The three kinds of bot
- A FAQ bot. Answers from a wiki. Cheap, and useless the moment the question is "the printer on level 2 is offline again", because it cannot look.
- An agent that acts. Looks at the server and fixes it. Fast, and the reason change-control teams sleep badly: nobody approved the fix and the log says "the agent".
- A teammate that asks. Looks at the server read-only, says what it found, proposes the fix as a card in the chat, and runs it when a person taps Yes. The log says who asked, who approved and what ran.
BE Teammate is the third kind, and so is every other Binary Elements product with an AI in it. It is the same rule as BE Hub: the AI proposes, a named person approves.
What a request looks like
Staff: "The printer on level 2 says offline again." Bot: "Checked the print server: the queue is paused since 08:12. Resume it?" A person taps Yes. The queue is resumed, the result is checked, and the thread is written up with who asked, who approved and what ran.
What to look for
- It can look, with limits. Servers, services and APIs an admin has granted, over SSH, web APIs and MCP, read-only until someone says otherwise.
- Approval is per bot and per action. An admin decides which actions the IT bot may run on its own (none, by default) and which need a person. A marketing bot has different keys and different limits.
- It lives where people already are. One-to-one chats and group chats in Teams, and its own mailbox so it can read and reply to email.
- It shares company notes. Facts taught to one bot are available to the others, and admins can see and remove them.
- It can raise a ticket and work it. With BE Hub, the bot reads the fleet, raises or updates tickets and proposes fixes through MCP under the permissions of its own user.
Against Microsoft's own agent
Microsoft 365 Copilot includes an IT helpdesk agent template and needs a Copilot licence per user. It answers from Microsoft 365 content well. It does not, out of the box, SSH into your print server, check a queue and resume it under a named approval. If that is the job, you need a bot with hands and a leash.
Getting started
Tell us which roles you would give a bot first (IT support is usually the first; marketing and sales ops are next) and we set them up in your Teams and show you one working. Book a demo, or read what BE Teammate does.