Getting started with AI agents with agentic AI

AI agents with agentic AI are designed to solve complex user requests with limited direct human supervision, and without requiring scripted conversation flows. These AI agents increase your automation rates and reduce the load on human agents and admins, while still providing the level of service your customers expect.

This article contains the following topics:

Creating an AI agent with agentic AI

Getting started with your AI agent

Related articles:

About AI agents with agentic AI

Creating generative procedures for AI agents with agentic AI

Creating an AI agent with agentic AI

When you create a new AI agent, it uses agentic AI by default.

To create an AI agent with agentic AI

In AI agents - Advanced, in the left sidebar, click AI agent management > Create AI agent.

In the AI agent name field, enter a descriptive name for your AI agent.

Under Channel, select the channel you want your AI agent to work for: Messaging or Email.

Select the Industry the AI agent will be used for.
If the exact industry isn't available as an option, select the closest fit. This setting impacts benchmark and other industry-related settings throughout your account.

Airline

Gaming

Telecommunications

E-commerce

Banking

Other

In Select language, select the language your AI agent should use.
The Icon drop-down updates to reflect the selected language.

Click Create.

In the left sidebar, select Settings > AI agent settings.

Under Generative AI, select Enable agentic AI.

Getting started with your AI agent

After you create an AI agent with agentic AI, there are several mandatory and optional setup tasks:

Configure an AI agent persona

Import a knowledge source

Create use cases

Create generative procedures or dialogues

Create actions, entities, and API integrations (Optional)

Continue configuring the AI agent settings (Optional)

Configure an AI agent persona

The first step in your AI agent setup is configuring an AI agent persona that controls the identity of the AI agent and how it presents itself to your customers. A persona gives the AI agent the context of who it’s working for, what your company does, what your products are, and so on. If you don’t configure an AI agent persona, a technical error will appear for every message the AI agent receives.

For instructions, see Customizing the persona and tone of voice for your advanced AI agent.

Import a knowledge source

For an AI agent to function with generative procedures, it must have at least one knowledge source imported. The knowledge source can be a help center, CSV file, or web crawler.
Note: At the moment, generative procedures used by AI agents don’t work with search rules for knowledge sources.
For instructions, see Importing knowledge sources for an advanced AI agent.

Create use cases

Next, create use cases that allow the AI agent to understand customer requests and follow the correct generative procedures or dialogues. If you don’t create any use cases, the AI agent forms responses using only the content of your imported knowledge source, not procedures or dialogues (see the next section).

For instructions, see Creating use cases for advanced AI agents.

Create generative procedures or dialogues

The most powerful step in AI agent setup is to create generative procedures. These procedures should reflect your business policies so that the AI agent can resolve customer requests in line with your policies.

For instructions, see Creating generative procedures for AI agents with agentic AI.

In addition to generative procedures, you can also create dialogues that allow the AI agent to respond to customer requests according to scripted conversation flows.

For instructions on creating dialogues, see Using the dialogue builder to create conversation flows for advanced AI agents.

AI agents that use both generative procedures and dialogues are sometimes referred to as hybrid AI agents. You can decide which use cases should use the more flexible generative procedures, and which should use more prescriptive dialogues.

For instructions on choosing between dialogues and procedures, see Configure whether a use case uses a dialogue or generative procedure.

Create actions, entities, and API integrations (Optional)

To leverage helpful details in either generative procedures or dialogues, you can create:

Actions that allow the AI agent to perform actions based on the details of the session or your customer relationship management (CRM) system. For instructions, see Creating and adding actions for advanced AI agents.

Entities that hold pieces of information in customer messages that have specific meaning, such as the user’s email address. For instructions, see Creating entities in conversation flows for advanced AI agents.

API integrations that leverage information from other backend systems you use during your workflows. For more information on using the integration builder to create API integrations, see About the integration builder for advanced AI agents.
Note: For APIs to be used by an AI agent at the right time and in the right context, it’s extremely important to add a clear description to your APIs while building them in the integration builder.

If your AI agent was converted from zero-training to agentic AI, and you already had existing actions, entities, or API integrations for that AI agent, you can use those in generative procedures or dialogues without recreating them.

Continue configuring the AI agent settings (Optional)

At any point, you can always continue configuring the AI agent’s settings. For details, see Accessing and viewing settings for advanced AI agents.