Chat With Your Work
Chat that knows your files, meetings, calendar, and the web.
The AI Assistant is the primary surface in MainBranch. It's a chat that knows your work — your files, your meetings, your calendar, and (optionally) the web. It can also write documents, build spreadsheets, draw charts, and generate images and videos for you.
In this section
Asking Questions
How to phrase prompts and read citations.
Tools the Assistant Uses
Web search, charts, image & video generation, calendar.
Files in Chat
Attach files, supported types, and size limits.
Documents & Spreadsheets
Generate and edit content in the canvas.
Images & Videos
Generate visuals from a prompt.
Chat History
Pin, archive, rename, branch, export, delete.
Configuring Chat
Model picker, data source toggles, custom instructions.
What the assistant can do at a glance
- Answer questions about your work. It searches across your Vault files, meetings, emails, and calendar (depending on what you've connected) and answers with citations to the original source.
- Search the web. When internal data isn't enough and your admin allows it, the assistant can pull from the live web.
- Generate documents and spreadsheets. Long-form writing and structured data open in a side canvas where you can edit them.
- Generate visuals. Bar, line, area, pie, radar, and radial charts inline. AI-generated images and short videos.
- Manage your calendar. Find events, suggest times, and (with your confirmation) create or edit events.
- Read attached files. PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets, images, and more.
How tools work
You don't have to choose which tool the assistant uses — it decides based on your question. When it uses a tool, you'll see a small step appear in the conversation showing what it's doing ("Searching the web for…", "Reading document…", "Generating chart…"). When the step finishes, the result is integrated into the reply.
If a tool requires your confirmation — most notably calendar changes — you'll see an inline approval prompt before anything happens.
Privacy
The assistant only sees content you already have access to. Workspace admins can review activity in the audit log. See Data Privacy for the full picture.