Using instructions to influence advanced AI agent responses

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Add-on | AI agents - Advanced

Note: For equivalent functionality for AI agents - Essential, see Using instructions to influence AI agent responses.

You can create instructions for your AI agents that let you control their behavior in ways beyond customizing their persona, tone of voice, and pronoun formality. Instructions let you balance generative AI's automation potential to solve more customer requests without requiring human intervention, while preserving a precise level of control that helps you protect your brand.

This article contains the following topics:

About instructions

Creating instructions

Testing instructions

Editing instructions

Deleting instructions

Related article:

Best practices for using instructions and custom tone of voice to influence advanced AI agent responses

About instructions

Instructions let you customize your AI agents’ responses beyond tone of voice, response lengths, and pronoun formality. For example, you can create instructions that tell your AI agents to:

Follow an in-house style guide that includes specific terminology or formatting.

Avoid specific phrases or responses that shouldn’t be used with customers (for example, “According to the sources” or “Contact customer support”).

Respond in specified ways to particular user messages (for example, to always include a specific hyperlink in responses about a given topic).

Instructions are configured at the AI agent–level.

Limitations of instructions

Instructions allow you to refine an AI agent's responses beyond just tone of voice. They can enforce specific language, avoid certain phrases, or ensure key information is included in replies.

What instructions can’t do, however, is fundamentally change the content returned by the AI agent. For example, instructions cannot be used to search a different knowledge source or to cause an escalation.

Instructions are applied after the AI agent has understood the end user’s message, queried a knowledge source accordingly, and generated an answer ready to be sent back to the end user. At this point in the process, instructions can be used to shape—but not fundamentally change—the way that answer is presented to the end user.

Additionally, instructions have a specific limitation when it comes to links and other content that appears in the source but was not directly used to generate a factual answer. As a result, instructions similar to the following won’t work: "When the article includes a product link, always include it in your response." The process that interprets instructions has no visibility into the content of the article that contains the link, so it either does nothing or risks hallucinating a non-existent link.

Creating instructions

For each AI agent, you can create up to 40 instructions that influence its responses to customers.

To create an instruction

In AI agents - Advanced, select the advanced AI agent you want to work with.

Click Content in the sidebar, then select Personalization.

Select the Instructions tab.

Click Create instruction.

In Name, enter a descriptive name for the instruction.
The name is shown to admins on the Instructions settings page and is never shown to customers nor sent to the AI agent.

In How would you like the AI agent to respond?, enter a description of how the AI agent should respond to the customer.
For example, “Always use the term Acme Labs™ instead of Acme.”

In Status, select either of the following options:

Inactive: (Default) The AI agent won’t follow the instruction in real situations with customers, but you can still test it behind the scenes.

Active: The AI agent immediately starts following the instruction. In production environments, it’s not recommended to set an instruction to Active until after you’ve tested it.

Click Create.

Testing instructions

Before setting any instructions to active, it’s highly recommended to test them thoroughly to help ensure that they affect the AI agent’s responses as you expect.

On the Instructions page, you can test instructions individually or in bulk. How and where you conduct the testing affects what information the system evaluates as part of the test:

When you test an individual instruction using the in-line Test button, the system evaluates that instruction plus any currently active instructions. It does not evaluate any other inactive instructions.

When you test multiple instructions in bulk, the system evaluates only the instructions you’ve selected. Any other non-selected instructions, regardless of their active/inactive status, are not evaluated.

Tip: From any page in AI agents - Advanced, you can also use the Test AI agent button at the top to simulate the current customer experience. This type of testing evaluates all currently active settings, including instructions. See Testing conversation flows in advanced AI agents.

To test an individual instruction

On the Instructions page, click the instruction you want to edit.

Click Test to open a test window on the right, where you can get an idea of how the instruction affects the AI agent’s responses.
During this testing, the system evaluates this instruction plus any currently active instructions. Any other inactive instructions are ignored.

Tip: If you want to test a single instruction and ignore all other instructions, regardless of their status, you can use the bulk testing method (described next) and select only a single instruction for testing.

To test multiple instructions together

On the Instructions page, select the checkboxes to the left of the instructions you want to test.

In the menu that appears at the bottom of the screen, click the options menu () and select Test selected.
A test window opens on the right, where you can get an idea of how these instructions affect the AI agent’s responses. During this testing, the system evaluates only the instructions you selected. All other non-selected instructions are ignored, even if they’re active.

Editing instructions

You can edit an instruction, even if it’s active, and test the edits without affecting the customer experience.

To edit an instruction

On the Instructions page, click the instruction you want to edit.

Update the instruction’s details as needed.
For help, see Creating instructions.

Click Test to open a test window on the right, where you can get an idea of how these edits affect the AI agent’s responses before proceeding.
During this testing, the system evaluates this instruction plus any currently active instructions.

Click Save changes.

If the instruction is currently active, click Proceed in the Save instruction window to confirm that you want to overwrite the previous version of the instruction with this new version.
Any changes to an active instruction will immediately affect the AI agent’s interactions with customers.

Deleting instructions

You can delete instructions you no longer need, either one at a time or in bulk.

Deleting an instruction is permanent and cannot be undone. When an instruction is deleted, the AI agent immediately stops following that instruction.

To delete an individual instruction

On the Instructions page, find the instruction you want to delete.

Click the options menu () and select Delete.

To delete multiple instructions

On the Instructions page, select the checkboxes to the left of the instructions you want to delete.

In the menu that appears at the bottom of the screen, click the options menu () and select Delete instructions.

In the Delete instructions window that appears, click Delete.