Agents
Agents help you automate tasks, answer user requests, and interact with enterprise systems by using natural language. They act as intelligent assistants that can understand intent, make decisions, and perform actions across business workflows.
In BMC HelixGPT, agents combine AI capabilities with enterprise integrations to deliver fast, contextual, and actionable responses.
What agents do
Agents streamline business operations by performing the following tasks:
- Answering user queries by using enterprise knowledge
- Performing actions such as creating requests, retrieving data, or triggering workflows
- Connecting with BMC applications and external applications
- Providing contextual and personalized responses
- Enforcing security and compliance through guardrails
Agent workflow
The following diagram shows how an agent processes a user request and delivers a response:
Key components of an agent
Agents are built by using the following components:
| Component name | Description |
|---|---|
| Instructions | Define how the agent behaves and responds |
| Skills | Enable the agent to perform specific actions |
| Tools and toolkits | Connect the agent to external systems and services |
| Guardrails | Enforce security, validation, and compliance controls |
Prebuilt versus custom agents
The following table shows a comparison of prebuilt and custom agents:
| Criteria | Prebuilt agents | Custom agents |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | Ready-to-use for common scenarios | Designed for specific business needs |
| Setup effort | Minimal configuration required | Requires full configuration |
| Time to value | Faster to deploy | Takes more time to design and implement |
| Customization | Limited (via cloning and modification) | Fully customizable |
| Use cases | Standard workflows and common tasks | Complex or organization-specific workflows |
| Flexibility | Moderate | High |
| Recommended approach | Use as a starting point and extend | Build when prebuilt agents do not meet requirements |
Prebuilt agents
Prebuilt agents are ready-to-use agents designed for common business scenarios. Prebuilt agents perform the following tasks:
- Provide out-of-the-box capabilities for standard use cases
- Follow best practices for typical workflows
- Reduce setup time and accelerate time to value
You can use prebuilt agents as-is or clone them to customize behavior, add skills, and integrate with your systems. For more information, see Prebuilt agents.
Custom agents
Custom agents are user-defined agents created to meet specific business requirements. Custom agents can perform the following tasks:
- Provide full control over agent behavior and responses
- Support custom workflows, integrations, and use cases
- Enable organization-specific automation
You can create custom agents from scratch by defining instructions, adding skills, and connecting data sources. For more information, see Creating custom agents.
Related topics