The default profile
Every organization has one default profile. Its skills and settings are merged into every person's configuration automatically, before any team- or person-assigned profiles — which makes it the most powerful profile you have, and the one to keep smallest.
What makes it the default
On the profile detail page, the Default profile checkbox under Profile settings marks a profile as the organization default, and the Profiles table shows it with a Default badge. Only users with Manage Harriet Endpoint AI can change the flag; delegated profile managers cannot.
The default profile needs no assignments. Its Who receives this profile card explains the behavior directly: its skills and settings are merged into every user's effective Harriet Desktop / agent configuration first, before any team- or person-assigned profiles. The assignment list below it is only for explicit extra assignments and is usually empty — every person still receives the profile as the baseline automatically.
What lands in it
Anything you add to the default profile reaches everyone. You edit it like any other profile — open Manage → Profiles, select the default, and add skills, global rules, or transport overrides.
Some console shortcuts also write to it. The Try a demo skill card on the Dashboard offers each demo with two buttons: To default profile adds it for all users, while To me assigns it to you only. After choosing To default profile, the console confirms that all users will receive the skill after the next agent sync, a good illustration of how quickly the default profile fans out.
When you are testing something new, prefer To me or a person-level assignment over the default profile. You can always promote the skill to the default once it has proven itself. See Assigning skills.
When a device falls back to it
A newly enrolled device whose user has no team or personal profile assignments is not empty: it still receives everything in the default profile on its first sync. That fallback is what guarantees a working baseline — a person can enroll before anyone has sorted them into a team, and their AI already has the organization's core skills and rules.
For people who do have assignments, the default profile is the first layer of the merge. Their Effective access view under Teams and people shows the default, direct, and team routes combined.
Keep it minimal
Because the default profile reaches every person and every device, each addition carries organization-wide cost: more skills to load on every desktop, more instructions competing for the model's attention, and a wider audience for anything that misbehaves. A skill that only one department needs belongs in that department's profile, not the default.
A good default profile holds the few things genuinely universal in your organization: house-wide global rules and the small set of skills everyone benefits from. Everything else should travel through team profiles, where delegated managers can own it.