Agent Foundations

What an agent is, and the ideas the builder screens configure.

The Agent Builder documents what you do — each screen, each field, each setting. This section documents what an agent is: the ideas those screens configure, and how they fit together.

Read a concept page when you want to understand why a setting exists and what it trades off. Read the builder page when you want to know what a specific control does and what its default is. Each concept links to the screens that configure it.

The parts of an agent

An agent is a small number of things working together. Every request it handles moves through all of them.

• Steering & Reasoning — How the agent decides what to do. Instructions, autonomy, how deeply it thinks, and how the planner turns a request into a sequence of actions.

• Skills & Tools — What the agent can do. The planner can only ever choose from this set.

• Knowledge & Context — What the agent can read. Retrieval from your documents and data.

• Memory & Learning — What the agent carries forward, across a conversation and across users.

• Guardrails & Validation — The automated checks that inspect what goes in and what comes out.

• Human-in-the-Loop — The points where a person stays in the decision.

• Protocols — How the agent talks to the outside world, and how your product talks to it.

How they fit together

A request arrives. Guardrails inspect it. Steering decides how to approach it — the planner reads your instructions, consults Memory for what it already knows about this user, and builds a plan. The plan calls Skills, which may retrieve from Knowledge or reach outside through Protocols. Guardrails inspect each step and the final answer. Where you've asked for it, a human approves before the agent commits.

For the end-to-end workflow, see How Agents Work.

Two catalogs, one idea. Several concepts here appear in more than one place in the product — for example, an agent's connectors are configured per-agent in Apps & Services, while the workspace-wide catalog lives in Integrations. Same idea, different altitude. The concept pages say which is which.