You know you can chat back and forth to refine your query - but how? What adjustments should you make?

A good rule of thumb is to consider the five most important questions:

• Who - Who is the creator? Who is the audience?
• What - What form should the output take? How long should it be? What tone should it use? Is there a specific call to action or bit of content which WRITER should use?
• Where - Where will your audience consume this content, i.e. TikTok, Facebook, a blog, etc?
• Why - Why does the audience need this content? What are you aiming to achieve with it?
• How - How should the output be structured? What should we reference to create the right content?

Of course, you don't have to answer all of these questions, but if you're stuck, unsure why your outputs aren't what you expected, consider telling WRITER the answer to a few of the questions above.

FAQs

General

Where can I access WRITER Agent?

WRITER Agent is available on the web app. The legacy version of Ask WRITER is available in the WRITER Chrome extension and our macOS app.

What are the file size limits for WRITER Agent?

In chat mode you can upload 10 files each, 100MB per file, and a total of 500K words per session. In agent mode you can upload more files up to 100MB per file.

Conversations and sessions

What is a session?

A session is an instance of WRITER Agent where the chat history and uploaded files will persist even if you leave the chat. If there is a set of files you’ll work with consistently, you can upload them into a session and return to it repeatedly.

Does WRITER Agent consider the entire chat history when responding to a request?

WRITER Agent will consider the full chat history for all options you select except when working with Knowledge Graph. If you select a Knowledge Graph within WRITER Agent, it will consider the most recent three chat back-and-forths between you and WRITER as context for what it generates next. If you do not want WRITER Agent to consider previous chat history, you can create a new session.

Are sessions shareable with teammates?

Yes you can share your session replay using the share icon in the top right. This will show another user your session but will not allow them to chat with and build upon the session you share.

How do you access previous sessions?

You can access previous sessions by going to the Sessions menu on the left as well as from the My Work section.

Can you delete previous sessions?

Yes, you can delete previous sessions.

Are custom instructions only available at the user level?

Yes.

Uploading files

Is there a limit to how long your source(s) can be?

The number of words in all the files that you upload into a chat session can't exceed ~350,000 words. You can upload up to 10 sources to a single session, as long as their total number of words does not exceed 350,000 words.

What types of files can WRITER Agent handle?

• Can parse text from these file types: xlsx/xls, csv, pptx/ppt, pdf, html, txt, srt, docx/doc, url, pasted text, past sources.
• Can analyze .jpg and .png images.
• Can parse text from tables but may not understand table formatting and layout.
• Can parse PDFs but quality depends on how files were created. For example, if PDFs may have text that is an image, a file’s permission may not allow text to be copied, or the layout of a PDF’s layout may be hard for us to interpret (e.g., WRITER may struggle to render that a newsletter with multiple columns).

Can WRITER Agent translate content?

WRITER Agent can translate content <500 words. For longer translation, use a translation prebuilt agent.

How do we mitigate security, safety, and privacy risks given the level of autonomy and access of WRITER Agent?

WRITER Agent is designed with a multi-layered approach to mitigate risks associated with its autonomy, and backed by the security, reliability, and control provided by the WRITER platform.

Security Controls:

• Isolated Sandbox Environment: Operates within a secure, containerized sandbox that is completely isolated from the host infrastructure and other user sessions.
• Temporary Workspace: All files, data, and running processes are temporary and are permanently destroyed at the end of each session. This design prevents the persistence of malware or sensitive data.
• Restricted Network Access: Outbound network connections are monitored and filtered, limiting it to standard web protocols (HTTP/S) and preventing malicious activities like network scanning or participation in DDoS attacks.

Safety Protocols:

• Behavioral Guardrails: The underlying language model has built-in safety filters to prevent the generation of harmful, illegal, or unethical content.
• Human-in-the-Loop Design: For critical actions, such as deploying applications or deleting files, the agent is programmed to stop and request explicit confirmation from the user. The user retains ultimate control over significant operations.
• Resource Limiting: All processes are strictly limited in their use of CPU, memory, and execution time to prevent system instability or resource abuse.

Privacy Protections:

• Stateless Sessions: WRITER Agent has no long-term memory and does not retain any data between sessions. Each interaction begins from a clean slate.
• User-Controlled Data: WRITER Agent only has access to data that the user explicitly provides during an active session. It has no access to a user's local machine or files.
• Encrypted Communication: All data transmitted between the user and the agent is protected with industry-standard HTTPS encryption.