Bring your own provider

Instead of orboto AI, you can connect an account you already have with another AI provider. orboto then calls that provider directly with your key, and your usage is billed by that provider under your own account with them - orboto's usage and limits mechanics don't apply to it.

This is a plain settings choice, not a one-way migration: you can switch back to orboto AI at any time, and - for the reason explained below - switching your embeddings provider away from orboto AI on a managed workspace is remembered even across restarts, so it's never silently switched back for you.

Supported providers

Admin -> AI settings' "Own provider" option supports:

• OpenAI
• Anthropic (Claude) - no embeddings endpoint; pair it with orboto AI, OpenAI, or another embeddings-capable provider for search and Ask-Docs.
• Google Gemini
• GitHub Copilot - Business or Enterprise seat only. An individual Copilot subscription's terms of service don't permit this kind of use.
• Ollama - self-hosted, native API, no key required.
• Any OpenAI-compatible endpoint - OpenRouter, Groq, DeepSeek, LM Studio, vLLM, and others that speak the OpenAI API shape. A preset picker autofills the base URL and a sensible default model for known vendors.

Full setup steps (loading a provider's model catalog, presets, per-feature model overrides) are in AI providers and models.

Chat and embeddings are independent

Choosing "own provider" for chat and completion doesn't change your embeddings provider, and vice versa - they're two separate settings. That's intentional: Anthropic and Copilot don't have an embeddings endpoint at all, so a workspace using either for chat needs a different provider (orboto AI, OpenAI, Gemini, Ollama, or an OpenAI-compatible endpoint) for embeddings regardless of what powers chat.

Switching is lossless

Whichever provider you switch away from - orboto AI or another one - has its base URL, key and model stashed on the server. Switching back later restores exactly what you had, rather than making you re-enter it from scratch. This applies to both the chat and embeddings choices, in either direction.

The managed-workspace opt-out

On a managed cloud workspace, orboto AI's embeddings are active by default. If you explicitly switch the embeddings provider to something else, that choice is durable: it's recorded as "bring your own" for embeddings specifically, and survives restarts and platform-side key rotations - orboto never re-activates managed embeddings under you without an explicit action on your part.

This opt-out is scoped to embeddings only. Switching the chat provider away from orboto AI doesn't need an equivalent flag, because chat has no automatic wiring to protect against in the first place - it's just whatever provider is currently configured.

To switch embeddings back to orboto AI on a managed workspace, either:

• click Use orboto AI (managed) in the Embeddings subsection of Admin -> AI settings, or
• pick orboto AI again from the embeddings provider dropdown.

Either one clears the opt-out and restores managed embeddings.

Troubleshooting

• The embeddings provider dropdown doesn't offer Anthropic or GitHub Copilot. Expected - neither has an embeddings endpoint, so they're intentionally absent from that list even though both appear for chat.
• I switched away from orboto AI and now key rotations on the platform side don't affect my workspace. Expected for embeddings, as described above - that's what the durable opt-out is for. It has no effect on your own provider's key, which you manage entirely yourself.
• "Load models" fails after pasting a key. Usually a wrong base URL or an invalid/expired key - the error shows inline, and you can type a model id by hand while you fix the wiring.
• I want orboto AI for one capability and my own provider for the other. Fully supported - set them independently in Admin -> AI settings; see Chat and embeddings are independent above.