Ask for bigger jobs
How do I ask Sydekick for multi-step or bulk work?
You can ask Sydekick for a whole job, not just a lookup — "compare these two clients", "find every location missing a description", "draft something I can send". It will plan it, do the reading, and hand back something you can review. For work that can change customer-facing data or reach an external channel, check the approval or confirmation step before you continue.
Four things you can ask for
Knowing which of these you are asking for is most of the skill.
Think it through
- You get
- a plan, a comparison, a recommendation
- Changes anything
- no
- Ends up
- in the conversation
Go and look
- You get
- an answer gathered across clients, locations or directories
- Changes anything
- no
- Ends up
- in the conversation
Make me something
- You get
- a draft, a report, a set of ideas
- Changes anything
- nothing customers can see
- Ends up
- a file you can open or download, or a queue item in Inbox
Do it for real
- You get
- a post published, a review replied to, a routine switched on
- Changes anything
- yes, outside Synup
- Ends up
- live — check for an approval or confirmation step first
The first three are safe to ask for freely. The fourth is where to slow down.
Work you can review before it goes anywhere
The third row is the one most people underuse. Ask for something written and Sydekick saves it as a file rather than burying it in the conversation:
Open in Canvas puts it in a full-width editor beside the conversation; Download takes it away as a file. Notice the sentence underneath — the reply says plainly that nothing was published, scheduled or changed. Drafts of customer-facing work behave the same way through a different door: post ideas and review replies land in Inbox → Approvals and wait for your yes.
Where the line is
Here is one request that reached the boundary and handed the decision back. Asked which playbooks were set up, Sydekick listed them and then closed on a question rather than acting:
"Want me to activate any of the draft playbooks, or adjust a schedule?" Activating one would change when your agent acts on its own, so it put that back to you. Read a closing question like that as the confirmation step for that request — not as a guarantee that every request will end with one.
There is also a formal version. When an action needs sign-off, the conversation shows a card headed Awaiting your approval with the work to review, and the status line while it prepares reads Sending for your approval. That card is the same decision as an Inbox item; it has just come to you rather than waiting for you to go to it.
The gate you can rely on is the one you set yourself, and it belongs to a job rather than to the conversation. When you create a playbook, and when you teach a skill, each carries a switch reading "Ask my approval before anything goes live", and it is on by default. Leave it on and everything that job produces waits in Approvals. There is no equivalent switch covering Sydekick's chat replies as a whole, so for a one-off request that reaches a customer, confirm the approval or confirmation step is there before you continue.
Give a repeating job to a playbook instead
A conversation is the wrong home for work you want every week. If you find yourself re-typing the same large request, that is a playbook: you describe the routine once in plain English, the agent works out the steps and the schedule, and it runs without you. Chat is for the one-off and the exploratory.
Watch out for
Questions people ask
If I say yes, does it happen immediately?
For anything that reaches a customer, yes — publishing a post or posting a review reply goes out. That is why the drafts-first path exists: ask for the draft, read it, then approve it in Inbox rather than approving in the flow of a conversation.
Can I ask it to approve a queue of drafts in one go?
Approvals has multi-select for working through a queue, but the queue is where that happens. Do not treat "approve all of those" in chat as equivalent to reading them.