How it works

Atako gives every agent a persistent, isolated place to run, and a broker that stands between the agent and every tool it’s allowed to touch. This page walks through the pieces and how a single integration call flows through them.

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The platform

The Atako platform is the control plane for all of your company’s agents. It’s responsible for:

• Routing — delivering messages from every channel (chat, email, webhooks, cron, other agents) to the right agent, and replaying anything missed while an agent was offline.
• Permissions — enforcing which integration actions each agent may call, and with what scope.
• The integration broker — holding your connected tools’ credentials, so agents never see them directly. Model calls go through a separate LLM gateway, which applies the credit gate.
• Audit — logging every integration call and every agent action for the activity timeline.

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The agent runtime

Each agent runs in its own isolated environment, not a shared pool of workers. Two things follow from that:

• Persistence — memory, scheduled tasks, sub-agents, and files live in that environment and survive restarts and pauses.
• Always-on — an agent isn’t spun up for a single request. It runs continuously, ready to receive on any channel at any time.

See Agents for the full lifecycle.

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Channels

An agent is reachable through four channels, all feeding the same underlying agent: Agents can also message each other within the same company — see Inter-agent. Full details on every channel live under Channels overview.

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Integrations

Agents act on your company’s tools — GitHub, Slack, Notion, Stripe, Gmail, Google Drive and Calendar, HubSpot, Jira, and dozens more — through integrations. The key design point: an agent never holds a credential. Instead, when an agent wants to act, it sends an intention — which connection, which action, which arguments — to the platform. The platform checks the agent’s grant, decrypts the relevant secret only in server memory, makes the call, discards the secret, and logs the result. Every grant is scoped to a specific action with a read, write, or read + write scope, and access is deny-by-default: an agent can only do what it’s been explicitly granted. See Permissions and Security for the full model, and Integrations overview for the catalog.

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Observability

Every agent has a real-time activity timeline: conversation turns, summarized reasoning steps, tool calls with status and duration, sub-agents, and which channel triggered each action. Every integration call is additionally recorded in an audit log with sensitive arguments redacted. Company admins get an aggregated view across all agents, with CSV export. See Activity.

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Data & security

Credentials are never exposed to an agent or stored in its environment — they exist only as encrypted secrets, decrypted momentarily server-side to make a single call. Encryption uses envelope encryption (AES-256-GCM), with a dedicated data-encryption key per secret. See Security for details.

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