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Short, honest answers to the questions teams ask most before and after they start using Hive. Each answer links to the page with the full detail.

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Product

Hive is an AI operations layer for your business. It connects to the tools you already run, watches for work that is slipping — an overdue invoice, a stalled deal, an email waiting on a reply — explains what it found, and proposes a safe next step. Your team decides what happens until Hive has earned permission to do routine work itself. Start with What is Hive? and the quickstart.
No. Hive reads your systems in place through connectors. Nothing migrates, and new connections start at the Read level: Hive can search and summarise, and nothing leaves Hive. See Connect an app.
A signal is something Hive caught in a connected tool that is at risk of being missed, with the evidence behind it, why it matters and a proposed next step. You can act on it, snooze it or dismiss it. See Signals overview.
Not by default. Every action is a typed proposal that passes a deterministic policy check before anything runs. Most actions ask for a human approval, and money, legal and irreversible actions always do. Autonomy is set per action type by your Owners and Admins. See Autonomy and blast radius.
Owners and Admins can engage the Kill switch. It halts every autonomous action and approval across the workspace until someone resumes. See Safety and control.
Not necessarily. Hive can only raise signals from what it observes. Open the Coverage tab to see what each connected tool is being watched for, and which metrics are still Learning a baseline. See Coverage.
A workflow is a graph of steps that runs from one trigger — a button, a form, a public form or a schedule — and gets a version number each time you deploy it. An agent in Agent Studio is a specialised assistant you configure for a job, grounded in your Business Brain, that people use from Ask Hive, on a schedule or as a step in a workflow.
No. Workflows start from Manual, In-app form, Public form or Schedule triggers. To let an outside system start a workflow, use a public form. Incoming webhooks feed Signals, not workflows — see Incoming webhooks.
No. Test runs execute the current draft with real models, but every action is shadowed — recorded as “Shadowed: test run, not dispatched” and never sent. See Test and deploy.
Yes, for conversation. Install the Slack or Teams channel, then mention @Hive or send it a direct message to ask questions. Signals and approvals stay inside Hive. See Slack and Teams.
No. Notifications appear in the in-app bell, and your notification preferences filter what the bell shows.

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Data, privacy and security

No. Every record carries your workspace’s identity, taken from your verified session, and the database enforces row-level security on top of the application’s own filtering. See Security overview.
The Hive API runs on Fly.io in Frankfurt, and the database is Postgres on Supabase in Frankfurt (eu-central-1). The full list of providers is on Infrastructure.
OAuth tokens for managed connectors are held by our connection provider, Nango. Secrets Hive holds itself — MCP server tokens, webhook signing secrets and a bring-your-own model key — are encrypted with a key unique to your workspace (AES-256-GCM) and are never shown to an AI model. See Data protection.
Hive does not train AI models. Your workspace has a Data sharing setting, off unless an Owner or Admin turns it on, that governs whether Hive may use your chat and workflow data to improve its product. How each AI provider handles the requests it processes is governed by that provider’s terms; see AI and models for which providers are involved.
Hive staff signing in with a Hive company account have support access so they can help operate the service. Actions taken in a workspace are recorded in the Audit log.
Sign-in is handled by our identity provider, Clerk. Hive does not currently publish a SOC 2 report or offer SAML single sign-on configuration. Talk to your Hive account team about your requirements.
Deleting the workspace engages the kill switch, removes private attachments, stops scheduled work and ends billing. Workspace data is retained so that a returning organisation can be restored. Contact your Hive account team if you need data removed.

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AI models

Hive works with models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and Microsoft. The model picker lists only the models available to your workspace, so the exact list depends on your configuration, and Admins can restrict it to an allowlist. See Models.
Yes. On the current plans each seat is funded either by Hive credits or by your organisation’s own OpenAI or Anthropic key, which lowers the seat price. See Billing and plans.
A chat falls back to an included efficient model instead of failing. Admins can allow members to top up, and members can request an upgrade or extra credit.
Ask Hive answers with citations to the documents, emails, live reads, signals and Brain facts it used. If a live lookup failed, the answer ends with “Live sources were not checked” and tells you it relied on stored data. See Ask Hive.

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Billing

Yes. New workspaces get a 14-day trial with £5 of AI credit per active member, and no card is required. See Trial and payments.
You pay per seat (Basic, Pro or Max, with a minimum of five seats) plus an Execution layer that sets how many agent and workflow runs your firm gets each month. Prices are in GBP, excluding VAT. See Billing and plans.
The workspace is marked past due and Hive retries the payment method on file. After a seven-day grace period, billable actions are restricted until the payment details are updated. See Trial and payments.
Only Owners and Admins. Other members see a note that commercial and payment data is restricted to them.

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Integrations

Accounting, payments, CRM, support, project, email, calendar and file tools — including Xero, Stripe, HubSpot, Gmail, Outlook, Jira, GitHub and Google Drive. See the integrations catalog.
Yes, once an Admin has enabled the provider for the workspace. Each connection belongs to the member who made it, and Admins see only metadata about members’ personal connections. See Accounts and autonomy.
Yes. Connect any MCP server by URL, or send signed events from any system with an incoming webhook. See MCP servers and Incoming webhooks.
Not today. The supported programmatic ways in are incoming webhooks and public workflow forms. See Build on Hive.
Hive syncs right after you connect, then on an hourly loop, plus realtime events where the provider forwards them. Admins can select Run loop now on the Signals page to run it on demand.

Troubleshooting

Fix common problems step by step.

Glossary

Every Hive term in one place.