What is a Specialist Agent?
A specialist is one focused AI agent inside an Agent Stack. It handles a specific kind of question — orders, cancellations, returns, billing, technical support, onboarding — and only that. The router picks which specialist takes each message; the specialist replies.
The single biggest lever you have over how well an Agent Stack performs is how you slice the work into specialists. A stack with one generalist will always be weaker than a stack with five focused specialists, because each specialist can have its own scope, its own instructions, and only the knowledge and capabilities it actually needs.
What a specialist is made of
When you open a specialist from the orchestrator canvas, the Setup tab shows three fields and a few derived counters at the top.
- Agent Name — Internal identifier (also shown to customers if router exposure is enabled) — “Billing Support”
- Responsibility (Scope) — What this specialist handles. Used by the router to pick who answers — “Billing, invoices, refunds, subscription changes”
- Instructions — Specialist-specific behavior — required steps, things to always do, things to never reveal, escalation triggers, reply format — “Confirm account email before issuing refunds. Hand off charges older than 90 days.”
That split — Scope vs. Instructions — is important. Scope is what topics come here. Instructions is how to behave once a topic is here. Don’t put tone in either; tone lives on the stack’s Personality tab.
Scope is what the router reads
The router uses LLM-based topic matching to decide which specialist takes a message. It looks at three signals:
- The Scope field on each specialist (the responsibility text).
- Any Routing topics explicitly attached to a specialist.
- Any Routing rules appended to the orchestrator’s prompt.
Most stacks only need a clear Scope per specialist. Routing topics are an explicit override when LLM matching is missing something obvious; the orchestrator-level routing rules are for global preferences (“prefer Billing over Tech for refund questions”). See Define routing topics.
A specialist with empty Scope and no routing topics shows a “No routing signals” warning on its canvas card — the orchestrator will struggle to route to it. Fill in the Scope at minimum.
Knowledge access — per specialist
Every specialist independently controls which knowledge it can read.
- Knowledge Base — pick “All” or select specific categories. Customer-facing articles. Quoted and linked in replies.
- Handbook — pick “All” or select specific categories. Internal procedures. Used to guide behavior, never quoted directly to customers.
- Knowledge Packs / Library — add packs from the specialist’s Knowledge tab using the assigned pack list and the Add knowledge pack slideout. Only packs your tenant is subscribed to or has been granted are available. Packs supplement the specialist’s Knowledge Base and Handbook access; they don’t replace either one.
A technical-support specialist might have access to the troubleshooting KB category and the technical-procedures Handbook category. A billing specialist might have a different scope — refund policies in the Handbook, billing FAQs in the KB. Tighter scope = faster, more accurate retrieval.
See Give a specialist knowledge access.
Capabilities — per specialist
Capabilities are the actions a specialist can take in external systems. Each specialist gets only the capabilities it needs:
- The order tracker gets the order-lookup capability.
- The billing agent gets the refund and invoice-lookup capabilities.
- The product expert gets nothing acting — just KB access.
Each capability assignment can override the default security level. L0 = always available, L1 = after the customer claims an identity, L2 = after OTP, L3 = after full authentication. So an order-status lookup might be L0 (anyone can ask “where’s my order”), but a refund action is L3.
Playbooks — multi-step procedures
A playbook is a deterministic procedure the specialist follows for a specific task — “process a return,” “verify identity,” “escalate a complaint.” Playbooks live under each specialist’s Playbooks tab and can be edited as a visual canvas.
Playbooks are useful when the LLM is reliable for one-off answers but inconsistent for multi-step flows where order matters. If your specialist sometimes skips the “did you turn it off and on again” step, a playbook makes sure it doesn’t.
The catch-all specialist
Every stack can designate one specialist as the catch-all. When the router can’t confidently match a message to any specialist, it routes to the catch-all instead of refusing. Useful as a friendly “I’ll find someone who can help” specialist that triggers handover or asks a clarifying question. Look for the star icon on the canvas.
Specialists are precise, not creative
Specialist temperature is forced to 0 at runtime. The temperature column exists in the schema because Self-Learning writes adjustment proposals there, but in practice every specialist replies deterministically. If you want personality, that’s the Personality tab — voice and tone are stack-wide.