Getting Work Done
Almost everything you do in Opal comes down to four ideas: spaces, threads, tasks, and flows.
Spaces, threads, tasks, and flows all live inside a space, so what you can see and do depends on your organization's plan, your role permissions, and the permission level you hold in that space — Manage, Access, or View. The access model is documented in one place: Access & Permissions.
Purpose
Almost everything you do in Opal from one day to the next comes down to four ideas: spaces, threads, tasks, and flows. Learn them, and the platform stops being a set of features and becomes a way of working.
They divide neatly. A space is where the work happens — the operational environment that holds a team's people, agents, knowledge, and capabilities. Threads, tasks, and flows are how the work gets done inside it: live in conversation, running on its own, or step by step through a defined process. That is the whole map, and everything else in this subsection is detail underneath it.
This subsection is for anyone starting to work in Opal — including team leads setting work up for other people. It assumes no technical background. Each page below takes one concept and explains what it is, what you can do with it, and how it behaves in practice.
This page is the map, not the territory. It tells you what the four concepts are, how they fit together, and which one to read first.
People, agents, knowledge, and capabilities in one container
Conversation between people and agents
A single unit of work, triggered on demand or on a cadence
A multi-step process with assignees and review gates
In This Section
- Spaces — The operational environment where people and agents come together to do work, bringing a team's agents, knowledge, capabilities, and work into one organized context. Spaces
- Threads — Conversations between people and agents inside a space, where you work side by side in real time and steer the work as it unfolds. Threads
- Tasks — Units of work handed to an agent to run on their own, carrying their own instructions and a trigger that decides when they run — on demand, at a set time, on a repeating cadence, or on an event from another system. Tasks
- Flows — Multi-step workflows that carry a process from start to finish, with an assignee on every step — an agent or a person — and review gates wherever the work needs checking before it moves on. Flows
Key Concepts
One container, three ways to work. Threads, tasks, and flows are all created and run inside a space. They draw on the agents, knowledge, and capabilities added there, and what each person can do with them follows the permission level they hold in that space — Manage, Access, or View. Set a space up once and everything run in it starts from the same context, instead of being assembled again for each new piece of work.
The difference between the three is who is steering.
| Who directs the work | Reach for it when | |
|---|---|---|
| Thread | You do, live, in conversation | The shape of the work is still forming and you want to react to what comes back |
| Task | Nobody — the trigger starts it and the agent runs it | The work should happen dependably without you in the room |
| Flow | The process itself, step by step | The work has a defined order and crosses several hands |
If you catch yourself describing the work as "first this, then that, then someone checks it," it is a flow. If it is "someone should just do this every Monday," it is a task. If it is "let me think this through with a couple of agents," it is a thread.
What all three have in common. Agents do the work in every one of them, drawing on the space's knowledge alongside their own capabilities — and in a flow, a step can be assigned to a person instead. Oversight is optional and sized to the work: a task can have an agent reviewer, a user reviewer, or both, and so can any step in a flow. Tasks and flows each record their executions in a Run Log, so work that ran without you watching is still work you can trace.
These are the concepts you use, not the ones you build. Spaces, threads, tasks, and flows are how work is carried out. The agents doing that work — and the skills, connectors, tools, guardrails, and knowledge behind them — are covered in the other subsections of this section.
Short definitions of every term used here are in one place: Glossary.
Where to Start
Start with Spaces. Threads, tasks, and flows all run inside a space and inherit what it holds, so the container is the piece that makes the other three make sense.
Then work through the three ways of getting work done, in increasing order of structure:
- Threads — the most direct way to work with agents, and the one you are likely to use first.
- Tasks — when a piece of work should run on its own, once or on a cadence.
- Flows — when a whole process needs to run in order, across several people and agents, with review along the way.
You can also read any single page on its own. Each one explains when to use its concept and how it differs from the other two.
If your next question is how these four concepts relate to the rest of the platform — agents, knowledge, templates, governance — read Mental Model, which sets out how the pieces fit together as a whole.