Tools give your agents the ability to act. An agent without tools can only talk. With tools it can look up an order, search your knowledge base, update a customer record, or transfer the conversation to a colleague.
How a tool works
A tool is a flow of steps you build on a canvas. It receives input, does its work, and returns a result to the agent.
Every tool has two sides:
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The outside: its name, description, and input parameters. This is everything the agent sees. It uses these to decide when to use the tool and what information to send it.
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The inside: the steps that do the work. The agent never sees these. It only gets the result.
During a conversation, the agent picks the tool whose description matches what the customer needs, fills in the parameters from the conversation, runs the tool, and uses the result in its reply.
In this section
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How agents use your tool: the name, description, and parameters, and how to write them so the right tool gets used at the right time. Start here if an agent is not using your tool as expected.
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Building a tool: creating a tool and working in the builder.
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Steps, branches and outputs: every step type and what it does.
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Parameters, variables, context and data flow: how data moves through a tool.
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Testing your tool: running your tool with the debugger.
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Tool Analytics: how often your tools run, how fast, and how successfully.
Managing your tools
The Tools page lists your tools. Search by name or description, or sort by name or date modified. Each tool has a menu with Edit, Duplicate, Copy to profile, Export, and Delete; select multiple tools for bulk actions.
When you copy a tool to another profile, linked context variables are not copied. Recreate them in the target profile.