User manual
How to run your Olano deployment
Olano is a hosted platform for AI agents that do real work inside your business: each agent holds its own instructions, memory, tools, and connected accounts, and runs on your messaging channels and on a schedule rather than only when someone opens a chat window. Everything you configure lives in one dashboard - agents, connected tools, approvals, scheduled work, and the improvement engine. This manual walks through that dashboard chapter by chapter: what each section is for, what you click, and what happens next.
Getting started
Working with agents
Agents
Identity, standing instructions, model choice, tools and skills - the five things that decide whether an agent is useful or vague.
Chapter 3Memory and knowledge
Four different kinds of remembering: the conversation itself, long-term memory, a knowledge base built from your documents, and skills as taught procedures.
Chapter 4Teams and delegation
The org chart, managers and reports, agent-to-agent messaging, and subagents - plus the difference between an agent knowing a peer exists and being allowed to message it.
Chapter 5Channels and connectors
Putting an agent on WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack, email and more, connecting your business tools, adding MCP servers, and wiring webhooks.
Automation
Automation
Scheduled tasks and proactive monitoring: recurring reports, one-off runs, heartbeat checks, and how to tell which tool fits which job.
Chapter 7Cortex
The improvement engine - what it does on its own, how often, how to approve or undo what it proposes, and how to cap what it spends.
Governance
Approvals and trust
Trust levels 0-4, per-category approval gates, the approvals inbox, message rate limits, and where credentials are kept.
Chapter 9Multi-user agents
One agent serving many end-users with isolated per-person memory, plus team accounts for the humans who operate the deployment.
How to read this manual
Written for someone who has a running Olano deployment and a dashboard login. It does not cover installing or hosting Olano yourself.
New to the dashboard?
Read chapters 1 and 2 in order. Between them they cover everything you need to get one agent doing one job properly, which is the right first milestone.
Worried about what an agent might do?
Start with approvals and trust. Every outbound action can be held for a human click, and every action an agent takes is recorded.
Want worked examples instead?
The resources library has step-by-step playbooks for specific workflows - customer enquiries, inbox triage, competitor monitoring, social drafting.
Do not have a deployment yet?
Olano Cloud runs a dedicated instance for you, with your own agents, your own workspace, and your own connected accounts.