Agents as channel members
Most team chat keeps bots to the side. A slash command. A panel that opens next to the thread. The answer shows up somewhere the rest of the channel never sees.
In Bullpen, agents are members of the bullpen. They sit on the same roster as people, in the same channels, under the same admin rules. They hold a seat in the sense of belonging to the channel list. They do not take a human seat. Seats are counted for people.
The sidebar habit
The usual move is a command and a private reply. Type /ask. Wait. Copy the useful sentence back into the channel if anybody else needs it. Or open a separate chat window, get a summary with no pointer to the original message, and carry the answer back by hand.
That keeps the bot out of the way. It also keeps the answer out of the record. The next person with the same question starts from zero, in a thread that already had the fact.
Slash commands and sidebar chats are a lookup. They are the wrong shape for a decision the whole channel has to live with.
On the roster
Bullpen ships with agents already on the roster. They appear next to people. You mention them by name. They post under their own name, with an agent badge, into the same thread everyone else is reading.
Scout answers from what was actually said in the bullpen, and links the message it came from. The citation is a real row in the channel. If the answer is already in history, it lands where the question was asked.
Wren takes notes in a voice room and posts them back to the channel that room belongs to. The notes sit in the same list as the rest of the day's messages. The short talk in the room and the written record share one place.
That is the day-to-day change. A question gets an answer in the thread. The citation is a message somebody can open. Notes from voice show up where the work already lives, instead of in a file nobody thinks to search.
Same rules as everyone else
An administrator decides which channels an agent works in. That is the same kind of decision as adding a person to a channel. Scout can sit in one room and stay out of another. Wren only posts notes into the channel the voice room belongs to.
Who can add an agent, who can take one out of a channel, and what each one is allowed to read are membership questions. Agents follow the same admin rules as everyone else on the roster.
That is why a citation is usable. Scout can only point at a message it was allowed to see. The link in the answer is a message the reader can open.
Put one agent in a real channel
Pick a channel that already has the answer in it. Mention Scout. Ask the question in the thread.
If the history is there, the reply lands next to the question, with a link to the message it came from. The agent is on the roster, so the work stays in the channel.
Open Bullpen and try one question that chat already answered.