How BasicOps Turns Agents Into Team Members With Guild

We recently sat down with Justin Oberbauer from BasicOps to talk with him about how he's using Agent Users to streamline the company’s work and the work of their customers. What started as a side experiment has become a core part of how BasicOps thinks about the future of collaborative work, and Guild is the engine that makes it easy.

Justin has been at BasicOps for about a year as CRO, and the Agent User concept didn't come from a product planning session. It came from him tinkering.

While experimenting with OpenClaw, he ran into a problem that anyone managing multiple agents will recognize: juggling several of them inside a single, linear chat window is unwieldy. Conversations blur together, context gets lost, and it stops feeling like you're working with a capable helper and starts feeling like you're wrestling with a tool.

That was when Justin switched over to Guild, and setting up an agent was much easier. Instead of bolting an assistant onto the side of the screen, he gave the agent a seat in BasicOps as if it were a real person with its own Gmail account and permissions. It worked immediately. The agent was assigned tasks, gave updates, drafted documents, saved them to Drive, and linked them back to the relevant tasks. It behaved like a team member because it was treated like one.

That first experiment grew from three or four Agent Users into something much bigger: a core product concept.

The insight underneath it is deceptively simple. Treat the agent as a team member, not a sidebar widget. In BasicOps, that means each agent has a humanized persona with a name, a role, and a conversational style. When a new agent joins, its first message sounds like a new hire's: "Here's what I specialize in. What should I be focused on now?"

One detail we love: Justin is a CRO, not a developer, and he built this himself. As he put it, "You don't have to be a developer, you just have to know what you want to get out of it."

"You don't have to be a developer, you just have to know what you want to get out of it."

That's exactly the kind of user we want to empower.

Today, Agent Users are a native user type in BasicOps, sitting right alongside standard seats and external or agency seats. Depending on plan tier, Agent Users are included in every BasicOps license at no add-on charge. Agents aren't a premium bolt-on; they're part of the team.

Importantly, BasicOps stays builder-neutral. It doesn't build the agents itself. Instead, it surfaces agents from partner platforms like Guild, letting each side do what it does best. BasicOps provides the collaborative home, and Guild provides the agents.

Setting an agent up takes two steps. First, you create an Agent Users seat in BasicOps, which generates the credentials and ID. Then you head to Guild, create or connect an agent using a small skill file, and the whole thing self-configures from there.

Justin was candid that Guild is the easiest partner platform to connect. Other options require command-line setup, while ours does the heavy lifting for you. We're proud of that, and we think it's a big part of why agent users feel approachable rather than intimidating.

We're not going to pretend the experience is perfect yet. The main friction point is that users still have to leave BasicOps to set up a Guild account and configure an agent. That context switch is exactly the kind of thing that stops a good idea from spreading.

The vision we're working toward is one-click provisioning entirely within BasicOps. Imagine selecting a role, whether that's a PM, an HR helper, or an executive assistant, and hitting "Provision." From there, Guild authentication cascades automatically, pulling from a library of predefined agent templates, with no need to touch a separate Guild interface at all. The agent just shows up, ready to work.

That fits neatly with where BasicOps is heading. A few priorities are on their roadmap that matter to us. They're building internal agents, native and platform-focused helpers that follow the more traditional agent model. They're developing a marketplace model that lets agent-builder platforms like Guild acquire users directly through BasicOps. 

We see that as a natural stepping stone to what's next. As agents take on more real work, the value isn't in any single clever response; it's in continuity. An agent that lives where the work happens, remembers what it's responsible for, and picks up tasks like a team member is worth far more than one you have to re-brief every time you open a chat window.

BasicOps figured that out through hands-on experimentation, and we're glad Guild could make it simple. If you're curious what an Agent User could do on your team, let us know. We'd love to show you.