What is ALLO?

You shouldn't have to rebuild the same work for every audience

Think about how a single piece of work travels in a real team. The brief lives in a doc. The references sit in a Drive folder. The mockups are in another tool. The feedback is scattered across chat and email. And every time a new person needs to weigh in, whether a teammate, a client, or an executive, someone rebuilds the whole story from scratch: a recap deck, a status email, a quick Loom to explain what the team already knows.

That rebuilding is the hidden cost. The work was never the bottleneck. Re-explaining it was.

ALLO removes that step. It keeps the brief, the references, the files, the feedback, and the decisions in one place the whole team can read, so the next person sees the actual work, in context, without anyone repackaging it first.

The short version

Keep the real briefs, files, references, and comments on the canvas, not in a separate doc people have to chase later.

The card is the canvas

Most tools treat a project as a row with attachments hanging off it. You open the card and find links to the real work, which lives somewhere else.

ALLO inverts that. The card is the canvas. Open a project and you land inside the room where the brief, the references, the mockups, the comments, and the decisions actually sit, arranged spatially and scrollable top to bottom, the way the work really looks.

That single difference changes what a canvas is for. It isn't a whiteboard you photograph and abandon after the workshop. It's the working memory of the project: the place where messy inputs become direction, and where the reasoning behind a decision stays visible long after the meeting that produced it. Six months later, "why did we go this way?" has an answer you can scroll to, not a person you have to track down.

What changes when the work is the room

When the work and the conversation live in the same place, a whole category of friction quietly disappears. People stop asking:

• "Where's the latest version?" There's one room, and it's current.
• "What did we decide?" The decision is sitting next to the thing it's about.
• "Can someone summarize this for me?" The room already reads in 30 seconds, even to someone who wasn't there.

And it works the same way for everyone. The team, the client, and the executive look at the same canvas, with no translation layer and no separate "external version." Bring a reviewer in to view and comment without handing them the keys to the whole workspace (Roles and access covers exactly who sees what).

What ALLO is and isn't

ALLO is a visual workspace for creative, operational, and cross-functional teams whose work doesn't fit neatly into rows. It combines the freedom of a canvas with the structure of projects, OKRs, comments, files, permissions, and AI that works inside the canvas instead of in a separate chat box.

It helps to be just as clear about what ALLO is not:

Teams that get the most from ALLO

ALLO is strongest when the work is visual, collaborative, and hard to compress into a ticket.

Where the work lives

You don't need every area on day one. But knowing the map helps you pick the right path instead of duplicating work or losing a decision.

The simplest rule: when you're not sure where to go, open Home. When you know what you're looking for, go straight to the focused area.

How work moves through ALLO

A typical piece of work starts as context, becomes visual review, collects feedback, and turns into a decision.

1. Open Home to see what needs attention.
2. Use a project when the work needs owners, dates, or status.
3. Create or open a canvas when people need to review material together.
4. Add files, images, notes, and comments so the discussion stays attached to the work.
5. Use comments and mentions when a specific person needs to respond.
6. Link the work to a goal when it should tie back to a quarterly objective.

The flow is flexible. For a small team, Home and a handful of canvases are enough to start. Larger teams add projects, goals, teams, and permissions from day one.

A real example: a campaign review

A design team is preparing a launch.

When the client joins to review, they open the same canvas the team has been working in. No export, no recap deck.

Nothing had to be rebuilt for the client. The plan, the people, the visual work, and the decisions were already connected.

A first week that actually works

If you're rolling ALLO out to a team, resist the urge to build a perfect structure first. Start with real work:

1. Confirm the workspace where the team should collaborate.
2. Invite the core members who need ongoing access.
3. Create one canvas for work the team already needs to review.
4. Put real material on it, not sample content.
5. Share it with the reviewers and ask for specific feedback with comments and mentions.
6. Come back through Home the next day to pick up where you left off.

Add projects when the work needs owners and dates. Add teams when finding people starts to matter. Empty structures look tidy for about five minutes, then everyone ignores them.

When you can't find something

What you can see depends on the workspace you're in, your role, and how each item was shared. If a teammate can open something and you can't, it's almost always access, the wrong workspace, a removed share, or deleted work, in that order.

One habit worth keeping: don't recreate important work until you've checked Switch workspaces, Search, Shared with me, and Trash. Recreating too early is how teams end up with two half-correct versions and one very tired reviewer.