Companion agent setup guide

Companion agent is a multi-agent system that uses the following three powerful features to support your work:

  • Guidance Agent: Proactively provides information to a human agent during a conversation, such as next action suggestions and sample responses.
  • Reactive Agent: An AI chatbot that the human agent can interact with.
  • Knowledge Agent: Proactively provides information from a knowledge base to the human agent during a conversation.

Before you begin

Before you create a companion agent, you must decide which resources to use and choose the datastore link to provide knowledge assist.

  • Resources: Companion agent can use a document knowledge base (PDFs, URLs), a set of instructions, and tool definitions.

  • Data store link: To provide human agents with knowledge base suggestions, follow these instructions to get a datastore link.

Set up a companion agent

Follow these steps to set up your companion agent.

Step 1: Create a companion agent

  1. Log into the Agent Assist Console.
  2. Navigate to Companion agent and click Create.
  3. Enter a Display name.
  4. Click Save.

Step 2: Add tools to the companion agent

Empower the companion agent by adding web search and datastore search tools. For datastore search, you should already have a data store setup.

Step 2.1: Create search tools

Follow these steps to create search tools, on the CX Agent Studio Console :

  1. Select the same project and location where you created the Companion Agent.
  2. Click Create Agent, enter a Name.
  3. Click Create > Add in the root agent > Add Tool.
  4. Click Add in the tool management panel and select Web Grounding or Data Store.
  5. Enter a Name and a Description of the tool.
  6. For the datastore tool, also select the data stores to connect.
  7. Click Create.
  8. To test the created tool, click the created tool in the root Agent > Test to open the test window. Make sure you test the tool and verify that it works before adding to the companion agent.

Step 2.2: Add tools

Follow these steps to add tools to the companion agent, on the Agent Assist Console:

  1. Navigate to the Companion agent and click the one you created.
  2. Click Add in the Tools section.
  3. Select the CX agent you created.
  4. Click Tool Type and select Web Grounding or Data Store.
  5. Click Tool and select the search tool you created.
  6. Check one of the following options for Trigger:
    • Reactive Suggestion: Enables search tools for the reactive agent.
    • Proactive Suggestion: Enables search tools for the guidance agent.
  7. Click Add > Save.

You can repeat the preceding steps to add both web search tool and datastore search tool.

Step 3: Add guidance to the companion agent

Follow these steps to add guidance to your companion agent.

  1. Open companion agent in the Agent Assist Console.
  2. Select a Triggering event from the menu. The triggering event determines when to initiate a guidance agent and a knowledge agent. Choose one of the following options:
    • Customer message
    • Agent message
    • End of utterance
  3. Click Add in the Guidance section.
  4. Enter the following details:
    • Guidance title: A name for your guidance agent.
    • Description: A description of what your guidance agent provides.
    • Condition: Determines the most appropriate guidance for the current situation.
  5. Click Actions and add your steps. The actions suggest the next steps a human agent can take.
  6. To add tools for guidance, follow the instructions in Step 2.2.

  7. Click Add > Save.

Step 4: Configure model guidance

You can set overarching instructions to determine the behaviour of the Guidance Agent. Follow these steps to configure model guidance.

  1. Open companion agent in the Agent Assist Console.
  2. Enter instructions in the Model Guidance box.
  3. Click Save.

Step 5: Test Your Companion Agent

Before you begin using the agent, create a test profile to see it in action.

  1. In the Agent Assist Console, go to Conversation profiles and click Create.
  2. Enter a Display name.
  3. For Suggestion types, select Companion agent and choose the agent you created.
  4. Click Save.
  5. Navigate to your profile and click Try it out to start the simulation.