Your agent
AI settings
Shape how your agent answers customers with its instructions, tone, knowledge grounding, reasoning effort and tool rounds.
Settings → AI controls how your agent behaves on every channel and in the Playground: what it's told about your business, the voice it writes in, how closely it sticks to your knowledge, and how much effort it puts into each reply.
Only owners and admins can change these settings. Members can open the page and see the current values, but not edit them.
Change your agent's settings
Open AI settings
In the sidebar, click Settings, then AI under Agent.
Make your changes
Edit Instructions and choose the options under Behavior, described below.
Save
Click Save changes. You'll see "Agent settings saved." Your agent uses the new settings for its next replies, on every channel and in the Playground.
Try new instructions in the Playground with Compare a variant before saving them here. That way customers never see an experiment.
Instructions
Instructions tell the agent who it works for, what it should help with, and anything it must never say. Your knowledge sources supply the facts; the instructions supply the judgement.
- You have 500 characters. A counter shows how many are left, and instructions over the limit can't be saved.
- While the box is empty, your agent uses OrbitBase's default instructions, which tell it to be accurate and helpful, ask a clarifying question when something is unclear, rely on your knowledge and actions for facts, and never invent prices, policies, availability, order details or promises. Write your own to replace them.
- Keep facts — prices, opening hours, policies — in your knowledge sources, not here. They're easier to keep up to date there, and they don't use up your 500 characters.
For example:
You are the support agent for Acme, a project-management tool. Help customers with billing, plan changes and account access. Never promise a refund — hand those to a human.Tone
Tone sets the voice the agent writes in.
| Option | How it sounds |
|---|---|
| Professional | Courteous and precise. Safe for any audience. This is the default. |
| Friendly | Approachable and human, without being casual. |
| Concise | Answer first, no preamble. Best for high volume. |
| Warm | Acknowledges how the customer feels before solving. |
Knowledge grounding
Knowledge grounding sets how strictly the agent must stay inside your knowledge sources.
| Option | What the agent does |
|---|---|
| Strict | Answers only from your sources. Anything else gets an honest "I don't have that", and the agent offers to pass the customer to a teammate. |
| Balanced | Prefers your sources and admits gaps. The right default for most teams, and the default setting. |
| Flexible | May draw on general knowledge, but never invents specifics about your business — its prices, policies, availability or products. |
Choose Strict if your answers must only ever come from approved material. Choose Flexible if customers often ask general questions your sources don't cover, such as how to care for a product material.
Reasoning effort
Reasoning effort sets how long the agent thinks before answering.
| Option | When to use it |
|---|---|
| Low | Quick, light thinking. Good for straightforward support. |
| Medium | Balances speed and care. The right default for most teams, and the default setting. |
| High | Thinks longest before answering. Slower and costs more per reply. |
Higher effort can help with multi-step questions, such as comparing products or working through a booking, at the cost of slower replies.
Tool rounds
Tool rounds sets how many times the agent may run its actions and look at the results before it has to answer. You can choose from 2 to 10 rounds; the default is 5.
The agent can run several actions in one round — escalating and alerting your team happens in one round, not two — so this setting is about how much back-and-forth the agent gets, not how many actions it may take. Each round adds work to a reply, so a higher number makes replies slower and costs more. Raise it only if a multi-step action, such as booking a meeting, regularly stops before it finishes.
Reset to defaults
Click Reset to defaults and confirm to put every AI setting back to OrbitBase's defaults: default instructions, Professional tone, Balanced grounding, Medium reasoning effort and 5 tool rounds. This can't be undone.
Resetting also switches Reply to customers automatically back on. If you've paused your agent in Settings → Security, it starts answering customers again after a reset.
What isn't set here
- Pausing the agent and the AI rate limit live in Settings → Security. See Auto-reply and rate limits.
- When the agent escalates, collects leads or wraps up is set in each action's instructions on the Actions page. See Actions overview.
- What the agent knows comes from Sources. See Knowledge sources.