Agents and Skills
How AI agents work as specialized employees, how custom agents extend the catalog, and how skills give them superpowers.
The big picture
Your assistant is the generalist — it helps you personally across everything in your workspace. AgentForce is where specialists live: a curated catalog of four pre-built agents plus a builder for any custom role your org needs. Catalog agents and custom agents appear side-by-side on the hub at /agentforce.
Catalog vs. custom agents
Catalog agents ship with a fixed identity and Opisense-tuned defaults for their role. Admins can layer instruction overrides and tool changes on top, but the core role, personality, and built-in toolkit are set by Opisense.
Custom agents are fully admin-configurable — name, icon, color, description, model, instructions, and tools are all yours to define. Orgs can have up to 20 custom agents. Once published, a custom agent shows up on the hub alongside the catalog agents.
How a catalog agent works
Each catalog agent comes with:
- A defined role — Customer Support, Sales, Research, Content Creator.
- A personality — Tuned for the role.
- A toolkit — Built-ins like
search_kb,read_file,search_org_contacts, plus integration tools when services are connected. - Suggested starter prompts — Three example prompts on each agent's empty state.
Admins can layer instruction overrides and tool changes on top of any catalog agent via the builder — see Building an agent.
How a custom agent works
- Built from
/admin/agents→ + New agent. - Defined by identity (name, icon, color, description, model), instructions, and a chosen toolkit.
- Up to 20 per org.
- Drafted and published like a small piece of software — iterate on instructions, then publish when it's ready for the org.
Assistant vs. agent
| Your Assistant | An AgentForce Agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Purpose | General help for you personally | Specific role for the org |
| Memory | Per-user thread + working memory | Per-user, per-agent thread + working memory |
| Identity | Configurable per user | Configurable by admin (catalog: tools + instructions only; custom: everything) |
| Tools | Full toolkit + heartbeat | Built-ins + admin-chosen tools, tuned to the role |
| Who uses it | Just you | Anyone in the org |
How skills work
Skills are modular capabilities — think of them like apps on a phone. On their own, they're useful. Attached to an agent, they're powerful.
A skill might let an agent:
- Search and analyze documents
- Generate reports from structured data
- Send emails or messages
- Connect to external tools and services
- Process files in specific formats
Skill scopes
Not all skills are available everywhere. They're organized into three scopes:
- Common skills — Available to every assistant and agent in Opisense. These are the built-in basics that everyone can use.
- Organization skills — Created by your team and shared across your org. Everyone in your org can use these, but they're not available outside it.
- Agent-specific skills — Custom skills built for a single agent. They're tailored to that agent's specific job and aren't shared with anyone else.
When you create an agent, it automatically has access to all common skills and any organization skills. You can then add agent-specific skills to give it unique capabilities for its role.
Key terms
- Agent — An AI worker designed for a specific role. Comes from the catalog (4 default agents) or built by an admin as a custom agent (up to 20 per org).
- Skill — A modular capability that extends what an assistant or agent can do.
- Tool — The underlying function the AI calls to take action — searching the knowledge base, looking up a contact, reading a file. Tool calls appear as pills in the chat.
- Personality — The behavioral traits and communication style of an agent. Fixed for catalog agents; defined by admin instructions for custom agents.
- Working memory — Stable facts an agent keeps about you across threads. Per-user, per-agent.
In practice
Use a catalog agent for common roles. Build a custom agent when your team has a specialized role the catalog doesn't cover — for example, a "compliance reviewer" or "shift-handoff drafter". Admins create custom agents from /admin/agents; once published, they show up on /agentforce next to the catalog agents.