What Is Opal?

#Purpose

This page introduces Opal: what it is, who it is for, and the value it delivers. It assumes no prior knowledge of the platform and minimal technical background — every idea is explained as it comes up. Start here, then move on to the tour and the hands-on walkthrough.

#What Opal is

Opal is an agentic operations platform.

Agentic operations is the practice of coordinating people, agents, knowledge, systems, and processes toward shared business objectives. It is the operating model organizations need in order to put AI to work at scale while keeping alignment, accountability, and governance intact.

Instead of treating AI as a collection of disconnected tools, Opal treats digital workers as participants that work alongside people in a shared operational environment. People, agents, knowledge, systems, and processes come together under a single model rather than being spread across separate applications.

#Why organizations need it

For decades, software was a tool used by people. Recent advances in AI introduced a new kind of worker — the digital worker, or agent — that can reason, decide, retrieve information, and carry out work autonomously or semi-autonomously.

The first wave of AI focused on individual productivity: one person, one assistant. The larger opportunity is organizational. Value is created through operations — how work, decisions, and coordination actually happen across teams — not simply through faster individuals.

So the future workforce is not human or digital. It is human and digital. People remain responsible for leadership, judgment, creativity, and governance. Digital workers expand capacity for analysis, coordination, and execution. Coordinating the two at scale takes a new operating model, and that is what Opal was built to provide.

#Who Opal is for

Opal is for organizations that need to coordinate work across people, information, and systems, and that want to run a digital workforce alongside their existing teams.

In practice, that means two kinds of reader:

• People doing the work — operations teams, knowledge workers, subject-matter experts, project and program leads, customer-facing teams, department owners, and business leaders who want to delegate repeatable or specialized work to a reliable digital worker while staying in control of how that work is done.
• People responsible for oversight — anyone accountable for who can participate, what they can access, and how work is reviewed and approved.

You direct agents in plain language, the same way you would brief a colleague, and you can review and refine their output at any point.

#What this looks like in practice

Picture a customer success team. They keep their onboarding playbooks and product documentation in Opal as knowledge, and they bring the agents and capabilities they rely on into a single space. Day to day:

• A specialist asks an agent a question in a thread, and the agent answers using the team's own published playbooks rather than generic information.
• A scheduled task runs every Monday without anyone asking for it, producing account summaries for the week's upcoming renewals.
• A multi-step onboarding flow moves each new customer through the process from start to finish, with an agent or a person assigned to each step and a reviewer checking the work before it moves on.

The same people, the same information, and the same rules apply throughout.

#The value Opal delivers

• Deliver faster. Opal's central value is helping organizations move from intention to execution faster — delivering work, decisions, and outcomes with speed. Where windows of advantage are short, delivery speed is itself a competitive advantage.
• Take on more work. Coordinating human and digital workers lets teams run more work in parallel and absorb demand that would otherwise exceed their capacity.
• Improve how the organization operates, not just how one person works. Opal coordinates execution across teams, agents, and systems instead of optimizing one person at a time.
• Work as one human and digital workforce. People and agents collaborate in a shared context, rather than through disconnected, single-user AI tools.
• Work from one governed source of truth. Work is grounded in the organization's own governed, structured knowledge, which both people and agents can act on.
• Repeat what works. Reusable, standardized building blocks let proven ways of working be applied reliably across the organization.
• Stay in control. Oversight, accountability, and control are built in — including enterprise-grade security and access controls such as single sign-on, enforced authentication, and role-based access — so a digital workforce can grow on a foundation of trust.
• Work with the systems you already use. Opal connects to the applications and data an organization already relies on, and can send platform events to external systems, so work stays in sync with the rest of the stack.

#In This Section

The rest of 1. Getting Started builds on this page:

• Opal at a Glance — A high-level tour of the platform's main areas and how they fit together. Opal at a Glance
• Quickstart — Hands-on walkthroughs that take you through your first agent, knowledge, space, thread, task, and flow. Quickstart
• Glossary — Short definitions of key Opal terms, for quick reference as you read. Glossary

#Key Concepts

These are the ideas this page relies on and that the rest of the documentation builds on. You do not need to master them here — each one is explained in full later.

• Agentic operations — The practice of coordinating people, agents, knowledge, systems, and processes toward shared business objectives. It is the operating model Opal is built around.
• Digital worker — A worker that is software rather than a person, able to reason, decide, retrieve information, and carry out work autonomously or semi-autonomously. In Opal, digital workers are called agents.
• Digital workforce — The combination of human and digital workers an organization coordinates together. People remain responsible for leadership, judgment, creativity, and governance; digital workers add capacity for analysis, coordination, and execution.
• Agent — A digital worker in Opal. Agents collaborate alongside people: taking part in conversations, completing and reviewing tasks, executing and reviewing steps in workflows, drawing on organizational knowledge, and interacting with connected systems.
• Space — An operational environment where people and agents come together to do work, bringing the agents, knowledge, capabilities, and work of a team, project, or initiative into one organized context.
• Knowledge — Opal's centralized knowledge base: a single, organized home for the documents, files, and shared context an organization relies on, structured as a familiar system of files and folders. It gives people and agents a common source of truth to work from, and Opal treats it as operational infrastructure rather than a static repository.
• Thread, task, and flow — The three ways work happens in a space: a thread is a conversation between people and agents; a task is a unit of work an agent runs on its own; a flow is a multi-step process that coordinates people and agents from start to finish, with optional review at every step.
• Governance — The oversight and control built across the platform, including permissions, approvals, versioning, auditability, and safeguards on how agents behave. Governance is built in from the start rather than added afterwards, because a digital workforce can only scale on a foundation of trust.

#Where to Start

Follow these in order:

1. Take the tour. Opal at a Glance shows the platform's main areas and how they connect. Opal at a Glance
2. Try it yourself. The Quickstart walks you through your first agent, knowledge, space, thread, task, and flow. Quickstart
3. See how the pieces fit. Mental Model explains how Opal's concepts relate to one another. Mental Model
4. Go deeper on any concept. Core Concepts covers every part of the platform in depth. Core Concepts

If a term is unfamiliar along the way, look it up in the Glossary.