Agent Skills & Tools
Overview
In Vantage, an agent's capabilities are determined by its Skills. Instead of giving every agent access to every tool on the platform, you assign specific skills to give the agent focused expertise. Skills dictate both when an agent activates its capabilities and what it can do.
What is a Skill?
A Skill is a modular capability pack. Each skill contains:
| Component | Description |
|---|---|
| Display Name | The name of the skill (e.g., "Dashboard Creator") |
| Description | A summary of what the skill allows the agent to do |
| Triggers | Keywords and phrases that activate the skill (e.g., "create dashboard", "visualize data") |
| Tool Categories | The groups of platform tools the skill unlocks (e.g., Dashboard Ops, Workflow Ops) |
| Instructions | Specific AI instructions added to the agent's prompt when the skill is active |
Prebuilt vs. Custom Skills
- Prebuilt Skills: Provided by the Vantage platform. These cover common, essential capabilities like "Dashboard Management", "Workflow Automation", or "Google Drive Integration".
- Custom Skills: Skills you define specifically for your organization, often tied to custom internal data schemas or specialized compliance requirements.
Progressive Skill Matching
To ensure agents respond quickly and stay focused, Vantage uses Progressive Skill Matching.
When you ask an agent a question:
- The platform analyzes your query against the Triggers of all skills assigned to the agent.
- Skills that match the query become Active.
- Skills that don't match remain Inactive.
Why this matters:
- The agent only loads the tools and instructions it actually needs for your current request.
- This prevents the agent from getting confused by irrelevant instructions.
- It significantly speeds up response times and reduces credit usage.
If your request changes mid-conversation, the agent automatically activates different skills based on the new context.
Tool Categories
When a skill becomes active, it unlocks specific Tool Categories. These categories determine what actions the agent can perform on the platform.
1. Dashboard Ops
Allows the agent to view and modify your analytics dashboards.
Capabilities:
- List available dashboards
- Create, rename, and delete dashboards
- Add, modify, and delete dashboard tiles (charts, tables, metrics)
- Fetch data from tiles to analyze in chat
- Perform bulk data refreshes
2. Workflow Ops
Allows the agent to build and manage automated data pipelines.
Capabilities:
- List available workflows
- Create, run, and delete workflows
- Add workflow nodes (e.g., database queries, filters, formatters)
- Connect nodes together to build pipelines
- Retrieve workflow execution outputs
3. AI Ops
Unlocks specialized AI sub-tasks that the agent can use to process data.
Capabilities:
- Summarize long documents or large datasets
- Generate forecasts and predictive models
- Build AI-generated dashboard tiles from natural language
- Perform deep Business Intelligence (BI) analysis on metrics
4. Integration Ops
Allows the agent to read from and write to your connected external services.
Capabilities:
- Google Drive / OneDrive: Browse folders, search files, preview documents
- BigQuery / Databases: Explore datasets, run SQL queries, preview schemas
- Gmail / Slack: Search messages, emails, and channels
- Shopify / QuickBooks: Search products, customers, invoices, and transactions
- Jira / Asana: Search issues, projects, and tasks
Important: Agents always operate with your permissions. An agent can only access integrations and data that you personally have access to. If you haven't connected Google Drive, your agent cannot search Google Drive, even if it has the skill.
Default Tools
Even without any assigned skills, all agents have access to basic conversational capabilities and context-awareness. However, to perform actions on the platform (like creating a dashboard or searching a file), you must assign the appropriate skills in the Agent Builder.