AI - Grok Bot 1.0 is out of beta with shared Bots, meetings and proactive teammates
Grok Bot is officially out of beta π
When I wrote about Grok Bot for Enterprise in September, I finished with a warning that it was all still in BETA, so be careful with it. With Grok Bot 1.0, I suppose I can retire that warning… mostly π
The big themes are that Bots can now be shared with your whole team, work with you in Slack, Microsoft Teams and video calls, and take on work without waiting to be asked.
Grok Bot 1.0
SpaceXSI describes three big improvements since the beta: multiplayer teammates, proactive teammates and more capable teammates. In plain English, a Bot is no longer just your personal assistant; it can become a shared colleague that the whole team works with.
Official announcement
Introducing Grok Bot 1.0.
Bots can be shared and are more collaborative and capable than ever.
Introducing Grok Bot 1.0. AI teammates that work alongside your whole team.
Share Bots, collaborate with them in Slack and Teams, invite them to meetings, and watch them learn and become more helpful.
Today we’re launching Grok Bot 1.0, a major update to our AI teammates.
Grok Bot began as a way to hand off work to an AI teammate. With 1.0, those teammates understand the work your team is doing and the people doing it, so they can contribute like any other colleague.
What is new?
- Shared Team Bots: share a Bot with specific people or groups, and work with it in Slack or Microsoft Teams. As it works with different people, it learns the team’s knowledge and preferences, and something one person teaches it can benefit everyone who uses it.
- Meetings: a Bot can join a Google Meet, Zoom or Microsoft Teams call from a link, take part through the meeting chat, and send a summary afterwards.
- Proactive work: Bots can monitor ongoing projects, spot work that needs doing, follow up on unfinished tasks, coordinate with other Bots, and bring people in when a decision needs their judgement.
- Better browser use: more reliable website navigation and smoother sign-ins, with fewer interruptions.
- Better documents and presentations: including interactive Pages that you can edit together or ask the Bot to keep up to date.
- Better app connections: improved Gmail, Google Calendar and GitHub integrations.
- Smarter approvals: Bots should better understand when you have already authorised something and when they need to ask, rather than asking every single time.
- Safeguards for shared spaces: Bots respect each person’s permissions, ask before sensitive actions, and check whether information is appropriate to share in a public channel.
- More control for admins and owners: according to the changelog, what teammates teach a Team Bot waits under Review learnings until its owner or a Manager approves it, and team admins can limit who is allowed to share Bots. There are also new Bot settings and team usage analytics.
Team Bots are available on Team and Enterprise plans. Meetings are available on Team, Enterprise and Ultra plans, and Enterprise admins need to turn Meetings on in settings.
Bringing a Team Bot into Microsoft Teams also needs a few approvals: a team admin turns it on, the Bot’s owner or a Manager connects it, and a Teams admin approves it. If you are rolling it out at work, start with Cursor’s Grok Bot for Teams and Enterprise and Grok Bot security documentation (links below).
Meetings also seem to be rolling out gradually, so you may not see it straight away, even on an eligible plan (more on that below).
My take
When Grok Bot got its Outlook, Calendar and OneDrive plugins, I wondered whether it might become the ultimate small business AI tool. Shared Team Bots push it further in that direction. One Bot that knows how the team works, sits in Slack or Microsoft Teams and takes notes in the stand-up is a lot closer to an actual colleague than a personal assistant in a chat window.
Microsoft Teams support is the bit I find most interesting, as so many organisations live in Teams rather than Slack. I also like that a Teams admin has to approve it; nobody wants a Bot quietly turning up in every channel π€£
The proactive part is the one I would watch carefully. A Bot that notices a deadline and prepares the materials is brilliant. A Bot that creates new channels and chases everyone about unfinished work could also become the most enthusiastic (and slightly annoying) colleague in the company π€£ The approvals, the Review learnings queue and the new settings and analytics are what will make or break that in practice. Roman Ugarte makes a similar point below: it is hard to trust an AI teammate if it is a black box.
Meetings: your Bot can now join the stand-up
Meetings had already started switching on for some accounts before the launch. Alex had seen it appear on his account a few days earlier, hence the “(again)”.
π¨ Grok Bot meetings is officially live (again)
> Paste a Google Meet, Zoom or Teams link and your Bot joins, takes notes, answers in the meeting chat
> Your bot sends you the summary and action items when the call ends
> Team, Enterprise and Ultra plans
SPACEXSI π₯: The first stable version 1.0 of Grok Bot has been announced.
In addition to many improvements, Grok Bots can now join Slack and participate in video calls!
Looks like I will have a daily stand-up tomorrow π
Roman Ugarte shared what the team was aiming for with this release, including how they use Meetings themselves:
Bot 1.0 is out. Our goal for this release was to make Bots a much more useful part of your team.
Some new things we’re excited about:
- Bots can now join Zoom, Google Meet, and more. You can ask Bot questions in meetings and even assign it action items. We have ours taking standup notes every day in our shared Google Doc and doing background research on discussion themes. Soon, you’ll be able to talk back and forth with it live in a meeting.
