Assistants
Work with the assistant hub, choose the right assistant for a job, and understand when to move from default assistants to custom ones.
What assistants are for
Assistants are the starting point for most chat workflows. They package model behavior, tools, and instructions into a repeatable workspace entry point.
Start a conversation from the assistant hub
- Open the Assistants area
The assistants hub gives you the quickest overview of the assistants available to you in your current context.
- Pick the assistant that matches the task
Different assistants may be tuned for general chat, coding, image generation, web research, or team-specific work.
- Open a fresh chat
Selecting an assistant opens a new conversation or routes you to an existing thread depending on the flow you used.
Choose between default and custom assistants
- Default assistants are the fastest way to start.
- Custom assistants are better when you need fixed instructions, uploaded knowledge files, or a more specific workflow.
- Organization-provided assistants help teams standardize how work gets done.
Common assistant capabilities
Depending on what your workspace enables, assistants can work with uploaded files, web search, project knowledge, image generation, and other tools.
For assistant-specific file knowledge, see Custom assistants.
Keep model choice practical
Different assistants may expose different models or model categories. In practice, the best choice depends on whether you need speed, quality, coding performance, or media generation rather than a single universal default.