ChatGPT is a tab. A teammate has a job.

ChatGPT Team is a shared conversation. Copilot Studio is a vendor-hosted agent. Lindy is no-code chores. Shelly is a crew with tools, memory, and a human approval.

Most “AI at work” is still chat with a costume. Excellent for reading. Weak at doing. They do not own your board. They do not wait for a person before a destructive change. They do not version the teammate the way you version a playbook.

A crew is not a prompt you re-paste. It has a body, skills you attach on purpose, tools it is allowed to call, memory it can retrieve. Runs can start from the board, a clock, or an incoming link. When a change is dangerous, it becomes an approval, not a surprise.

What “governed” means in the product

Crews (snails) live in a workspace: a species, a shell colour, instructions, and versioned behaviour you can roll forward.
Skills are written playbooks. The catalogue is a name and a description. The full text loads only when it is asked for.
Connected tools are three moves: search what is available, inspect one, then call it. Anything that writes waits for a person.
Every parked write is an approval. Decide from the queue, or a team-chat card. Waiting approvals expire on a timer.
Runs start on a schedule, from a link, or on demand. Each run pins the behaviour it was built with. Budgets: steps, spending and time. Over budget gets a shorter rescue turn.
Memory lives at the workspace level, searched by meaning and by keyword, with a fallback. Credentials are stored as references, hidden in responses, and released only per run.
Work arrives in the board’s agent inbox. Shelly does not invent a second board. After a run, it proposes memories and edits for a person to accept or reject.

The sidebar is the integration you actually click

Shelly is not only the hub app. It opens as a panel inside the product you are already in. In the timer it is the clearest version: it knows which app and page you are on, and its shortcuts change if a calendar is connected. Ask “is my timer still running?” without leaving the tracker. Confirm or cancel a write without opening a second login. If the answer lives in the board or the wiki, the panel can open that app.

It always knows which app and page you are on.
A chat starts a run you can follow. Destructive steps come back as actions you confirm or cancel.
First-party tools: board cards (find, search, create), the timer and its entries, and document search, read and write — each gated by what you may access.
Admin-only tools stay admin-only: member access, purging archived documents.

How connected apps show up for a teammate

A connection is owned by a person, linked to a workspace, and sorted into a category (calendar, email, code, chat, other). Organisation policy can forbid a category. The teammate does not get a dump of every vendor action. It searches, then it acts.

It can look up which tools the connections you may use actually offer.
It can run a read immediately. Anything that changes outside data waits for confirmation, the same as any other write.
A shared chat may use connections shared with that chat. Private connections stay private.
The same connection can also fire workspace rules (an assigned issue becomes a task), and feed Kraken research as a source. One connection. Three uses. Keys never leave the server.

If it cannot be approved, versioned and pointed at a task, it is a demo.

Use Shelly when the AI has to join the organisation: same workspace, same permissions, a person who can say no.