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Anatomy of an agent

An agent in Apollo Space is the sum of four things:

Persona

Tone, voice, and behavior. Defines how the agent responds, in what language and with what level of formality — and what it knows about its organization.

Tools

What the agent can do — search the web, send WhatsApp messages, create a lead, read Notion. Each tool is a typed function with its own permissions.

Memory

Knowledge that persists across conversations. Can be factual (dates, preferences), procedural (approaches that worked), or semantic (insights distilled from many conversations).

Budget

Spend caps configurable by the org — a safeguard so an unexpected loop doesn’t drain the entire balance. See Caps.

What happens in a conversation

When you send the agent a message, Apollo Space runs the following sequence under the hood:
1

Opens the trace

A trace begins — the complete record of everything the agent did in that conversation. Every action, cost, and return value is logged for replay and auditing.
2

Checks the budget

Before any billable action, Apollo Space checks whether the call fits within the limits — wallet balance plus caps by org, agent, and user. See Caps.
3

Agent selects tools

The agent decides which tools to call (or none, if the response is plain text). Apollo Space runs each one with the agent’s permissions and your org’s isolation.
4

Records usage

Each billable action becomes a line in the org’s usage history. Stars are debited from the wallet in the same operation — no separate accounting.
5

Closes the trace

The response returns to the chat. The trace is available via View trace — you can inspect it anytime afterward.

The agent hierarchy

Agents aren’t a flat list — they form an org chart, just like a real company. Each level delegates downward and reports upward:
  • Digital Twin — your personal agent, spanning every organization you belong to and speaking with your voice. It’s the headline feature of Apollo.
  • Chief of Staff (Athena) — the organization’s agent: coordinates company work with a neutral voice.
  • Managers and specialists — function- and task-specific personas that the Chief of Staff activates as needed.
The Digital Twin and the Chief of Staff are distinct agents with different roles — one represents the person, the other runs the company. They collaborate, but they are not “the same agent in two modes”.

Agent types

Apollo Space ships with ready-made agents and also lets you create custom agents.

Canonical personas

Apollo Space ships with personas that cover day-to-day work — from research to closing, from operations to back-office. The three most used:

What it does

Public web search via Tavily, company analysis, information consolidation with cited sources. Ideal for the research and lead enrichment phase.

Main tools

Web search (Tavily), page reading, contact extraction via Apify, public profile analysis.
Every Scout search includes links to the sources consulted — you can verify the origin of each piece of information.
See Scout in detail →

Chief of Staff vs. Digital Twin

These are two distinct agents with different roles — not “two modes of the same agent”:

Chief of Staff (Athena)

The organization’s agent. Knows the company’s context and coordinates its work, but speaks with a neutral voice — not “as” any specific leader.

Digital Twin

The person’s agent — personal, spans all their orgs, and speaks with the leader’s voice. Shows up in conversations they don’t have time to handle.
They collaborate: a leader’s Twin delegates to Athena when the work belongs to the company; Athena activates the Twin when a communication needs to go out in that person’s voice. Distinct roles, one team.

Other available personas

Beyond the three canonical personas above, Apollo Space offers a catalog of specialist personas that are opt-in per org. It includes function-specific Chiefs of Staff (finance, technology, marketing) and agents focused on narrower tasks — writing, design, post-sale relationships, competitive analysis, and more. These personas are opt-in — you enable only the ones that make sense for your team. There’s no cost to “keep an agent alive” — cost is always per actual call made. The full list is visible under Settings → Agents → Catalog inside the app.

Custom agents

Each org can create its own agents with:
  • Custom persona: your own system prompt plus defined tone and voice
  • Custom tools: you enable only the tools this agent needs
  • Custom caps: can have a daily cap different from the org’s default
  • Own memory: agents don’t share memory — each accumulates its own history
See Create a custom agent (coming soon) for the step-by-step guide.

Audit trail

Every agent action generates two types of log:
LogPurpose
TraceComplete replay of the conversation — every decision, every tool call. Visible in the UI via “View trace” in chat.
Usage historyOne line per billable action, with cost. Feeds the Billing panel and the caps.
The audit log is append-only — nothing is deleted when a conversation ends.

Next steps

Scout

Details on the research agent.

Stars + caps

How to size the budget per agent.

Integrations

Which external tools your agents can use.

CRM

How agents interact with leads and pipelines.