# Slate: where teams work, beyond slides and documents

> A Slate is a living page a team builds together, each person through their own AI, and each AI draws on the whole shared project. It holds what a deck or a document cannot: interactive charts, dashboards, tables to fill in, checklists, layers of detail, timelines and animated process flows.

URL: https://substrait.build/capabilities/slate/  
Last updated: 2026-11-10

Where a deck or a document shows a fixed picture of the work, a Slate holds the work itself. A Slate is a living page that a team builds together, each person through their own AI, with interactive charts, dashboards, tables to fill in and graphics that move.

## Beyond slides and documents

Teams run their most complex work through decks, documents and spreadsheets.
Each one shows a fixed picture, goes out of date the day it is sent, and lives in someone's inbox.
A Slate replaces them with one living page that the whole team builds and reads.

## What a Slate can hold

| On a Slate | What it does for the team |
|---|---|
| Interactive charts | Readers filter and explore the figures instead of reading a screenshot |
| Dashboards | The state of a project or a team, on one screen |
| Tables to fill in | Editors fill in data fields and everyone sees the change |
| Checklists | Tasks ticked off on the page, not in a separate tracker |
| Layers and tabs | A one-screen summary, with the detail one click below |
| Timelines and plans | Milestones, owners and dates in one view |
| Animated process flows | A process that plays step by step, instead of a static diagram |
| Org designs | Teams, roles and reporting lines that readers can explore |
| Decision logs | What was decided, when and by whom, next to the work |
| Comments on a section | A question about one section, naming the person who should answer |

## How a team builds a Slate together

1. **Someone starts it.** An owner publishes a Slate through their AI model or from the portal in minutes, with no app to build.
2. **Everyone adds their part through their own AI.** Each editor asks their own AI, such as Claude, to add a section from their own context.
3. **Each AI draws on the shared project.** Before it writes, each person's AI reads the whole Slate as it stands, with its comments. It works from the team's shared context, not only from its own person's, so every new section builds on what the team already knows.
4. **It looks like one piece of work.** Every section uses your organisation's design, or the standard Substrait design.
5. **Nothing is lost.** Every change is saved as a version, and any earlier version can be restored.

## Kept inside your company

- Every Slate stays behind your company's sign-in.
- Owners, editors, commenters and readers each have their own permission, and only an owner shares or deletes.
- A Slate shared with the whole company appears in Explore, and Slates sit in folders.
- A Slate nobody has touched for 90 days is flagged to its owner, who keeps it or removes it.

## Good uses for a Slate

- A cross-team project, from plan to status, on one page
- A board or management pack that readers can explore
- A proposal or business case with live models in it
- A team's operating rhythm: goals, owners, decisions and checklists
- An org redesign, with the structure readers can click through
- A one-off analysis with interactive charts, shared without building an app

## Questions and answers

### How is a Slate different from a slide deck or a document?

A deck or a document shows fixed text and pictures. A Slate is a living page: readers filter charts, read dashboards, move between layers of detail and watch a process play, and editors fill in tables and tick checklists on the page.

### Can several people work on one Slate at the same time?

Yes. Each editor asks their own AI to add or change a section, and each AI reads the whole page as it stands first. Changes to different sections both go live. When two people change the same section at once, one change goes live and the other person is told, with their text kept.

### Does each person's AI know what the rest of the team has done?

Yes. Before it writes, each person's AI reads the whole Slate as it stands, with its comments. It draws on the shared project, not only on its own person's context, so a new section can use facts another member's AI added.

### Does a Slate need a developer or an app?

No. A Slate is published by the owner's AI model or from the portal in minutes, with no app, no database and no deploy.

### Who can see a Slate?

Only people inside your company, behind its sign-in. A Slate has owners, editors, commenters and readers, and access is to the whole Slate or none of it.

### Does every section look the same when different people's AI wrote it?

Yes. Every section uses your organisation's own design, or the standard Substrait design, so a Slate reads as one piece of work.

## Related

- [Agentic Builder: requests become tools](https://substrait.build/capabilities/agentic-builder/): Agentic Builder is the part of Substrait where anyone asks for a new tool or a change in plain words, and build agents plan, build, test and ship it under the company's own rules, with the tool's owner in charge.
- [The communications centre: one pre-wired exchange for the whole organisation](https://substrait.build/capabilities/communications/): The communications centre is one central, pre-wired exchange that connects every alert, approval, notification and message across the organisation. Every tool built on Substrait calls it, so no tool builds its own. The company hooks in its own Slack, Google Chat, Teams, email or WhatsApp, and each person chooses the channel.
- [Every tool your people use, in one place](https://substrait.build/capabilities/home-and-explore/): Substrait gives every employee a Home page with their own tools on it, and an Explore directory of what colleagues chose to share. Finding a tool never grants access to it.
- [Your people's AI, working as one team](https://substrait.build/productivity/): Substrait's productivity tools: Slate, where a team and their AI think together; templates built on Substrait's best practice; Agentic Builder, where a request in plain words gets built; and the communications centre, one central, pre-wired exchange for every alert, approval, notification and message, so no tool builds its own.