Add tools and information to an AI agent

  • Release version: Zurich
  • Updated November 23, 2025
  • 2 minutes to read
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    Summary of Add tools and information to an AI agent

    Enhance your AI agents by adding tools that enable various functionalities and help achieve specific objectives. Tools are essential for providing the capabilities necessary for task completion and improving the overall performance of AI agents.

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    Key Features

    • Collaboration of Tools: Design tools to work in harmony, allowing the AI agent to effectively tackle specific tasks.
    • Detailed Descriptions: Write comprehensive tool descriptions to clarify their functions, enhancing the AI agent's ability to utilize them efficiently.
    • Output Considerations: When creating tools, plan for output processing, especially for tools handling large data sets.
    • Knowledge Graphs: Incorporate knowledge graphs to provide context and relationships between entities, improving decision-making capabilities of AI agents.
    • Supervised Execution Mode: Configure tools to operate under human oversight to mitigate risks associated with sensitive actions.

    Key Outcomes

    By adding appropriate tools and knowledge graphs, you enable your AI agents to perform more effectively and securely. This setup supports better decision-making and ensures compliance with your organization's data policies, especially when using external resources like Google for web searches.

    After configuring the tools, proceed by selecting Save to continue with the guided setup of your AI agent.

    Add a tool to an AI agent to enable different functionalities and help your AI agents achieve their objectives.

    Tool overview

    Tools provide your AI agents with the capabilities necessary to complete their tasks. When adding tools, consider how the AI agent uses them to achieve its objectives as well as how those tools interact with each other. Providing your AI agents with the appropriate tools help promote the robustness and quality of their performance.

    Some additional guidelines for adding and creating tools are the following:

    • Design tools to work together. Your AI agent should solve a specific, discrete task, and the tools should give the AI agent the capabilities necessary to achieve its goal.
    • Write detailed tool descriptions. Tool descriptions are used by the AI agent to determine a tool's function. Thorough descriptions about what the tools are and how they work give the AI agent the best chance to succeed.
    • Consider the outputs of tools when creating them. Use the tool description or output transformation strategy fields to describe how to process the tool outputs. For example, if you have a tool that gathers records from a large number of tables, provide the tool with plans for how to handle the large number of records.
    Note:
    If you select Google as your web search tool provider, the web search tool leverages Grounding with Google Search, offered under a Global Standard deployment. Because grounding isn’t data resident, Google's global infrastructure routes traffic to a global datacenter for each web search request. This processing may be different than your data processing location chosen for your ServiceNow instance. Consider your organization's data policies before enabling AI agents that use Google web search tools.

    Once you have added the tools to your AI agent, you can select Save and continue to move to the next step in the guided setup.

    Knowledge graphs

    In this step, you can also add Knowledge graphs. Knowledge graphs give the AI agent information to understand the relationships between real-world entities to improve its outputs. For example, you could add a Knowledge Graph to an approval AI agent that maps users to their location, company, and department to help the AI agent understand the specific approval process to apply.

    Knowledge Graph options

    Supervised execution mode for AI agents

    You can minimize the potential negative impact of an AI agent not executing as expected by configuring AI agents' tools to run in supervised mode. Running in supervised mode means that the tools use human oversight when executing actions. You can use the Supervised mode to enhance security for agents with the capability to perform sensitive or critical actions.

    You can set the supervised execution mode when creating a tool in the AI agent guided setup. For example, choose Supervised as the Execution mode when adding a catalog item tool. For reference, see Add a catalog item to an AI agent.