- A new interface for managing your Bots. You can see and steer their responsibilities, what they’re learning, and their impact. It’s impossible to build trust in an AI teammate if it’s a black box, so it should proactively flag when it’s blocked or confused, take and learn from feedback across the company, and be able to succinctly summarize its contributions.
Not all a bed of roses
It is not all a bed of roses, though π Replying to Roman, Nathan Kaiser says he is on the Ultra plan, which should include Meetings, and still cannot get his Bot into a meeting:
@romanugarte_ I’m on the Ultra plan and still cannot join meetings. The only thing I get is “this feature has not yet rolled out to all users”.
Updated on an iPhone just now. Still the same.
So if Meetings is not showing up for you yet, it looks like a staged rollout rather than something you have done wrong. That is fairly normal for a big launch, but it is worth knowing before you promise your boss that a Bot will be taking the stand-up notes tomorrow π€£
Bots now warn you about hidden instructions
This one landed a few days before 1.0, but it is a really important one. Prompt injection, where a web page or message hides instructions aimed at AI agents, is one of the biggest risks for an agent that has its own browser and computer.
Grok Bot will now warn you about hidden instructions. This one is a really big one
If a page or a message tries to inject hidden text into your chat, the bot surfaces a warning and does not follow those instructions. Ask about a store’s return policy, and if that page tries to sneak in commands for SI agents, Grok Bot answers your actual question and flags what it found
A simple, important security habit, built right into the Grok Bot… That’s how you know how powerful Grok Bot is and how capable it really is
The Grok Bot changelog lists it under version 0.79.2 on 5 November. XFreeze mentions messages as well as pages, but the changelog entry itself talks about web pages:
When a web page hides instructions for AI agents, the Bot tells you it found them and didn’t follow them.
I really like that it tells you, rather than silently ignoring it, because then you know something dodgy is going on with that page. Just remember that it is a safety net, not a guarantee, so I would still be careful about what you let a Bot read and do π
What people are saying
The headline features
XFreeze has a long breakdown of everything new. The key line for me is the last part: Bots no longer wait for someone to assign every task.
SpaceXSI just officially launched Grok Bot 1.0, and this is a massive upgrade
Grok Bots now has a intelligent teammates that work alongside your entire team, collaborate with each other, take initiative, and continuously improve
And the biggest shift is that Grok Bots no longer need to wait for someone to assign every task
They are becoming proactive teammates that understand what needs to get done and start making progress
Alex Finn also picks up on the proactive side. His example of a Bot starting new Slack channels on its own matches one of the examples in the official announcement, where a Launch Bot creates a launch channel to keep the team on track.
MASSIVE. Grok Bot 1.0 just dropped
That’s right, everything before this was a beta test
Some really cool new features here:
β’ Multiplayer AI has arrived. You can now have team bots that you and your coworkers/friends can interact with.
β’ Bots can now join video calls and take action based on what’s said in the calls
β’ Bots are significantly more proactive. Will do things like proactively start new channels in Slack based on conversation
β’ Better self improvement. Bots will now learn and remember the way you and your teammates work
β’ Significantly better browser use (was already best in class)
What was already probably the best AI agent just got better
grok bot 1.0 just dropped π₯
you no longer have to tell your AI what to do every single time.
bots can now:
β’ join team chats & calls
β’ remember context and decisions
β’ spot unfinished work and follow up
β’ handle research, docs, slides & workflows
love this. we’re officially entering the superintelligence era π₯³
Reactions
bots are everywhere!! in our slacks, in our meetings, doing the tedium, taking work off our plates and honestly, making work more… fun?
shout-outs to @tylr and @johnbai for their work on this!
Elon is, unsurprisingly, rather keen π€£
Hire Grok @Bot as a colleague and give it your hardest tasks!
Aaron Kesseler’s reply quotes his own Grok Bot call-log animation of 325 calls and 107 hours, so he has clearly put the hours in π
@SpaceXSI Once you go @bot, you never go back.
A Korean take
IVAN posted a nice, concise summary in Korean of the three big changes, and also picked out the plan availability.
Translated from Korean:
Grok Bot 1.0 is officially released!!
Grok Bot 1.0 officially came out today. There are three big changes compared with the beta.
- You can use it together with your team
You can share one Bot with your teammates and take it straight into Slack, Teams and video meetings. Apparently, the more people it works with, the more it learns about how the team works. Wow.
- It finds work to do first
When a deadline is approaching, it prepares the materials on its own, follows up on unfinished work, and apparently only calls on people when human judgement is needed (most important).
- It is faster and better
Using the browser is more stable, and logins get blocked less often. It makes better documents and slides, and it can also create pages you can edit together.
It is also good that it no longer asks again about things you have already approved, and now only asks about sensitive tasks.
Team Bots are on the Team and Enterprise plans, and joining meetings works on Team, Enterprise and Ultra.
I will try it out again today and post a review!!!
Useful links
#Blog #AI #Grok #Grok Bot #Grok Bot 1.0 #SpaceXAI #Slack #Microsoft Teams #Agents #Security