Agents and Agent Packs — Customer Portal

Your people talk to Zoe. An agent is a named specialist Zoe can consult for part of that work, with its own instructions, its own short list of what it may use, and its own limit on what it may change. Nobody has to pick an agent to get started: Zoe consults one when its role fits the question, and anyone can ask for one by name. Agents are managed under Agents in the left-hand navigation. The page is for administrators.

Three kinds of agent

Organization agents are shared with every member. Administrators create and edit them on this page.
Personal agents belong to one member, who builds them in Zoe with Add agent. Only that member's conversations can reach them.
External agents run outside AINOW, in a system your organization already uses. Zoe sends them a question and reads the answer.

The same page holds the Agent Pack catalogue, where you adopt prebuilt agents, and Agent activity, where you see how much your agents are used.

Organization agents

Select Add an org agent and fill in the form:

Look — the agent's picture in the roster.
Name, Role and Description — what members see in the roster. Zoe decides when to consult an agent from its name and role, so write the role the way a colleague would describe the job.
Instructions — how the agent should behave and answer.
Write access — what the agent may change. See below.
The assistant and members can consult this agent — clear it to keep the agent in the roster without it being consulted. The row then reads Roster only instead of Delegable.
Long-running — tells Zoe to prefer running this agent's consults in the background and notifying the person when it is done. It is a hint, not a guarantee.
Tools, Skills and Repositories — strict allowlists. An agent can use only what you select here, and an empty list means it has none of that thing. These limits are enforced by the platform, not by the agent's instructions.

Write access has three levels:

Read-only — the agent cannot use tools that change anything.
Approval required — the agent can propose changes, and each one waits on an approval card. When the change came from an agent, the card says so.
Automatic — write tools run without an approval card, but only on a surface that also allows it, such as a workflow an administrator has set to Auto-execute. In a conversation with Zoe the card still appears.

Each row has an Active checkbox to take the agent out of service without deleting it, Edit, and a delete icon followed by Confirm delete. A new workspace starts with three example agents for IT support, sales, and people and HR. They have no tools, skills or repositories until you choose them.

Personal agents

Members build their own agents in Zoe. A personal agent can use read-only tools only and can never make changes automatically.

The Personal agents list on this page is for oversight. Editing stays with the owner, but you can do two things:

Clear the checkbox to disable the agent.
Select Promote to turn it into an organization agent. Ownership transfers to the organization: every member can see the agent, only administrators can edit it, and the previous owner loses edit access. This cannot be undone.

Agent Packs

An Agent Pack is a prebuilt agent together with its skills, published by AINOW. Packs are listed in the Agent Pack catalogue on the Agents page. Nothing in a pack runs until you adopt it and then enable it, and what you adopt is your own copy to review, change and bind like anything you built yourself. If the catalogue reads No packs are offered to this workspace yet, none has been offered to your organization.

Browsing the catalogue

Each card shows the pack's name, version and description, the agent's name and role, the skills it brings, and a Requires: line. Select Preview to read everything before you commit: the agent's instructions, its tools, its Write access, and each skill, with Show procedure for the full text.

Requirements

The Requires: line lists the integrations the pack needs. If one is not connected, the card shows Not connected: with a Connect integrations link, and Adopt stays disabled until every required integration is active. Packs that need nothing read No integrations required.

Adopting a pack

Select Adopt on the card.
Keep the proposed Agent name or change it. It must not match another organization or external agent.
Select Adopt in the dialog.

Adopting creates the agent and its skills in your workspace, all disabled. To start using them, tick the checkbox on the agent's row so it reads Active, and turn on Enabled for each skill on the Skills page. You can then bind those skills to phone lines and email channels like any other enterprise skill. Adopted items carry a small chip with the pack and version, and the card shows which version you adopted and under what agent name.

A workspace holds up to 200 enterprise skills, so an adoption that would pass that limit is refused. If an integration an adopted agent depends on stops being active, its row on the Agents page warns Not connected: and the tools that use it will not work until you connect it again.

Updating a pack

Updates never apply on their own. When a new version is published, the card shows a chip such as v2 available and a Review update button. The dialog compares your version with the new one, item by item, and preselects the safe choice:

unchanged — nothing to decide.
changed upstream — you have not edited this item. The default is Take the new version, and Keep mine holds it back.
changed upstream — you edited yours — both sides are shown under Show changes. The default is Keep mine, and Take the new version discards your edit.
new in this version — Add it (disabled) or Don't add it.
no longer in the pack — Keep it as my own skill leaves it enabled and bound and only drops the pack link. Delete my copy removes it. Before you choose, the dialog shows how many phone channels, email channels or other agents use it, because deleting it breaks those bindings.

Whichever you choose, the agent keeps its name, appearance, enabled state and channel bindings. If the new version needs an integration you have not connected, the dialog says so and the update waits until you connect it. Select Apply update to finish. If you keep your own version of an item, you are asked again the next time that item changes.

Removing a pack

Remove deletes the adopted agent. Its skills stay in the workspace as ordinary enterprise skills, so nothing bound to a channel disappears. Deleting an adopted agent from its row has the same effect on the pack.

If AINOW stops offering a pack, the card reads No longer offered. Your copy keeps working, and Remove is the only action left on the card.

IT service management packs

Five packs for ServiceNow are in the catalogue. Each is an agent with four to six skills. Adopt them like any other pack: they need an active ServiceNow integration and are not installed for you.

