## What's in this article?

## What Are Tools?

Tools are how AI Agents take action. In general, tools are API calls that allow your agents to not only respond to questions, but also look up information, make updates, create new records, and take action on your behalf. When you combine tools with an agent's general LLM capabilities, you can create powerful, scalable workflows. AI Studio comes with many pre-built tools, and more are constantly being added.

## Approving and Managing Tools

Before a tool can be used in an agent, it must be approved. Navigate to **AI Studio > Tools** to reach the **Available Tools** tab, where all available tools are listed. Click the **Approve** button on the right side of any tool to make it available for use in agents.

Once a tool has been approved, it will be removed from the Available Tools list. You can remove it by going to the **Approved Tools** tab, clicking the menu button on the tool's row, and selecting **Remove Tool**.

## Adding Tools to an Agent

To add tools to a specific agent, navigate to **AI Studio > Agents** and click on the desired agent to open the configuration screen. On the **Tools** step, you will see all approved tools listed. While editing a Draft, you can enable each tool you want the agent to be able to use. Some tools include additional configuration options — for example, the Knowledge Search tool allows you to limit which libraries and article visibility levels the agent is permitted to search. Save your agent and you can test it in the chat testing panel on the right.

## Popular Tools and Examples

The following are some of the most commonly used tools available in AI Studio:

| Tool                            | Description |
|---------------------------------|-------------|
| **Knowledge Search**            | Allows your agent to search your knowledge content to find relevant material and answer questions more accurately. For a Copilot, you can enable searching both public and internal content. For customer-facing agents, you can restrict it to public content only. |
| **Case Update**                 | A popular tool for Copilot that allows the agent to update fields on a case based on your instructions. |
| **Case Resolve**                | When combined with the Case Update tool, this enables multi-step resolution workflows. You can instruct your Copilot to resolve a case, and it will update multiple fields and resolve the case in a single action based on the case content. |
| **Org Get Teams List**          | Allows your agent to look up all Teams in your organization. When combined with the Case Update tool, the agent can read an inbound email, compare it against all Team descriptions, and automatically route the case to the most appropriate team. |
| **BQ Communication Search**      | A powerful tool that allows your agent to read all communication transcripts on a case at any time. This unstructured data can be used to fill in case notes, respond to emails, and more. |