A skill is a real ability you hand your WhatsApp agent: check an order, book a slot, look up an account.
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Ask a normal bot where an order is and it explains how you could find out. An agent with a skill goes and looks, then replies with the date, the tracking number and nothing else. Same question, two very different mornings for your team.
Hi, any update on order 4821?
You can check the status of any order from your account page. Let me know if there is anything else I can help with!
Polite and accurate, and the customer is still the one doing the work, unless somebody on your team does it for them.
Hi, any update on order 4821?
It left the warehouse on Tuesday and is out for delivery today before 20:00. Tracking: ES4821-77.
skillcheck_order · order_id 4821
The agent read your system, then answered. Nobody was interrupted and nothing was left open.
You describe the ability once. The agent then works out when to reach for it, what to ask, and how to say the answer back, all inside the conversation.
The handle the agent calls, like check_order or book_table. Lowercase, short, and one job per skill. Give it three jobs and it gets picked for the wrong one.
One sentence describing the situation this skill is for. That sentence is what the agent compares a customer's message against, so it is the single most valuable thing you write.
Every input carries its own description and a required flag, plus a type: text, number, true/false, a list or an object. The agent keeps asking in the chat until the required ones are filled.
An HTTPS endpoint of yours, called with POST, PUT, PATCH or DELETE. Whatever your system returns is what the agent has to work with, so you keep control of the answer.
What you fill in, once
Nothing here is scripted. The customer wrote a sentence, the agent recognised the situation, asked for the one thing it was missing, called your system and read the result out loud.
Hi! Any idea when my order turns up?
Happy to check that for you. What is the order number?
4821
It is out for delivery today before 20:00. Tracking: ES4821-77.
Every business ends up with its own list. These twelve come up in almost all of them, and each one takes a customer question off somebody's plate for good.
Reads status, contents and the promised date straight from your shop or warehouse.
Turns a tracking code into a sentence: where the parcel is now and when it should land.
Opens the return in your system and sends back the label or the next step to take.
Reads the real calendar, so the times it suggests are times that actually exist.
Writes the appointment and confirms it in the chat with its reference.
Reschedules or cancels, then tells the customer exactly what changed.
Matches the person by phone, email or reference before anything sensitive is said.
Fetches the invoice, contract or receipt and delivers it in the chat as a file.
Answers "what am I paying for" with the figure from your billing system, not a guess.
Creates it with the conversation attached and gives the customer the number.
Reads the status back, so nobody has to interrupt an agent for an update.
Stops answering and moves the chat to the right agent or department through a Flow.
Six things happen between a customer's message and a useful reply. None of them need a decision tree from you.
Not just the last line. Context is what separates "where is it?" about an order from the same words about your office.
The situation in the chat is compared to the sentence you wrote for each skill. There are no trigger words to maintain.
It answers from the knowledge you uploaded, or says it cannot help with that yet. No skill ever fires by accident.
It asks for what is missing, in the language the customer is writing in, and waits until it has the lot.
The inputs go to your URL as JSON. Your system does the work and decides what comes back.
The reply is built from what you returned. If your Flow says a human takes it from here, that happens instead.
A skill is one HTTP call away from anything you own. The agent cannot tell the routes apart, so pick whichever one matches how your team builds.
Giving an agent abilities is a decision about trust, so the boundaries are set by you rather than inferred. Five of them ship with every skill.
A skill points at one URL you defined. There is no wandering around your network and no access you did not deliberately hand over.
Inputs are typed and can be marked required. Until the required ones are collected in the chat, nothing is sent anywhere.
A skill can sit in draft while you test it, or be switched off on its own, without disturbing the rest of the agent.
Cap how many messages the agent may send in a single chat and across the number, per hour and per day.
Any Flow can take the conversation off the agent and put it in front of the right department, at any point.
Most agents end up using all three. The quickest way to tell them apart is to ask whether the answer depends on a document, your data, or your process.
| What you are comparing | Knowledge | Skills | Flows |
|---|---|---|---|
| What it is | Documents and question-answer pairs you upload | Abilities that call your systems | Rules that decide what happens next |
| Where the answer comes from | What you wrote, ahead of time | Your live data, at the moment of asking | Your process |
| Can it change anything? | No, telling is all it does | Yes, it creates, updates and cancels | Yes, it routes, assigns and hands over |
| You set it up by | Uploading files and answers | Defining inputs and an endpoint | Drawing the flow, no code |
| Reach for it when | The answer is identical for everyone | The answer is different for every customer | A person or a department has to take over |
Four fields, in the order the form asks for them, and then a draft you can test against your own number long before a customer ever meets it.
Name it after the job it does, keeping to one job per skill, and save it as a draft so nothing is answering customers while you are still deciding.
Describe the situation, not the wording. "The customer wants to book, move or cancel a visit" beats any keyword list, because what the agent matches on is meaning.
Give every input a type and a short description, and mark the ones the call cannot go out without. The asking is handled for you, in whatever language the chat is in.
Paste the URL, message your own number, and read the request that lands. When the reply is the one you would have written, switch the skill from draft to live.
Those are the only boxes. The agent works out the questions that fill them, and you never write one of them down.
A named ability you give your agent: a short description of the situation it is for, the inputs it has to collect, and an HTTPS endpoint of yours that does the work. The agent decides when the moment has arrived; your system decides what the answer is.
Skills hang off an AI agent, and agents are counted alongside Flows in your plan: Business includes five no-code AI agents and Flows, Enterprise includes fifty, and the Professional plan does not carry them. Nothing is charged per skill and there is nothing to install. Every plan opens with a seven-day trial that asks for no card, which is long enough to build one and watch it run before you decide.
Compare the plansFor anything that reads or writes inside your own systems, someone has to expose an endpoint the agent can call, whether they build it themselves or wire one up through Zapier, Make or n8n. Answering from documents and FAQs needs nobody: upload them and the agent uses them.
It compares the conversation to the description you wrote for each skill. There are no keywords or trigger phrases to maintain, which is exactly why that description is worth spending ten minutes on.
Your plan counts agents and Flows, not the abilities you hang on one of them, so a count is rarely what limits you. Overlap is. The agent chooses by reading your "when to use it" sentences against the chat, which means two skills describing the same situation are what makes it pick wrong. Hold each one to a single job and they stay easy to tell apart.
Then the call never goes out. Required inputs must be filled before a skill can run, so the agent keeps asking in the chat, and a Flow can pass the conversation to a person if it stalls.
Your endpoint decides what comes back, so the wording a customer sees on a bad day is wording you wrote. If you would rather a human took over at that point, a Flow can move the chat to an agent or a department.
Yes. A skill can be left as a draft or switched off by itself, without touching the rest of the agent, and you can cap how many messages go out per chat, per hour and per day.
No. Skills belong to the agent attached to the number you already use, and your chats and history stay exactly where they are.
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