If you hold an owner or power seat, Laureo does not sit beside setup. It is setup. Instead of a page of form fields, Laureo asks you one question at a time in a single thread and gives each question the control that suits it: a dropdown for industry, chips for team size, a card with buttons for your contacts, a proposal you approve for your pipeline.

Setup runs the same Laureo AI as the main app's chat, but with a setup persona, a small tool set, and stricter guardrails. It is a guide you stay in control of, not an autopilot, and a form version of the same five steps is always one link away.

Each question opens with a short line explaining what it needs, then its control. Answering is a tap: the answer is recorded locally and the next question follows immediately. Nothing waits on Laureo to think, and Laureo never re-asks a question its own controls already collected.

You can break in without losing your place. Tap a suggested question, or type one of your own, and your message and the answer join the thread while the question you are on moves down underneath them. The thread reads in the order things happened, and the question still waiting on you is always the last thing in it.

Nearly every question carries a quiet skip link under its own controls, and it is worded for what it actually skips. There are exactly three wordings: Skip this question normally; Set up later when the question is the last one that step will ask and nothing else in the step has been answered, because skipping there really does record the step as skipped; and Skip, keep none on the contact review, where skipping discards the contacts staged on screen. Skipping is a real answer, not a deferral: setup moves on and the step counts as resolved, though a skipped step stays on your setup checklist and can be reopened from there. A branch that only asks you to acknowledge something offers Continue instead of a skip: a pipeline your team already set up, and the invite step when no seats are free or you are not an admin. The last question has no skip either, since there is nothing after it.

There is also a separate step-level exit in the thread, on most turns before the last step: a small Set up later button under the question. It leaves the whole step even on the turns where the question itself offers no skip, and typing set up later in the message box does the same thing on every step but the last, whether that button is showing or not, and without spending a reply. When the question’s own skip would already end the step, you get one control rather than two. The one exception is the contact review while contacts are staged on screen: there the skip throws those contacts away, so the button that leaves the whole step stays beside it. Whichever way you leave, the step stays on your setup checklist and can be reopened from there.

Step-level navigation lives outside the conversation, in a slim row between the progress header and the thread: Back, from the second step on, and Prefer a form?. Keeping it there means it stays put while the thread scrolls and never reads as part of the conversation.

Under some turns you also get a small set of one-tap chips, grouped as Suggested questions. They all ask Laureo something about the step, and several answer instantly with a built-in response. None of them act on your behalf: the question card in front of you is the thing that does the work. A chip that belongs to one specific question appears only while that question is on screen, so nothing offers you an answer box for a question you have not been asked yet.

Working through the questions costs nothing. Every scripted turn (the pickers, the action cards, the proposals, the finish) resolves without calling the model, so a full run of setup can spend zero AI budget however long you take over it.

The one part that can draw on your budget is the message box at the bottom, where you can ask Laureo something in your own words. That runs on your workspace's existing AI allowance, the same one Laureo draws from in the main app. There is no separate setup fee and no per-question charge.

Setup drives a small, curated set of actions. The buttons in the thread run most of them directly, and if you ask for one in your own words Laureo reaches the same set through its tools:

• Read your CRM: list companies, people, deals, and pipelines to answer “what's already here?” questions.
• Propose your pipeline stages, which you keep, edit, or replace before anything is saved.
• Propose the contacts to bring in from an inbox scan, pre-selected down to the ones that look like real business relationships.
• Start the inbox connection: the connect buttons take you straight to the sign-in prompt and bring you back to the same place in the thread.
• Load sample data for your workspace. This one runs as soon as you choose it, rather than waiting for a second approval.
• Send invitations to teammates you list, within the seats your plan has free.
• Mark a setup step complete or skipped.

Three actions are approval-gated: the pipeline proposal, the contact review that commits people found in your inbox, and invitations to teammates. Each of those goes through the same three beats: propose, confirm, adjust.

• Propose: the card spells out the change in plain language, with the real values, before anything happens.
• Confirm: nothing is saved or sent until you approve. You can edit the proposal first, or turn it down. Turning one down sets it aside rather than ending the step, so you can ask for it again on the same question, and the Approve button is never pre-selected for you.
• Adjust: after a change lands you can revisit that step from /setup, so a wrong turn is never stuck.

What those controls are called depends on the proposal. The pipeline keeps all three in one row under the stage list: Approve, Not these, and Edit stages. The contact review puts Approve first, then a Review all link that names the staged count, then Not these. Whichever proposal you turn down, the thread records it with a quiet You declined this step line, so the decision shows in the conversation rather than only in what left the screen.

The rule underneath is simpler than a list. A control in the thread acts when you press it, because pressing it is the confirmation: that is how loading sample data and running enrichment work. Anything Laureo puts in front of you as a proposal waits for Approve before it lands. Sample records are labelled as samples and you can clear them all in one click.

In the guided setup thread, invitations are shown to you for approval before they send. Nothing else in setup reaches another person: apart from that invitation, Laureo has no tool here that sends an email or a message.

Setup can move you forward, but only through the small set of actions above. Outside that set it has no destructive or outbound tools:

• It cannot delete any record (company, person, deal, activity, anything).
• It cannot send email, log a call, send an SMS, or push to any external integration on its own. The finish can hand a question you picked to the assistant on your dashboard, but you are the one who sends it.
• It cannot edit existing records: no field updates, no stage changes, no reassignment.
• It cannot change role permissions, and it cannot invite past the seats your plan has free.

If you ask for something setup has no tool for, Laureo says so and points you at the right surface (usually a setup step or an admin page). Two independent gates enforce this: a prompt-level filter that hides every non-setup tool, and a check at the point of execution that rejects any tool call the prompt should not have produced. The double gate is a defense against prompt injection from content the AI reads.

Setup degrades to the form version rather than blocking. Collaborator and view-only seats get the form from the start, and so does everyone if Laureo is switched off for the workspace.

If your AI budget runs out, your trial ends, or billing pauses AI access while you are partway through, Laureo finishes the question you are on, then moves you to the form at the next step boundary. Your answers are already saved, so nothing is asked twice. Short-lived problems (a rate limit, too many requests at once) leave you where you are with one line in the thread, so you can try again.

You can also make the switch yourself at any point, with the Prefer a form? control in the row above the thread, and come back with Back to Laureo in the same row on the form. Neither one hides on you: if the step holds an answer you have given but not yet saved, pressing it asks you to confirm before it moves you, in both directions. Neither is offered on the last step, which is the same summary either way.

The last step does more than mark setup complete. It recaps what you configured and offers three concrete things to ask Laureo, seeded from your industry and from what you actually set up.

Each suggestion is a button. Press one and you land on your dashboard with that question already waiting in the assistant, so you can read it, change it, and send it yourself. The button at the bottom of the card is separate: it reads Go to your dashboard and takes you there with nothing queued up, in every finish state. Nothing on this card sends or saves anything on your behalf.

The message box at the bottom of the thread reads Ask about this step. Type anything you like there, in plain language, and Laureo answers in context: it knows which step and which question you are on. Pressing ? anywhere in setup jumps your cursor into that box.

The box does one job at a time and says which. On the opening question about what your team does it reads Type what your team does instead, and what you send there is stored as your answer rather than sent to Laureo, so that send costs nothing. If you want to ask something on that one turn, use the Suggested questions under the card. Everywhere else the box is the ask box and every send goes to Laureo.

There is no slash-command menu on this surface. Slash commands belong to Laureo in the main app, covered in Slash Commands. During setup you just ask.