Core concepts
The handful of ideas — workspaces, projects, the work surfaces, Alto, agents, and skills — that the rest of the platform builds on.
A few concepts show up everywhere in AltStudio. Once these click, the rest of the product reads naturally.
Workspace
A workspace is your organization's home in AltStudio — its members, settings, and all of its work. You'll usually belong to a single workspace; if you work across more than one organization, you can switch between them.
Project
A project is a container for a body of work — a client engagement, an initiative, a research effort. Canvases, documents, knowledge, and agent work are organized under projects, which keeps related material together and makes it easy to scope what Alto and agents draw on.
You can work without picking a project, but grouping work into projects is what keeps a busy workspace navigable.
The work surfaces
Work lives on one of three complementary surfaces. Each has a job; content lives on exactly one and is referenced from the others.
| Surface | Best for |
|---|---|
| Canvas | Visual, multi-step, connected work — when structure matters. |
| Documents & decks | Standalone deliverables — reports, briefs, proposals, presentations. |
| Knowledge | Source material and facts — documents, reference files, brand context. |
Alto
Alto is the AI orchestrator you talk to in the Workbench. It's more than a chatbot: it can reason over your knowledge, produce documents and decks, build canvases, call tools, and delegate to agents — coordinating across the surfaces above on your behalf.
Agents
Agents do work on their own. Where Alto is interactive, an agent can be given a task and run in the background — researching, drafting, monitoring — and report results back to your Dashboard. Some agents run on a schedule; others you trigger or mention directly.
Skills
Skills are reusable, packaged know-how — a repeatable way of doing something that Alto and agents can apply when it's relevant. They let the platform bring consistent, expert approaches to recurring work instead of starting from scratch each time.