External Workmate Limitations and Troubleshooting

TL;DR

Use external Workmates for questions that require reading, context, and an assessment across accessible Wrike spaces. Use Wrike reports for exact counts, large-scale grouping, effort, workload, dependencies, and time in status. You pay Anthropic for usage; Wrike charges no connection fee or Workmate license. For issues, check login, API-key workspace, Claude session logs, and space access - or ask the Wrike Community.

• Overview
• What to Ask a Workmate, and What to Ask a Report
• Billing and Usage
• Troubleshooting
• Getting Help

Overview

External Workmates read and reason. Knowing which questions suit a Workmate and which suit a Wrike report is the fastest way to get value from one.

What to Ask a Workmate, and What to Ask a Report

A Workmate opens the items you point it at, follows them to their parents, children, and neighbors, reads the comments and the history, and forms an assessment  it can show you the evidence for. That is why it works best on a question a person would need to read around to answer.

It works from what your items say. Effort and workload figures, dependencies between tasks, and how long an item has sat in its current status are not part of what it reads, so a question turning on those is better answered by a Wrike report.

It reads and reasons rather than counting. A question that needs counting or grouping across thousands of items is better answered by a Wrike report, which answers it exactly.

It draws on every space it has been added to. A question that spans teams - what in Communication threatens the delivery date, who across the account has run this kind of migration before - is exactly what a Workmate is good for, provided its user account holds those spaces.

It works with the people and fields your account already has. It assigns work to Wrike users, and names anyone else in the task text instead. It chooses from the options a field already offers, and tells you when the option it wanted is not one of them.

Billing and Usage

Your Workmate's thinking runs on your own platform account, so you pay Anthropic directly for what it uses, at their published rates. Wrike does not charge for the connection, and your Workmate's user account does not consume a Wrike license.

What a job costs depends on the model you chose, how much of your project the Workmate had to read to answer, and how much work it did. Anthropic's console shows the cost of each session, so you can see what your first few jobs cost before deciding how widely to use your Workmate.

Troubleshooting

Your Workmate does not appear when you type @ in a comment. Log out of Wrike and back in. A Workmate brought in during your current session may not reach the mention menu until you sign in again.

The agent list comes back empty after you add your key. Your key was made somewhere other than where your agent lives. In the Claude console an account is divided into workspaces, and a key only reaches agents in the workspace it was made in. Open your agent in the console, read the workspace name at the top left, then create a key under API keys with that workspace selected.

Your Workmate acknowledged the job and then went quiet. The run happens on your own platform account, so that is where to look. Open the agent in the Claude console and check its Sessions. Every session reads Idle whether it finished or stopped early, so open the one for that job: it shows what it did, every tool it called, and where it stopped.

Your Workmate cannot see work you expected it to see. Check the spaces on its assigned agent user identity. A Workmate sees exactly what that user can see, and nothing outside it.

Getting Help

This is early, and a small number of teams are doing it alongside us. If you get stuck, post your question in the Wrike Community - that is where we answer questions about external Workmates.