04 · Experts and expert teams

Two mechanisms, stated plainly

An expert (专家) is a role-switching mechanism — a persona, a methodology and a toolchain that make WorkBuddy execute as a specialist in a particular field.

An expert team (专家团) is a collaboration mechanism — several experts dividing the work, with a lead that decomposes the task, runs the parts in parallel, and integrates the delivery.

The Experts section in the sidebar has two halves: the Expert centre (专家中心), where you browse official and community experts and teams by industry, and My experts (我的专家), where you build your own.

How to use them

1) Open the expert centre

Click Experts (专家) in the sidebar and browse.

• Expert cards show the capability description, areas of strength, and example tasks
• Expert team cards also list the team members

2) Summon

Click summon and you land in a conversation.

3) Find your regulars fast

Click the expert entry point in a conversation to expand a list of recently used experts, with two shortcuts:

• Search — type a name to find and summon
• Pin — pinned experts persist and appear at the top next time

Switching experts inside a team conversation needs a new conversation

Searching for another expert inside an expert-team conversation prompts: "this conversation is already using an expert team; switching to another expert requires a new conversation." Confirming returns you to a fresh conversation state before summoning — the new expert does not bind back into the team conversation.

So: decide before you commit to a team. Changing your mind mid-way costs you a restart.

4) Describe the task

With an expert: state the task and WorkBuddy completes it through that role's professional lens and methods.

With an expert team: describe the task in plain language and the team lead decomposes, assigns, executes and returns a complete result. You do not have to say who does what.

Skill, expert or expert team?

The most easily confused part of this chapter:

Dimension	Skill	Expert (agent type)	Expert team
What it is	Tool capability: lets the AI do something	An AI advisor who understands a field	An AI team: decomposes, parallelises, delivers
When to pick it	You need a specific tool capability	You have one clear, single question	The task is complex and needs several roles

The short version:

• A Skill is capability
• An expert is capability plus experience
• An expert team is several experts plus a process

Concretely:

• You need it to read PDFs → install the pdf Skill
• You need it to read this financial statement like an analyst → summon a finance expert
• You need a full market-entry plan with research, financial modelling, legal risk and a rollout schedule → summon an expert team

What an expert team costs

3–5× a single expert

The official wording: an expert team invokes several experts in parallel across multiple model interactions, so credit consumption is typically 3–5× that of a single expert (actual usage varies).

Check your credit balance before summoning one, to avoid a task dying mid-run from insufficient credits. Running out partway is the worst outcome — the consumption still happened and you have nothing to show for it.

The test is simple: does this task genuinely need several different viewpoints?

It does: a proposal that has to survive scrutiny from business, finance and legal simultaneously. It does not: a weekly report that needs to read more professionally. A single expert covers that.

The permission boundary

An expert does not touch your system by itself

Officially: experts do not proactively acquire system permissions — they process only the conversation and files you supply. Only when equipped with Skills or MCP servers do they indirectly reach files or external services, and only with your authorisation.

Put differently: an expert is a layer of role priming plus methodology. What actually acts is the Skills and MCP behind it. To know what an expert can touch, look at the Skills it carries.

Officially listed collection:

Information	Collected	Purpose
Account information	Required	User ID and nickname, for identity and session management
Conversation content	Required	Your text and instructions, for generating replies and completing tasks
Uploaded files	Optional	Only when you upload them
Workspace files	Optional	Only indirectly, when explicitly triggered via a Skill

Using experts, WorkBuddy does not collect contacts, precise location, device identifiers, biometrics, or your browsing history outside the product.

Disclaimers and limits

A role is not a qualification

The official disclaimer: generated content is for reference and does not constitute professional advice; for medical, legal, investment and compliance decisions, consult a qualified professional.

An expert is role-based AI assistance, which differs from a service with legal standing. It makes output more professional and better organised. It has no licence and carries no liability.

Two more:

• Confirm you have the right to submit what you upload. Protect other people's personal information and commercial confidences — particularly relevant when having an expert analyse team performance, client lists or CVs.
• If an expert's Skills or MCP call external services, the boundaries of those modules apply. See Skills and Connectors.

Roles without the Experts feature

If you just want more professional output, writing the role into the prompt works:

You are a financial analyst with ten years in investment banking. Judging by
the best research you have seen, analyse this company's financials, focusing
on revenue structure, cash-flow risks, and competitive position against peers.
Where data is missing, make assumptions boldly but label them as assumptions.

The Experts feature's advantage over doing it yourself is that the methodology and toolchain come pre-built — you do not have to work out what framework a financial analyst reads statements with. The trade-off is less flexibility.

General guidance: use an existing expert where one fits; write your own role when you need something genuinely unusual.

My experts

Under My experts you can build your own, freezing your domain knowledge into a role, and share it.

Good when your industry has judgement standards an external expert would not know — pricing conventions in a niche market, common traps in a class of contract — and restating them in every prompt is tiring.

FAQ

Are project experts the same thing?

Same mechanism, different scope. A project can configure project experts, and when a member starts a task there the selection range is "project experts + personal experts + everything in the expert centre", with project experts pinned to the top.

Can I use Skills while an expert is summoned?

Yes. Experts and Skills are orthogonal — the expert decides how it thinks, the Skills decide what it can do.

Do I get credits back if an expert team fails?

No. Which is why the advice is to check your balance first and validate the direction with a single expert.

Next

05 Projects and teamwork — turn this configuration into something a team shares.