Tools
Tools overview
The four ways to give an agent tools, and when to use each.
What a tool is
A tool is an action the agent can take mid-conversation — usually an HTTP call to your own API or a third-party one: look up an order, check a price, create a support ticket, fetch live data. The agent decides when to call a tool based on the conversation, the same way it decides what to retrieve from Knowledge.
Four ways to add tools
- Prebuilt tools — a handful of no-auth public-API tools (weather, timezone, exchange rates, etc.) you can add with one click. No setup.
- Toolkit builder — describe a goal in plain English and the platform researches the vendor's live API docs and drafts a full set of tools for you, ready to review and save. The fastest path for connecting a real third-party API.
- Manual tools — define a single HTTP tool yourself (method, URL, headers, body, parameters), optionally with AI assistance to draft the definition from a plain-English description.
- MCP servers — connect a remote MCP server and the tools it exposes become available to the agent automatically.
Credentials
Toolkits and manual tools that call authenticated APIs reference a
credential by an alias ({{secret.your_alias}}) rather than embedding a key
directly — see Connecting credentials. Credentials
are organization-level, so the same toolkit works across every agent in your
org without re-entering keys.
Where tools show up
Every tool you add — regardless of which of the four paths created it — lands on the agent's Tools tab under "Your tools," where you can enable, disable, test, or delete it. A shared Troubleshoot chat (advisory only — it never changes anything) is available from any tools screen if a tool isn't behaving the way you expect.