License and permissions
Availability of this feature depends on your license type. Before you get started, check the table below to confirm your license includes this functionality.
Find out more about Evo licenses>
Evo Standard | Evo Everywhere: Base user | Evo Everywhere: Advanced user |
❌ | ❌ | ✅ |
If you are unsure of your user type or license, see understanding Evo licenses.
An artifact is anything the AI produces for you to keep, share, or act on - a report, a summary, a slide deck, a spreadsheet, a chart.
What types of artifact can the AI produce?
An artifact is anything the AI produces for you to keep, send, or share, such as a report, an email, a deck, a spreadsheet, or a chart. The AI can produce ten types of artifact. Each type has a fixed format and suits a different kind of output.
Type | Format | Good for |
Document | Text (Markdown) | Emails, summaries, proposals, and drafts you'll copy, paste, or edit further |
Web page (HTML) | Styled web page | One-pagers, visual reports, and anything that benefits from layout and design beyond plain text |
Spreadsheet | Excel file (.xlsx) | Structured data, tables, and anything you'll want to work with in Excel |
Print-ready, formal outputs you want to send or file as they are | ||
Presentation | PowerPoint file (.pptx) | Content you'll present or share in a meeting |
Word document | Word file (.docx) | Formal documents and reports you'll finish or edit in Word |
Chart | Interactive chart | Charts you can view and explore in the Preview tab |
Interactive component | Evo component | A richer, interactive experience built on the Evo platform, shown in Researcher or opened in a tab |
Data | JSON | Structured data for use by other tools |
File | Any other format (ZIP, image, CSV, etc.) | Anything without a dedicated type. These have no preview and the AI can't read them back, but you can download and open them on your device |
Once an artifact is created, its type is fixed. If you want the same content in a different format, such as a document turned into a presentation, ask the AI to produce it again as a different type.
Artifacts, uploads, and attachments: what's the difference?
These three things are easy to confuse, but each is stored and used differently.
| What it is | Where it lives | How long it lasts |
Upload | A file you add to the project, such as a document, a spreadsheet, or your source material | Uploads | The AI can search across it in every chat in the project |
Attachment | A file you drop into a single chat message for the AI to look at | Shown inline in the message | Only for that message |
Artifact | Something the AI has created and saved for you | Artifacts tab | Persists with the project and can be downloaded |
The Artifacts tab has filters for All, Artifacts, and Documents. Documents in that tab means uploads. They're shown there for convenience, but they remain separate from artifacts.
How does the AI decide to create an artifact?
Most of the time, the AI creates an artifact automatically when your request is the kind of thing you'd want to keep, such as a report, a deck, or a set of meeting notes. It appears in the Preview tab as soon as it's being generated, and it stays in the Artifacts tab afterwards.
If the AI answers in chat and you'd prefer a saved artifact, ask: "Save that as an artifact I can preview and download."
Artifacts can also arrive from outside Researcher. External services can add certain types (HTML, PDF, Excel, Markdown, and PowerPoint) to a project, and they then appear in the Artifacts tab as if the AI had produced them.
How the AI builds more complex artifacts (sandboxes)
For richer outputs, such as a branded presentation, a formatted Word document, or a file that needs data processing or conversion, the AI works in a sandbox. A sandbox is a secure, private workspace that belongs to your project. The AI runs the steps needed to build the file properly, then saves it back to you as an artifact.
This happens behind the scenes, so you don't need to set anything up. A few things are worth knowing:
Word documents are always built in the sandbox. Excel, PDF, and PowerPoint files may be built either directly or in the sandbox, depending on how your project is set up.
The sandbox is isolated to your project. It's a working area for producing artifacts, not long-term storage. Finished artifacts are saved to the Artifacts tab.
PowerPoint and Word previews show real pages. When a PowerPoint deck or a Word document is saved, a PDF version is generated for the Preview tab, so you see paginated pages rather than a placeholder. Downloading still gives you the original .pptx or .docx file. If the preview can't be generated, the artifact still saves and you'll see a placeholder instead.
A note on branding
Branding (colours, fonts, logos, and house style) is applied when you ask for it. That happens when you rely on a skill that defines the brand, or when you upload an example for the AI to copy. In those cases, the Preview tab shows the branding.
Where the preview can't show the finished look, or there's no preview at all, download the artifact. The downloaded file is always the finished version, with its full branding applied.
Downloading and sharing
From the Preview tab and the Artifacts tab, each artifact gives you a few options:
Copy copies the content in a format ready to paste into Outlook, Word, or similar. For emails and documents, use this rather than selecting the text by hand, because it preserves formatting.
Download saves the artifact to your device in its native format, such as an Excel file for a spreadsheet or a PowerPoint file for a deck. This is also how you get the fully branded version.
PDF is available for Markdown and HTML artifacts. It converts the artifact to PDF and downloads it.
Delete removes the artifact from the project. You need write access to the project to do this.
Practical limits
There's no fixed length limit on most artifacts. Very large ones, such as a 200-slide deck or a spreadsheet with thousands of rows, take longer to produce and can run into the AI's output limits. Artifacts pushed into a project by external services are capped at 30MB.
If you're asking for something very large, the simplest workaround is to split it into sections. Ask the AI to produce each part separately, then download them as individual artifacts.