Getting Started with VDF AI: A Tour of the Platform

VDF AI is one platform with five applications and a shared set of agents, tools and data behind them. This tour takes fifteen minutes and changes nothing: you open each part once, so that later lessons can say “open Agents Hub” or “choose the workspace” without explanation.

Our screenshots come from a demo account that has already completed the other Academy paths, so you will see a team workspace and some earlier chats. A new account shows the same layout with fewer items.

Step 1: Start from Home

Sign in, and VDF AI opens on Home. It gathers everything in one place: quick actions along the top, your workspaces, your applications and a short Get started list.

The four quick actions are Start chat, New agent, Connected apps and Library. The same shortcuts sit in the sidebar under Quick access, and API Reference and Help sit at the bottom of the sidebar on every page.

Get started lists four steps in the order they build on each other: start a conversation, connect your data, build an AI agent and design a network. The Academy paths follow the same order, so you can use that list as your map.

Step 2: Know the five applications

The All applications menu at the top left switches between applications from anywhere in the platform. Each application has one job:

Application	What it is for
Chat	Asking questions, working with documents and running agents in conversation
Agents Hub	Building, testing and sharing AI agents, their tools and skills
Networks	Designing and running workflows in which several agents, tools and people work in order
Data	Connecting databases, checking data quality and building searchable indexes
Compliance	Keeping an AI system register, risks and evidence for the EU AI Act

Most people start in Chat and stay there for daily work. You move to Agents Hub when the same kind of request keeps coming back and deserves its own agent, and to Networks when a task has several steps that should always run the same way.

Step 3: Choose a workspace

A workspace groups the agents, tools and data that a chat may use. Every account has a Default workspace; ours offers 22 business agents across 13 domains. Teams can add their own: the IT Service Desk workspace in our screenshots holds exactly two agents, built and approved in the agents path.

Open Chat and look at the chip above the message box. It names the current workspace. Choose it to open the workspace or switch to another one.

The choice matters more than it looks. The same question can get a different answer in a different workspace, because each one decides which agents can take part. When an answer surprises you, check the workspace first.

Step 4: Start a chat

Choose New Chat in the sidebar. The message box has four controls under it:

• + attaches a document, either a new upload or one from My Documents.
• The two mode buttons switch between Network mode, where VDF AI plans the work and picks the agents, and Manual mode, where you choose the agent yourself.
• Auto is the plan depth. It sets how large a plan may get in Network mode.

Type a first question and send it. Chats are listed under Your Chats in the sidebar, newest first, so you can return to any of them later. The next two lessons in this path cover documents, modes and plan depth properly; for now it is enough to know where they are.

Step 5: Find your files in the Library

Choose Library in the sidebar. It holds every document you uploaded, every file VDF AI generated for you and any meeting transcripts synced from Zoom, each with its type, its date and buttons to download or delete it.

Uploading a file to a chat also stores it here. That is useful, because you can attach the same document to a later question through My Documents instead of uploading it again. It also means the Library is the place to delete a file you no longer want the platform to keep.

Step 6: See which apps you can connect

Choose Integrations in the sidebar. It lists the business apps VDF AI can connect to, grouped by category, each with its status. Ours showed eleven, all disconnected:

• Project management: Jira
• Documentation: Confluence, OneDrive & SharePoint, and SharePoint through a service account
• DevOps: GitHub Enterprise Server, Bitbucket Data Center, and Azure DevOps Server or TFS
• Communication: email over IMAP and SMTP, Outlook Mail and Microsoft Teams
• Enterprise: Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations

Read each card before you connect anything, because they differ in whose access they use. OneDrive & SharePoint and Outlook Mail are read with your own account, so agents see only what you can see. SharePoint (service account) searches across the organisation through one account and returns titles and links only, never file contents. Some connections are registered by an administrator before users can connect them.

You now know where everything lives. The next lesson uses Chat and the Library to answer questions from a document, and shows the one habit that keeps those answers tied to the document.