Core concepts

Meet Ally, the built-in assistant for your workspace

Ally helps people use Alloy, find information, organize work, and work with the organization's AI teammates and tools.

What Ally is

Ally is Alloy's built-in internal assistant. Users open Ally from the Chats launcher or with the `Alt+C` shortcut.

In the current product, Ally resolves to a per-user Ally AI teammate inside the current organization. That means each user gets an Ally experience scoped to that user and that workspace.

How people use Ally

Users can chat with Ally, search conversations, rename or delete threads, send attachments, stop generation, leave feedback, and use realtime voice when it is enabled.

Ally uses the same internal chat experience as AI teammate chat, including docked, floating, and minimized modes.

Ally understands the workspace

Ally can use a configured model, voice settings, tools, and MCP toolsets. If the canonical system Ally is configured, missing model or voice settings can fall back to that system Ally, and tool lists can be combined.

Ally also has access to organization action tools that help with workspace setup and management when the signed-in user belongs to the organization.

Ally and storage access

Ally is treated differently from regular AI teammates in storage sharing. The storage sharing dialog shows Ally as having automatic full access.

In the storage tool layer, Ally has organization-wide storage visibility instead of being limited to explicitly shared folders.

Ally during onboarding

Alloy can seed a welcome message into a new user's personal Ally conversation. The onboarding flow can also open Ally automatically after chat state has been restored.

This makes Ally the first assistant many users meet when they enter a new workspace.

Frequently asked questions

Is Ally a separate product?+

No. Ally is built into Alloy and is part of the workspace experience.

Is Ally the same for every user?+

Ally is resolved per user and organization in the current backend, so the chat context is scoped to the signed-in user and active workspace.

Is Ally managed like other AI teammates?+

Ally shares much of the AI teammate runtime, but Ally has special behavior, including automatic full storage access and system-level workspace tools.

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