Running your first Companion session

This walks you through launching your very first Companion session — from getting access to seeing your work show up in the Process Index.

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1. Get access and log in

Once your workspace admin has added you, log in to Within at app.within.ai using your company’s sign-in method. The first time you log in, a short guided setup opens automatically to build your role profile — that’s step 2 below. If you need access, see How to add a user to your workspace.

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2. Set up your role profile

You don’t start from a blank screen. On your first login, a short guided setup opens over your home screen and walks you through building your role profile — this tells Companion what your work looks like so it can recognize your activities. You only do this once. It’s five quick steps: your team, your role, what you own, your tools, and your typical day. The options are pulled from your organization and tailored to your team, not a generic list, and you answer one step at a time. For the last step, your “typical day” is drafted for you from your earlier answers, so you’re editing a starting point instead of staring at an empty box. When you’re done, you land in the product with your profile already set — and you can edit it anytime from My Profile (click your name in the nav).

• If you’re in an onboarding sprint: the Within team usually designs your role profile for you and gives you a starting point. Confirm it looks right and adjust if needed.
• If you’re setting it up yourself: the wizard walks you through it in about 20 seconds. At the last step — and anytime you update your role later — you can use the voice-to-text option to describe your work out loud instead of typing. The more accurate this is, the better Companion’s capture.

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3. Open Companion and start your session

From your home screen, open Companion (the side panel, or the chat bubble), then start your session.

1. Close the apps and browser tabs you are not using. Companion shares your laptop’s resources with everything else you have open, so a full laptop feels slow during a session. See Companion slows down your machine.
2. Click Start session and share your screen.
3. Work as you normally would. Companion observes quietly in the background and identifies the activities you perform — you don’t need to do anything special or “perform” for it.

Run for at least an hour. Companion captures best over a real stretch of work, and its insights (signals) build up over the course of a longer session rather than appearing in the first few minutes. A short session often produces little; an hour or more of normal work gives it enough to work with.

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4. Review and submit at the end

When you end the session, you’ll see what Companion captured:

• Your activity timeline — the work it identified, grouped into activities. Review it, and edit, recategorize, or exclude anything that isn’t right.
• Signals — noteworthy observations (workarounds, friction) that surface through the session, concentrating toward the end. You choose which, if any, to share.

Submit to the index. If you want your session to actually build the process map, confirm and submit your activity timeline to the Process Index. This is the step that makes it count.

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5. What happens after you submit

Submitting hands your session off to the indexing agent. It takes the clusters of work you did and figures out, for each one, whether it’s a new observation of a process that already exists — or a new process it should create on your behalf. Your contribution shows up in the Process Index right away, no manual mapping required. The more sessions you run, the richer the picture: repeated observations of the same process build a baseline and surface patterns over time.

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Where to go next