The roundtable

The roundtable is one question put to every agent at once. Instead of asking Hardware, then Quality, then Supply Chain and stitching the answers together yourself, you ask once and each discipline responds from its own angle.

Use it when a question crosses disciplines: a design decision with cost and compliance consequences, a change that touches manufacturing and test, or the opening review of a brand-new product.

Start a roundtable

1. Select the product you want discussed.
2. Open the agent picker in the composer and choose ● Roundtable (all).
3. Describe the situation and send.

An empty roundtable greets you with Start a roundtable — All enabled agents will discuss your product together. A strip above the messages lists who is taking part, for example 8 agents participating, with each discipline's colour dot.

While it runs

A progress panel replaces the usual typing dots:

• Roundtable in progress with a counter such as 3/8 agents.
• One line per discipline, marked ○ waiting, ↻ working now, ✓ finished.
• A blue progress bar.
• Directives issued — the concrete instructions the roundtable has handed to individual disciplines, each tagged with the agent it is meant for.

A roundtable takes longer than a single answer because every agent thinks separately. Leave it running; you can read the earlier responses as they land.

Directives are the output that matters

The discussion is useful, but the directives are the point. A directive is one discipline being told to do something specific — write a requirement, check a tolerance, get a supplier quote.

Once a roundtable has issued directives, you see them again in the individual agent chats: a purple strip reading Roundtable directives: with up to three of them. Click one to jump back to the roundtable thread it came from, or × to dismiss the strip.

Treat directives as your backlog

Work them one at a time in the relevant agent's chat. That is much more effective than asking the roundtable to do the work itself — the roundtable is for deciding, the individual agents are for doing.

Bringing a question to the roundtable

If you are already deep in a one-to-one conversation and realise it needs wider input, click ↗ Roundtable next to the agent pill. Your last message is carried over, marked with the chat it came from, so you do not have to explain the background twice.

New products start here

When you create a product, Colleag opens the roundtable automatically and asks every agent to look at what you described. That first pass produces the initial gap list — what is missing, what is risky, what needs deciding — which is exactly what you want on day one. See Products.

Troubleshooting

Problem	What is going on
Only two or three agents take part	Only enabled disciplines join. Check which are switched on under Settings → Disciplines.
The roundtable option is missing	You are in Commercial, Corporate or Quality System, or you have not selected a product. The roundtable runs on a product.
It is very slow	Every agent answers in turn. Use a cheaper model for broad discussions and save the expensive one for the decisions.
Credits drop quickly	A roundtable is many answers in one go. That is expected — use it for real cross-discipline questions, not for lookups.

Next: Products →