Tasks
Email, chat, calendar and approvals
How an AI staff member reaches the outside world — drafting and sending email, posting to chat, managing calendar events — and how it stops to ask a human first.
These are the tools that leave the building. A staff member using them affects someone outside Dhanu, so they are the ones worth understanding before you switch them on.
Where it runs: in AI staff runs, for staff given these tools.
Reaching people
| It can | What that looks like |
|---|---|
| Draft an email | Recipient, subject and body prepared for review — nothing is sent |
| Send an email | A real outbound message |
| Post or read chat | A message posted to a channel, or recent messages read back |
| Manage calendar | List availability, create an event, update one |
| Notify | An out-of-band alert to a person or a system |
A draft comes back into the thread, with the staff member asking what to do next — nothing has been sent.
Drafting and sending are separate tools on purpose. A Read-only staff member can draft all day and cannot send anything — the ceiling on its access makes it structurally impossible, not merely discouraged. Every catalogue role that writes correspondence is written to hand back a draft for a human to sign.
Sends can be run as a preview first, and carry an idempotency key, so a retry after a network wobble does not send the same email twice.
Stopping to ask
Three distinct ways an agent hands control back to a person.
| It can | When it is used |
|---|---|
| Ask a clarifying question | It lacks information it needs to proceed. Questions are posted to the task and the run pauses for your answer, usually with options to tap |
| Request approval | It is about to do something consequential or irreversible. The request is recorded to the audit log and the run pauses |
| Hand off | The work is outside its scope — to a human queue, or reassigned to another staff member, with a reason |
A clarifying question is posted into the task and the run pauses until you answer.
The difference between the first two is what is being gated. Clarifying gathers information; approval gates an action. A well-behaved staff member asks before guessing and asks again before doing anything it cannot undo.
What to check before switching these on
- Access level. Read-only cannot act outwardly. Standard can. Give a staff member the smallest level that lets it do its job.
- Who it can reach. Outbound recipients are constrained by configuration, not by the model’s judgement.
- The audit trail. Approvals are recorded, and every tool call appears on the run trace. If a message went out, there is a line showing it.
The default posture across Dhanu’s ready-made staff roles is: draft, do not send; ask, do not assume. Anything beyond that is a deliberate choice you make on a staff member’s settings.