Bespoke AI agents: Your automation’s Swiss Army Knife

Flowable Utility Agents are configurable specialized agents that carry out individual AI tasks wherever needed in a workflow. Many business processes are categorizable; and today even their dynamic steps can be automation assisted with agentic AI.

For example, those that manage documents, or are prone to accessing knowledge bases, but still there are often exceptions and specialized functions you would also like to happen automatically at the same time. How do you automate the generation of a project risk summary, the creation of a personalized marketing message, or the calculation of a custom lead score? Such gaps can require a specialized task, forcing teams back to manual work for the "last mile" of a process.

This is where the Flowable Utility Agent comes in. It's the perfect tool to fill those specific gaps in your automation strategy. If the Knowledge Agent is your librarian and the Document Agent is your data translator, the Utility Agent is your customized action tool, capable of adding flexible, focused AI operations tailored to your exact and additional business needs.

The challenge of unique business requirements

No two businesses operate identically. You have your own methods for assessing risk, your own formulas for scoring sales leads, and your own voice for communicating with customers. The challenge for any automation platform is to accommodate this uniqueness. Standard AI tools are powerful and solve common problems well, but they typically won’t fit perfectly to additional or more specific, nuanced tasks that differentiate your business.

You might be able to automate 80% of a process, but the final 20%, sometimes containing the most strategic value, remains a manual effort taking 80% of the time — where a process may suffer an example of Pareto's Law. Sometimes this will require a developer to build a custom integration or, more often, a person to step in and complete the task. This conflict limits your agility and prevents you from achieving optimization with end-to-end automation.

How the Utility Agent enables custom AI operations

The Utility Agent allows you to break through this ceiling. It provides a framework to create bespoke AI-powered tools directly within the Flowable platform at speed.

The concept is elegantly simple and allows any customized AI action to be added. You define:

• The information needed by the tool (structured inputs)

• The information it should produce (structured outputs)

• A natural language prompt to instruct the AI on how to transform the inputs into the outputs.

For example, you could create a "Risk Assessment" operation:

• The input would be a text field for a project description.

• The outputs could be a numerical risk score and a text field for a risk summary.

• The prompt would instruct the AI to "Analyze the following project description, identify potential risks related to budget, timeline, and resources, and provide a risk score from 1 to 10 along with a summary of the key risk factors."

Once a Utility AI Agent is defined, its custom operation becomes a reusable component in your automation toolkit. It can be tested directly in Flowable Design and then integrated as an AI agent task into any BPMN process or CMMN case model. This capability empowers business analysts and process designers, not just developers, to build and deploy their own AI-driven solutions.

The business value of a customizable AI toolkit

Empowering your teams to build their own AI tools provides significant strategic advantages.

Infinite extensibility: The Utility Agent makes your automation platform infinitely adaptable. Whatever the business needs, you can build a custom AI operation to address it, ensuring that the technology conforms to your processes, not the other way around.

Business team agility: When a new business need arises, you don't have to go through a long development cycle to address it. A business analyst can rapidly design, test, and deploy a new utility operation, allowing your organization to adapt to changing market conditions with incredible speed.

Democratization of AI: You don't need a team of data scientists to create powerful AI solutions. The Utility Agent's intuitive, prompt-based interface empowers your existing process experts to build the tools they need, fostering a culture of innovation and continuous improvement across the organization.

Targeted problem solving: Building highly specific solutions that solve your unique business problems with precision leads to better outcomes and a higher return on your automation investment.

Utility Agent use cases within the AI ecosystem

The Utility Agent's business power emerges when it operates in conjunction with other AI agents within coordinated workflows. Here are two practical examples that leverage the Utility Agent as part of a broader automation ecosystem:

Weather intelligence for field operations

A construction company needs to plan daily work schedules for multiple project sites. Their project managers use a Utility Agent that takes two inputs:

• Construction site location

• Current season

The agent outputs three key pieces of information:

• Expected temperature (in degrees)

• Precipitation forecast (light/moderate/heavy)

• Wind conditions (light/moderate/strong)

The Utility Agent allows project managers to make informed decisions about which tasks can be safely performed at each site. For example, the agent indicates heavy precipitation and strong winds for a roofing project in Munich during winter. In that case, the manager can automatically reschedule outdoor work and assign the crew to indoor tasks instead.

The Utility Agent can also work in coordination with a Document Agent that processes safety reports and a Knowledge Agent that provides internal safety rules and upcoming planned work, all orchestrated through automated workflows that ensure optimal resource allocation and worker safety.

Sales enablement

A software company's sales team needs to research potential clients before meetings. Their sales representatives use a Utility Agent that takes three inputs:

• Prospect's company website URL

• Any existing contact from the CRM system

• Details of relevant products and services from their portfolio

The agent outputs four structured pieces of information:

• Business summary (describing what the company does and its market focus)

• Key executive profiles (names and roles of decision-makers)

• Recent company news (funding rounds, product launches, or strategic announcements)

• Personalized talking points that connect the prospect's business needs with the seller's relevant solutions

This Utility Agent enables sales reps to walk into meetings fully prepared with relevant talking points and personalized conversation starters. When integrated with their CRM workflow, the Utility Agent can work alongside a Document Agent that processes meeting notes afterward, and an Orchestrator Agent that automatically schedules follow-up tasks based on the meeting's outcome. The entire research-to-follow-up cycle becomes seamlessly automated while maintaining the personal touch that drives sales success.

Tailoring automation to your business

While standardized tools are essential, the ability to customize and extend your automation capabilities with Flowable AI agent integration is what delivers a true competitive advantage.

The Flowable Utility Agent is the Swiss Army Knife of automation, providing a versatile toolkit to address your unique business challenges. It powers your automation platform to evolve and adapt along with your business, turning every requirement into an opportunity for innovation.