About External Workmates

TL;DR

External Workmates are AI teammates hosted on your own agent platform and connected to Wrike. @mention or assign them work to analyze risks, create tasks and projects, and use connected tools across their accessible spaces. Currently available through Wrike Labs with Claude Managed Agents, setup requires an API key and both View and Manage Workmates permissions.

• Overview
• Prerequisites
• What Can External Workmates Do?
• Supported Agent Platforms
• External Workmates and AI Agents
• What's Next?

Overview

An External Workmate is an AI agent hosted on your own platform and integrated into Wrike as a digital teammate. It retains its original name, while Wrike automatically creates a user account and assigns a standard Workmate avatar. Your team can interact with it just like a human colleague - simply @mention it in a comment or assign it to a task, and it will respond directly in the thread.

Prerequisites

• Two Wrike permissions: View Workmates in account settings, which lets you reach the Workmates page, and Manage Workmates, which lets you connect, edit and remove a Workmate. You need both permissions active. Having Manage Workmates without View Workmates locks you out of navigating to the Workmates page.
• An account on a supported agent platform, where you build and run the agent.
• An API key from that platform, which is how Wrike reaches your account.
• A space to work in - start with one. Choose a space with real work in it, because a Workmate judges by comparing against what your account already records. Avoid the space where a wrong edit would cost you something.

What Can External Workmates Do?

An external Workmate reads and reasons across your work, then acts on it:

• Work across several spaces: A Workmate is not tied to a single space. Its own user account can hold as many spaces as you add it to, and it reads those spaces and no others - not the spaces of whoever set it up. So it can answer a question about one of its spaces using what it read in another.
• Read around a question: It opens the item you mention it on, follows it to its parent, children, and related items, and reads the comments and history before forming a view.
• Assess risk: Reports on what threatens delivery, the evidence behind each risk, and what to do about it.
• Turn a meeting into work: Reads a transcript or notes, then records the decisions and creates the follow-up tasks with the right people on them.
• Turn a request into a project: Reads a brief and proposes a project structure, naming what the brief leaves unanswered.
• Reach your other tools, not only Wrike: On your agent platform you can connect your Workmate to the other places your work lives - your document store such as Google Drive, your design tool such as Figma, your CRM, as long as the platform allows it. A Workmate connected to Google Drive can read the brief sitting there and build the project in Wrike from it, in one job. This is what makes it a Workmate rather than an agent that only knows Wrike.
• Ask before it acts: It stops and puts a choice to you in the comment thread whenever its next step depends on something only you know.

Supported Agent Platforms

Claude (Anthropic) - agents built on Anthropic's Managed Agents service.

Managed Agents is Anthropic's service for agents that Anthropic hosts and runs. You describe the agent once - its model, its instructions, and what it may connect to - and Anthropic keeps that description and runs the agent whenever something asks it to work. Your agent lives in a workspace on your own Anthropic account, which means you control it and you pay Anthropic directly for what it uses.

Anthropic's documentation is the full account of building one: the Managed Agents overview explains the pieces, and the quickstart walks through creating one end to end.

External Workmates and AI Agents

Wrike offers two kinds of AI colleague, and you can choose one depending on where the work happens.

Example: When evaluating scope, location matters. If the workflow stays completely inside Wrike - like reading a task, checking a parent project's custom field, and assigning a teammate - use an internal AI Agent. If the workflow reaches outside Wrike - like pulling a brief from your document store, cross-checking your CRM, and creating the Wrike project - use an external Workmate.

What's Next?

Set Up an External Workmate

• Build Your Agent on Claude Managed Agents
• Connect Your agent to Wrike as a Workmate

Use, Manage & Troubleshoot

• Work With Your Workmate
• External Workmate Limitations and Troubleshooting