“Plan & execute steps” uses agentic reasoning to follow your guidance to decide what to do, what actions to take, and how to respond. You configure this step with a set of actions it can choose from as well as natural language instructions describing when those actions should be used and how it should write its response.

Using your instructions and the actions you provide it, this step creates an ephemeral agent graph in the background, which the user of the agent does not see. This graph is a series of steps just like what you build in the Agent Builder, but it is generated differently each time in order to handle the input, which is often a user message, but can also be the output of any previous step in your agent. The steps always end with a respond step, so that ‘Plan and execute steps’ creates a response in the UI, which is also added to the agent’s memory.

The most common use case for Plan & execute steps is building chatbots, as it is effective for handling a wide range of user inquiries. To build a chatbot, you can start with the default configuration, which provides the step with access to only the ‘Company search’ action. To ensure the step provides the most relevant and accurate answers, you can constrain exactly which documents, datasources, or folders that the search can pull from.

Click on “+ Add” to explore additional actions that Plan and execute steps can add to its plan.