A Guide to Persona vs Channel Directives: When and How to Apply Each

​Welcome to your weekly Personal AI newsletter! Stay informed with practical tips, feature highlights, and real examples to help you and your team build and manage AI Personas more effectively. With Personal AI, you can create an evolving AI workforce trained on proprietary knowledge, streamlining workflows and driving innovation across your business.

​This week, we’re highlighting a powerful update to the directive system that gives you more control over how personas behave across contexts. With the introduction of Persona Directives and Channel Directives, you can now separate global behavior settings from channel-specific instructions. This added flexibility makes it easier to guide persona behavior with precision, ensuring consistency across your AI workforce while adapting to the unique needs of each channel.

​Persona Directives

​Persona Directives are alternate instruction sets that adjust how a single persona responds across different channels or DMs—without needing to create new personas.

• ​To create or edit persona directives, go to Persona Settings under the Training Studio tab.
• ​For example, if you have a custom directive set for a Store Productivity Analyst Persona, you can add additional instructions under Persona Directives by scrolling down in the Persona Settings.
• ​These can be deployed in DMs and Channels depending on the audience the persona is intended for or the task it needs to handle there.

• ​In Persona DMs, you can assign a different Persona directive to each workspace member based on their role and engagement needs with the AI.

• ​Enable this by clicking on the AI Control menu in the top right corner, then click Default AI, and scroll down to select which persona custom directive to apply.

• ​In Channels, these directives are useful if you want to customize each persona’s directive based on the purpose of the channel or the audience engaging in it.
• ​Enable this by clicking on the AI Control menu in the top right corner of the channel, then click Default AI, and scroll down to select which persona custom directive to apply.

​Channel Directives

• ​Channel Directives let you set a shared directive for all AI personas within a specific channel. Unlike Persona Directives, which guide individual personas, Channel Directives ensure consistent behavior across all responses in a channel—ideal when the channel has a focused purpose or audience.
• ​For example, in a cross-functional planning channel, a Channel Directive can ensure all personas use a neutral tone and prioritize alignment, regardless of their default behavior. This helps maintain clarity and consistency without needing to configure each persona individually.

• ​Channel Directives are created and managed within the Channel Settings.
• ​If multiple Channel Directives exist, you can selectively enable or disable them as needed. You can also edit any directive directly from this settings page for quick updates.

• ​When enabled, they override any custom or persona-specific directives to ensure consistent behavior across the channel.

​Understanding when to use Persona vs. Channel Directives gives you powerful control over how your AI workforce communicates. Use Persona Directives when you need individual personas to adapt to different roles, tasks, or users—especially in DMs or varied team contexts. Use Channel Directives when the focus is on aligning all personas within a specific channel to a shared tone, purpose, or behavior. By combining both effectively, you ensure your AI remains consistent, context-aware, and aligned with your team's goals—no matter where or how it's responding.

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