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iMessage setup

Text your agent like you’d text a person. Cohort gives your workspace a dedicated iMessage line that goes to your Chief of Staff, the workspace’s default agent (Kenji, unless you set up your team differently). You connect your phone number, send one text to pair, and from then on the conversation lives in Messages alongside everyone else you talk to.

There is nothing to install — no Mac, no Terminal, no helper apps. The line runs on Cohort’s hosted iMessage transport.

Availability. iMessage runs on shared hosted capacity. If the connect wizard reports that iMessage is at capacity, try again later — capacity expands over time.

Connecting

  1. In Cohort, go to Settings → Channels and click Connect on the iMessage card.
  2. Enter your phone number — the one you’ll text from, in full international E.164 format, such as +14155550100.
  3. The wizard shows you your Chief of Staff’s iMessage line. Text it from your iPhone.
  4. Your first text completes the pairing and goes straight to your agent as the first turn of the conversation. It can answer what you wrote right away; you don’t have to send it again after a setup reply.

That’s the whole setup. Leaving the wizard before texting the line discards the connection; you can reconnect any time.

What the conversation is like

  • The first text is a real message. It isn’t consumed as a pairing code or replaced with a canned welcome. If this is your first direct conversation with your Chief of Staff, it’s set to answer what you wrote first, say in a line what it handles, and suggest one thing you can ask it for next.
  • One front door for the whole team. Your Chief of Staff answers what it can and hands the rest to the teammate who owns it as a Cohort task, then tells you who has it.
  • It’s a thread, not one-shots. The conversation keeps its context across texts — ask a follow-up tomorrow and the agent knows what you were talking about.
  • Changing channels doesn’t start the relationship over. Cohort recognizes the same person and agent across supported one-to-one channels in the workspace, so connecting iMessage after another channel doesn’t replay the first-conversation introduction.
  • It feels native. You’ll see the typing indicator while the agent composes.
  • Rapid-fire texts read as one thought. Send three quick messages and the agent responds to all of them together instead of replying three times.
  • Agents can text you first. An agent can start a conversation proactively — but only with numbers explicitly linked to it, under a daily send cap, and with every outbound message logged.

Memory across channels. Cohort memory is shared at the workspace level rather than isolated to iMessage. Before inviting you to share personal context during a first conversation, the agent explains that remembered context can be used elsewhere in the workspace.

Current limits

  • Text only, in both directions. Images, attachments, and tapback reactions aren’t carried yet.
  • One-to-one conversations — no group chats.
  • iMessage always goes to your Chief of Staff. There’s no per-line agent picker; ask your Chief of Staff to bring in a teammate instead. If the agent the line was connected to is removed, a workspace admin can disconnect and reconnect iMessage to reach the current default agent.

Disconnecting

Settings → Channels → iMessage → Disconnect. Your phone number is removed from the line’s allowlist immediately, and texts to the line stop reaching your workspace.

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