Three Things Called Grok Bots

Grok Bot is an agent app at x.ai/bot. An agent is an AI that carries out multi-step tasks for you instead of just answering in chat. Grok Bot launched in beta (an early, still-changing release) on 11 August 2026.

The company that makes it has changed its name twice. Early press says "xAI" or "SpaceXAI", and the site now says SpaceXSI. In this course we write "made by SpaceXSI (formerly xAI), with Cursor", because Grok Bot runs on infrastructure from Cursor, a sister company.

The app's own words for the parts:

• A Bot is one named, persistent agent. Persistent means it keeps its memory and its job between conversations.
• A Team Bot is a Bot shared with a team. You can chat to it in the app or in Slack.

Here's an example. A one-person template shop could have a Bot called "Post Drafts" that prepares a week of product posts every Monday, and a Team Bot called "Design Intake" that a brand team messages in Slack. Both are still beta, so menus and labels move between versions. The timeline below shows how much changed in the first eleven weeks.

Every Grok Bot user gets one cloud computer. That's a computer in a data centre, not your laptop. It has:

• a browser, so a Bot can open websites
• a shared folder called /workspace, where files are kept
• a terminal, where commands run

It keeps working when your laptop is closed or your phone is in your pocket. That's how a Bot can prepare Monday's post drafts while you sleep.

The catch is that all of your Bots share this one computer, including its logins and files. Each Bot gets its own screen, but the docs say screens aren't security boundaries. Suppose you sign in to a client's brand account for your "Client A" Bot. Your "Client B" Bot is on the same computer and can reach that login, along with any customer list you left in /workspace.

So separate Bots keep work organised, but they don't keep it private from each other. Later lessons build on this: use a work or least-privilege account, and keep personal accounts, admin logins and customer data off the computer.

A Bot takes a job and works through it step by step. Along the way it does four things:

• Uses apps or websites. If an app has a connector (a direct link, such as Google Sheets or Slack), the Bot uses that. If it doesn't, the Bot clicks through the website in its browser, as a person would. A Canva plugin is listed in Cursor's marketplace, but nobody has confirmed it appears in Grok Bot's Connect apps. You'll check your own screen in lesson 2.
• Keeps memory. It remembers your preferences, key facts and a dated log of its work. Memory isn't a source of truth, though. For prices and dates, it should reopen your facts sheet every time.
• Runs skills and routines. A skill is a saved procedure, such as "draft product posts from the sheet". A routine runs a skill on a schedule or when something happens, such as "every Monday at 8:00".
• Pauses for approval. Before a risky action, it shows an approval card and waits for your answer.

Put the stages below in order for a routine that drafts posts.

The Grok chat app (grok.com and the Grok mobile app) has its own feature that people also call "Grok bots": Custom Agents. A Custom Agent is a saved persona for chat. That means a name, a personality and some instructions you can pick when you start a conversation, such as "Brand Voice Editor, rewrites captions in our tone".

It has no cloud computer, no roster of Bots and no routines of its own. It can't open your facts sheet at 8:00 on Monday while you're away.

Grok's official release notes confirm the feature exists. They list "Agent customizations" in February 2026 and an "Agent library" in March. The menu path, the instruction length limit and how many agents you can have come only from third-party guides, and those guides disagree with each other. For that reason this course does not teach Custom Agent setup. If you use one, treat any guide's steps as something to check on your own screen.

The third kind is a bot that you or a developer build yourselves on the Grok API. An API (application programming interface) lets your own code send requests to Grok's models at api.x.ai and get answers back.

What that means in practice:

• Setup: a developer account, an API key, your own code and a server to run it on.
• Actions: it can only do what your code lets it do.
• Running while you're away: only if you host it somewhere that stays on.
• Billing: you pay per token (a token is a small chunk of text), and this is billed separately from your plan. Having a paid plan doesn't cover API use.

Take a brand team that wants a Slack bot. A developer could build one on the API. For non-developers, a Team Bot connected to Slack is the no-code route, and lesson 30 covers it. This course compares API bots but doesn't build one.

Match each brand job to the option that fits it.

Two names on X cause confusion:

• @grok on X is the chatbot that replies to posts. It isn't your Bot.
• @bot on X is Grok Bot's account. Tagging it forwards a post to your own main Bot. This course doesn't cover tagging @bot.

When you need facts about Grok Bot, use only the official sources:

• x.ai/bot: the product page and download
• docs.x.ai/grok-bot: the setup docs
• x.ai/changelog/bot: what changed in each version
• x.ai/pricing: current plans and prices

Look-alike sites turn up in search results. grok-bots.com is one example. x.ai doesn't link to it, so treat it as unofficial and don't download from it or sign in there. Third-party blog guides can also be out of date, because Grok Bot is in beta and screens change. If a guide and the docs disagree, follow the docs and check your own screen.