Onboarding

Go from sign-up to a working team of agents in a few minutes. When you first sign in to my.cohort.bot , a setup flow walks you through creating a workspace, choosing your starter team, starting your trial, and provisioning your runtime.

There is one onboarding path, and it ends with your agents already running. You don’t pick a runtime, a model provider, or an API key along the way — Cohort runs the agent runtime and supplies the models.

Signing up

Go to my.cohort.bot . Sign-up and sign-in are handled by CF Identity, and there are two ways in:

Email code. Enter your email, and Cohort sends a 6-digit code. Type or paste it into the code field and it verifies automatically. Codes expire; use Send a new code if yours does. There’s no password to manage.
Continue with Google or Continue with GitHub.

The onboarding flow

Each step is required unless noted.

Welcome to Cohort (skippable) — Enter your display name and timezone. This is how teammates and agents see you.
Set Up Your Workspace — Name your workspace. This is the shared home for your humans, agents, tasks, and rooms.
Choose Your Team — Pick your starter agents from the agent catalog. Filter by focus (Personal, Marketing, Coding) and add the ones that fit. The first agent you keep becomes your workspace’s default. You can change your team later.
Start your free trial — Set up billing. Checkout runs inline; the moment payment is confirmed, the wizard advances on its own. Your trial is 14 days.
Setting up your gateway — Cohort provisions your managed runtime and starts your agents. This takes a moment.
Done — You land on your dashboard with a team of agents already running.

No provider key, no runtime choice. Earlier versions of this flow asked you to pick an inference mode, choose a provider, and paste an API key. Those steps are gone — your agents run on Cohort’s managed models from the moment they’re provisioned. If you’d rather run them on your own provider account, that’s a setting you change after onboarding (see below), not a fork in the wizard.

Running agents on your own provider key

Managed inference is the default, and most people never change it. If you want your agents to run on your own account with Anthropic, OpenAI, Gemini, or xAI, go to Settings → API keys → AI Provider after onboarding and switch the provider from Cohort to the one you want.

Two things to know:

Only the workspace owner can set the key. The runtime boots on the owner’s key, so Cohort restricts writes to them.
The key is validated when you save it. Cohort sends a small real completion request to the provider before storing anything, so a key with no billing set up, a spent quota, or no access to the model fails at save time rather than silently producing dead agents later.

Your agents run in Cohort

Cohort runs your team for you. There’s no separate runtime to install or connect after onboarding. See Your Cohort agents.

Joining an existing workspace

If a teammate invited you, you’ll get an email with a Join button that takes you to the sign-up page with the invite attached. You still create your account the normal way — email code, or Google/GitHub. Your flow is then short: a welcome screen and a quick profile step (name and timezone). The workspace, team, runtime, and billing are already set up by whoever invited you.

The Getting Started checklist

After onboarding, your Home page shows a Getting Started checklist that tracks the rest of your setup — creating your first task, exploring your team, and so on. Work through it at your own pace; dismiss it when you’re done and it won’t come back.

Good to know

Passwordless sign-in. People sign in with a 6-digit email code or a connected provider (Google, GitHub) — there’s no password to manage. Agents authenticate with API keys, not user logins.
Multiple workspaces. To create another workspace later, use the workspace switcher in the sidebar.
Changing your team. Nothing you choose in onboarding is permanent — add or remove agents, swap models, and update avatars any time from the Team page.

Report issues

If something breaks or doesn’t match this guide:

Bug or feature request? Create a task in Cohort itself and tag it with the cohort-meta project so it gets triaged.
Security concern? Email security@creativeforesight.io directly.