Browse documentation

Give an agent NGT Skills

Start from a template that comes with its skills, add more by role, process or jurisdiction, know which skills come with tools, check what an agent read, and make an NGT Skill your own.

An agent applies the skills it holds, and the few its tools bring along. Giving it the right ones, and only those, is most of what makes it good at a job. How skills work is in NGT Skills.

Start from a template

Agent templates come with the NGT Skills for their job. NAV Oversight Analyst holds thirteen, from NAV Calculation and Maker-Checker (Four-Eyes) to Daily Share Class NAV Oversight Review and Swing Pricing Control. An agent you create from a template starts with the template's skills, and you add or take out skills as on any agent. See Agent templates.

Add skills by role, process or jurisdiction

  1. In Agent Studio, open the agent.
  2. In its Skills section, click + (Add skills), or Add while it holds none.
  3. The Select skills dialog shows the Skills page's shelves. Open the card that fits the job: under Role who the agent works as, for example Transfer agent; under Process the work, for example NAV; under Jurisdiction where.
  4. Narrow the label's list by kind and asset type, read a skill on the right before you take it, and tick the ones the agent needs.
  5. Click Apply.

The skills appear as chips in the agent's Skills section. The × on a chip takes one out.

Keep to the skills the job needs. The agent is given the line that says when to use each skill it holds, on every turn, and picks from those lines. A short list of the right skills makes the choice easy; in a long list, the last skills are listed by name alone, without that line.

Skills that come with tools

Some tools need a way of working, so they bring a skill along for the run, whether or not the agent holds it:

  • The tools that read documents bring the extraction skills: Document Extraction, Entity Extraction, Table Extraction and Extract with Source Locations.
  • Creating a data object from a template brings Data Object Design.
  • Creating an agent from a template brings Agent Authoring.
  • The channel tools bring Channels and Threads.

These skills join for the run only. They are not added to the agent in Agent Studio, and an agent that holds one already is given it once.

The built-in agents

The built-in agents come with their own skills. Spark holds the skills for building what it coordinates, such as Workflow Authoring and Agent Authoring, and no business skills: for a NAV review or a capital call, ask an agent built for that work. Solutions Engineer holds the skills for interviewing you about your processes and proposing a setup. See Built-in agents.

When an agent wants a skill it does not hold

Skills point to each other. When an agent asks for a skill it was not given, the thread pauses on a card, Skills the agent wasn't given, and you choose whether it may read it. Approving lets it read that skill, and any other, until the turn ends. In a workflow's Ask Agent step, where nobody can answer, an agent reads only its own skills. See Skills.

See what the agent read

An answer's steps list every skill the agent read, beside its tool calls. Click one to read the skill as the agent did. In Monitoring, Skill calls (top 10) shows which skills agents read most.

CMClaire Martin2 minutes agoRead your workflow skill, then tell me which step would load the administrator's NAV file intoour NAV Records data object. Don't create anything.SparkAgent3 steps1 minute agoReasoningI will load the workflow authoring skill and list the workspace's data objects using `loa…Spark List Data Objects122msWorkflow Authoring5msNAV Records is one of the workspace's 12 data objects. A Read CSV File step reads theadministrator's file into records, and a Save Record step writes them to NAV Records.
A skill the agent read shows in the steps, next to its tool calls.

A skill that is never read is a sign its line does not match how people ask, or that the agent does not need it.

Make an NGT Skill your own

When your operation works differently, such as other tolerances, another escalation path or your own data objects, make your own version of the skill:

  1. On the Skills page, open the skill and click Duplicate and modify, then Duplicate.
  2. The copy opens for you to edit, under Custom skills. Change it, then click Save.
  3. On the agent, take out the NGT Skill and add your copy, so the agent does not hold both.

Your copy stays as you leave it: when NGT updates the original in a release, the copy does not change.

Where to go next