Incident Manager — triages new incidents, works the queue, watches SLAs, resolves and closes, escalates major incidents, and writes the shift handoff.
Request Fulfiller — works catalog tasks and request items, orders on someone's behalf, and reviews the approvals waiting on you.
Change Coordinator — drafts change requests, reviews risk against the CMDB, tracks change tasks, prepares CAB material, and closes with a post-implementation review.
Problem Manager — opens problems from recurring incidents, runs root cause analysis, drafts known error articles, and tracks problem tasks.
Knowledge Curator — drafts articles from resolved incidents, finds gaps where incidents repeat with nothing written down, reviews article quality, and answers with cited articles. It writes drafts only: publishing stays with your knowledge process.

All five agents are set to Approval required, so every change they propose waits on an approval card.

External agents

An external agent is an AI agent your organization already runs somewhere else. If it speaks the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, Zoe can consult it much as it consults an organization agent. That covers ServiceNow AI agents and Copilot Studio agents published to Microsoft 365 Copilot, as well as agents you host yourself.

External agents are available once your AINOW contact has made them available to your tenant. The External agents section then appears on the Agents page. They are added and removed on the Integrations page, not here: on the Agents page you can only switch one between Active and Inactive, and between Delegable and Roster only.

Before you start

Zoe consults an external agent only when a data-masking guardrail is in force. On the Guardrails page, enable at least one of Mask PII, Block secret leakage or Protect card numbers (PCI), and turn on Live input/output scanning. The question Zoe sends is masked on its way out and the answer is masked on its way in. Without such a guardrail, Zoe tells the person that external delegation requires one.

Add an agent with its own credential

Use this for an agent that accepts one shared credential.

On Integrations, choose External agent (A2A) as the Integration type.
Enter an Alias: lowercase letters, digits and hyphens.
Choose the Authentication mode — API key (header), Static bearer token or Service credential (OAuth client) — and enter the Credential, plus the header name or the OAuth details the mode asks for.
Enter the Agent card URL. If you have an active ServiceNow integration, Browse agents on ServiceNow lists the AI agents on that instance, and Use fills in the form for you.
Enter the Role (what to route to this agent). Zoe routes questions by role, so write it the way a colleague would describe the agent's job. Display name and Description are optional and default to what the agent card says.
Select Create integration.

AINOW reads the agent card when you create the integration, so a wrong address or credential is caught straight away. Treat the credential with care: AINOW only reads what the agent replies and treats that as untrusted input, but the agent may act inside its own system under the credential you give it. Choose read-only agents.

Copilot Studio agents

Copilot Studio agents published to Microsoft 365 Copilot are reached as each member, not through a shared credential. Every member signs in once with their own Microsoft account, and the agent answers as that person. One integration can hold many agents. You need an app registration in your own Microsoft Entra tenant.

On Integrations, choose External agent (A2A) and select the Microsoft 365 Copilot preset. It sets the mode to Sign in as each user (Microsoft Entra) and fills in Gateway URL, OAuth scope and a 90-day Re-authorization interval (days).
Enter an Alias, your Entra tenant ID, the OAuth client ID, and the app registration's client secret as the Credential.
Register the redirect URI the form shows on your app registration, as a Web platform. Use Open the admin consent page to grant admin consent once, so members are not prompted individually.
Select Create integration. It starts with no agents.
Select Edit on the new row and Connect your own Microsoft account.
Under Agents on this integration, select Browse agents on Microsoft 365 Copilot and Add selected, or enter an Agent card URL or agent ID with its role and select Add agent. You can add up to 20 agents at a time. The field's hint shows the ID to use for Microsoft 365 Copilot itself.

Edit role changes what Zoe routes to an agent and Remove takes it off the integration. Changing the app registration, scope or mode disconnects every member, and each one signs in again.

What members see

External agents appear in Zoe's roster under External. On a Copilot Studio integration each member sees Connect on the agent's row, and Disconnect once they have signed in. If someone asks for the agent before connecting, Zoe puts a connect card in the conversation instead, and the roster updates once they finish. A member is asked to sign in again when the re-authorization interval runs out.

A consult always runs in the background. The conversation shows Working in the background with the agent's name, and the person is notified when the answer is ready. The answer carries an External agent chip, so nobody mistakes it for something Zoe found in your own systems.

Limits

External agents only answer. They cannot propose a change through AINOW, so nothing they say becomes an approval card.
They can be consulted from chat and voice conversations with Zoe. Scheduled workflows cannot consult them.
Zoe prefers its own tools and connected systems for your data, and goes to an external agent when its role fits better.
If the external agent needs more from the person, the reply is a partial answer that carries its question.
If it does not finish within the time limit, the consult ends as failed.
An answer Microsoft 365 marks as encrypted is refused rather than shown.

How a name resolves

Organization and external agents share one list of names, so no two of them can match. A member's personal agent can reuse one of those names, and that is the only case where a name can point at two agents.

When someone names an agent, the match ignores capitalization, with one refinement: a name that matches an agent's exact capitalization goes to that agent first. If more than one agent still matches, the order is organization, then external, then personal. So a member whose personal agent shares a name with an organization agent reaches the organization one, in chat and by voice. Renaming the personal agent restores it.

Another member's personal agent can never be reached. Neither can an agent that is Inactive or Roster only.

Agent activity

Agent activity at the bottom of the page covers the last 30 days: Active agents, Delegated model calls, Delegated tool calls and External consults, a By agent breakdown tagged Org, Personal or External, and a trend chart. To see what one agent did on one occasion, open the Delegations section of the Explain panel.