Monday.com Tutorial For Beginners, How to Use Monday.com Sidekick AI for Task, Project Management

A Monday.com board is a table split into named groups, colored bands like "Supplier A" or "Supplier B", with each row inside a group being one item, and each column holding a specific data type: text, a person, a date, a status label, or a number. The toolbar above the table carries the tools that act on the whole board: New item to add a row, Filter and Sort to narrow what's shown, Group by to reorganize, and on the right, entry points into the AI features covered later in this guide. Every group and column total rolls up automatically at the bottom of the table, sums, counts, and date ranges, so you get a running summary without building a separate report.

Instead of building a board from a blank grid, the Template center (reachable from the + next to your workspace) lets you browse by category, Marketing, Sales & CRM, Software Development, HR, and more, and preview a template before committing. Selecting one, like Project Management, shows how many users have adopted it and offers Use template to drop a ready-made structure of groups, columns, and sample items straight into your workspace, which you then rename and refill with your own data.

The Status column is the fastest way to see where work stands, and it's editable inline: click a cell and a dropdown of colored labels appears, Done, Working on it, Stuck, Not Started, plus an Edit Labels option if the defaults don't match your workflow. Changing a task's status here updates every view and rollup that depends on it immediately, which is what keeps Monday.com's dashboards and progress bars accurate without any manual recalculation. Auto-assign labels is also available from the same dropdown for cycling defaults automatically as items move through stages.

Clicking a task's name (instead of one of its column cells) opens its full item card, with tabs for Updates, Files, and Activity Log. Updates is a running comment thread scoped to that one task: post progress notes, @mention a teammate, attach a file or GIF, and everyone with access sees the same thread instead of it getting buried in chat. It starts empty on a new task ("No updates yet"), and this is generally where the day-to-day conversation about a piece of work happens, separate from the structured columns on the board.

The feature this guide's title refers to as "Sidekick AI" is Monday.com's assistant, and as of 2026 the platform calls it simply Sidekick, not "monday AI". It isn't tucked into one menu: it's reachable account-wide from the left panel, at board level from a star icon in the toolbar, and at item level from a star icon next to any individual task.

Alongside Sidekick sit two separate tools worth knowing apart from it: Agents, built to run ongoing or repetitive work inside a board on their own, and Vibe, a prompt-to-app builder for generating small custom tools instead of a chat assistant. Treat these as an accelerator once you already understand a board's groups, columns, and statuses, not a replacement for learning the basics first.

A real workspace, like the sample PMN workspace shown throughout this walkthrough, holds many boards at once: Financial Accounting, Daily Work Schedule, KPI Dashboard, Inventory Management, Budget Plan, all listed in the left sidebar and switchable with a single click. Related boards can also be nested under a parent folder (as seen with Project Management containing High Level and Projects sub-items), worth setting up early if you expect the workspace to grow past a handful of boards, since flat lists get hard to navigate quickly.