Universal Agent

The Universal Agent works the way people expect a modern assistant to work. Instead of following a fixed sequence of steps, it looks at each message and decides for itself what it needs: search your company's knowledge, read a file the user attached, recall what it remembers about the user, or answer straight away. It keeps going, one tool after another, until it can answer.

Every other agent on the platform follows a fixed workflow, so an admin picks the right one per use case and users have to know which assistant to ask. A Universal Agent profile is configured once with the knowledge it may search, and users ask it anything.

When to reach for this agent

Use the Universal Agent as a general assistant that combines your knowledge, the user's attachments and memory in one conversation. When a use case needs a guaranteed, auditable sequence of steps — always retrieving from the same collections, checking grounding before answering, escalating to an expert — use the dedicated blueprints such as the Document Intelligence Assistant. They stay the predictable option.

What it does

1. Prepare the conversation. The agent's built-in instructions on using its tools, then your profile's own instructions, are put at the front of the conversation, and the history is trimmed to the input budget.
2. Decide and use tools. The model chooses which tools to call, the platform runs them and hands the results back, and the model decides again. It can call several independent tools in one round.
3. Answer. When the model has what it needs, its reply streams to the user with citations to the documents it used.

Nothing is loaded into the prompt in advance: a question that needs no lookup is answered directly, and one that needs three lookups gets three.

The tools

Tool	What it does	Offered when
Search our knowledge	Searches the knowledge collections the profile allows, reranks the results and returns the best sections with ids to cite. The user's own # references are offered too. Only collections the asking user may read are ever searched.	The profile lists collections, or allows every collection the user can read.
Read attached files	Reads the files attached to the conversation. The model sees which files are attached and reads the ones it needs; a file too long to read whole returns the sections most relevant to what the model is looking for.	The user attached a document (images reach the model directly).
Recall memory	Searches what is remembered about the user and the organisation: preferences, facts and decisions from earlier conversations.	User or organisation memory is enabled on the profile.

More tools follow as the platform adds them: web search, web page fetch, code execution, image generation and the user's own file space each add their tool to this agent.

Every tool call shows in the chat: the knowledge search and the files appear as sources, each call as a collapsible block with what the tool returned, and the agent trace records each step.

Staying within the model's context

Long conversations with many tool results can outgrow what the model can read. Before each decision, the agent checks the size and, when needed, condenses the oldest material first: earlier tool results are summarised to what matters for the question, then the conversation before the question becomes one summary. The chat shows a short status when this happens. The current question and the latest results are never summarised; only when the latest results alone are too large are they cut to fit, marked as cut. When even the question and the tools' descriptions do not fit, the agent answers without its tools.

Limits and approvals

A profile bounds how many decisions and tool calls one answer may take. At the limit, the agent answers with what it has found and says that it stopped early. Any tool can be set to need the user's approval before it runs — every time, once per answer, or once per conversation.

What it does not do

• It is not a fixed workflow. The model decides which tools to use, so two similar questions may take different paths. For a guaranteed sequence, use the dedicated blueprints.
• It does not replace the Document Intelligence Assistant's retrieval. Its knowledge search is simpler: each database is searched with the embedding model it was indexed with and the results are reranked together, without the Document Intelligence Assistant's per-retriever tuning or grounding check.
• It never reads what the user may not. Collections the asking user cannot read are not offered, even when the profile lists them or the profile allows "every collection".
• No tools from external systems yet. MCP tool servers and handing off to other agents are planned follow-ups; use the MCP Tool Agent for those today.

Setting it up

1. Grant the blueprint. The Universal Agent is not part of a new tenant's default set; a sysadmin grants it (see Access control).
2. Create a profile. In Admin > Agents > Blueprints, select Universal Agent and click Create Profile. Give it an Agent ID, a name, a description and an icon.
3. Write the instructions. Describe what this assistant is for and how it should answer. They are added after the built-in instructions on using tools, so you do not need to explain the tools.
4. Choose the knowledge. Under Knowledge Tool, either list the databases and collections it may search, or turn on Every Collection the User Can Read.
5. Choose the model. Pick a chat model that supports tool calls. The Task LLM condenses long conversations and writes titles and follow-up questions, so a smaller model is fine there.
6. Review the limits and approvals under Tools, then save.

Configuration reference

Behaviour

Field	Default	Description
Instructions	(empty)	What this assistant is for and how it should answer, added after the built-in instructions.
Maximum Input Tokens	128000	The input budget. The conversation is trimmed and, inside the tool loop, condensed to fit it.

Knowledge Tool

Field	Default	Description
Every Collection the User Can Read	Off	Offer every knowledge collection the asking user may read, instead of the listed ones.
Collections	—	Databases the model may search, each whole or narrowed to some of its collections.

Under Knowledge Search, Sections per Database and the Reranking Model set how the search ranks what it finds.

Tools

Field	Default	Description
Maximum Decisions	5	How often the model may choose tools before it must answer.
Maximum Tool Calls	10	How many tool calls one answer may make in total.
Disabled Tools	—	Tools this profile never offers.
Approvals	—	Tools whose calls the user must approve first: every call, once per answer, or once per conversation.

Memory and attached-file settings are the same as on the other chat agents; see Memory.