Backstage — your AI operations copilot
Backstage is an AI copilot built into every agent. Tell it what you want in plain language — “what were my top topics this month?”, “change the welcome message”, “add a return-policy Q&A” — and it reads your live data and prepares the change for you to approve.
View as MarkdownInstead of clicking through settings pages, Backstage lets you manage your agent by chatting with it. Ask a question and it pulls the real numbers; ask for a change and it prepares it as a reviewable proposal you approve before anything happens. Think of it as a copilot for running your agent.
Open your agent and click Backstage in the left navigation (just under Playground). You'll get a home screen with your past sessions and some suggested prompts — type a message or pick a suggestion to start.
What you can ask it to do
Backstage works through a set of tools that wrap the rest of the product. It only uses the tools your role is allowed to (see Permissions below). Examples:
| Area | Things to ask |
|---|---|
| Analytics & insights | “How many conversations this month?”, “Top topics and sentiment”, “Where are my knowledge gaps?”, “How are my credits being used?” |
| Knowledge base | “List my sources”, “Search my knowledge for the refund policy”, “Add a Q&A about shipping”, “Delete the old pricing source”, “Retrain the agent”. |
| Configuration | “Improve my instructions”, “Switch to a different model”, “Lower the temperature”, “Change the welcome message and theme”. |
| Help desk (read-only) | “Show open tickets”, “How many tickets are unassigned?” Backstage can read the inbox but never edits tickets. |
| Actions & deployment | “List my actions”, “Disable the Slack action”, “Add a webhook action”, “Turn on the WhatsApp channel”. |
It reads live data before answering — it never makes numbers up — and it's concise. If something needs a tool your role doesn't have, it tells you instead of guessing.
Nothing changes without your approval
Backstage never edits anything silently. Any change it wants to make is surfaced as a proposal card right in the chat, with a clear before/after:
- Text changes (like instructions) show a side-by-side diff.
- Setting changes (model, temperature, appearance, channels) show a before → after table.
- Adds, deletes, and retrains show a short summary of exactly what will happen.
Click Approve to apply it, or Reject to discard it. Until you approve, nothing has changed — the proposal is just a plan.
If a request would make several changes, you get a card for each one, so you can approve some and reject others.
Attach a file (the + button)
Click the + in the Backstage input to attach a file to your message — useful for “summarize this PDF”, “what's wrong in this screenshot?”, or “add this document to my knowledge base.”
- Images are read by vision-capable models, so the copilot can actually see them.
- PDFs and text files are read server-side — their text is extracted and given to the copilot, so it can summarize them or propose adding them to your knowledge base.
- Up to 5 files per message. Attachments show as chips above the input; click the ✕ to remove one before sending.
Choosing the model
Pick the LLM Backstage runs on — and its temperature — from the Backstage model control on the home screen (any tool-capable model in your catalog). If you connect your own provider keys under Settings → Models & providers, your models appear here too.
Each Backstage message costs 1 credit when it runs on a platform model. If you bring your own provider key, Backstage runs on your key and costs no credits (you pay the provider directly) — it still counts toward your daily message allowance.
Sessions
Each conversation with Backstage is saved as a session, shown as cards on the home screen so you can pick up where you left off. Start a fresh one any time with New chat, or delete a session you no longer need.
Daily limits
Backstage is available on every plan. To keep it fair, each teammate has a daily message allowance based on your plan (plus a short-term rate limit to prevent runaway loops). The remaining count shows next to the input.
| Plan | Backstage messages / day (per user) |
|---|---|
| Free | 5 |
| Starter | 25 |
| Growth | 100 |
| Scale | 500 |
| Enterprise | Unlimited |
Permissions
Backstage respects your workspace role. A viewer can ask for analytics and read data but can't propose changes; an editor can propose knowledge and configuration changes; helpdesk reads require help-desk access, and so on. You only ever see the tools you're allowed to use, and mutations still go through the approve step.